I don’t think I have the cognitive context necessary to predict that. It’s only useful as a construct, in this case to make the point that humans are patriarchal because humans conform, and society is patriarchal—implying that if the same humans were in an environment where conforming meant being feminists, they would conform to that.
Fair enough. I guess in the context of that “end of the world” thought experiment discussed above, I was trying to picture how the relationship of the American Het Male and American Het Female would be different if they had internalized radical feminism.
I am sort of trying to reconcile the radicalness of your critique of gender relations with the mundaneness of gender relations between, to take the obvious example, myself and my wife. Neither of us are free of sexist attitudes, and yet ridding ourselves of them doesn’t seem like so urgent a project as you are urging. It seems like maybe we’d rather just go for a walk by the river.
I’m not trying to be flippant, just trying to understand where the urgency is coming from. Is it mostly a question of trying to prevent severe social ills related to sexism, such as rape? Or do you think that on the level of personal relationships between ordinary people, a lot of horrible shit is going on?
Or do you think that on the level of personal relationships between ordinary people, a lot of horrible shit is going on?
During the early days of feminist reawakening in the 60s and 70s, the main thrust of feminist activism came from consciousness-raising groups, where women talked about their experiences.
This revealed to them (and to the world) that they had massive pluralistic ignorance about things like domestic violence, marital rape, housework, and other various things ranging from extreme to mundane.
That sort of pluralistic ignorance is still common today about a variety of other things (recall that the last state to outlaw marital rape did so in 1993), especially since the prevailing meme is not “feminists have no legitimate position” but rather “feminism is a movement which has ended, there is no longer any oppression of women.”
In LW terms, I think that the CEV of your wife and possibly you would lead to radical feminism, and a re-evaluation of your non-feminist past of at best mildly oppressive and at worst abusive and toxic.
Thanks for the reply. What I’m getting from you is the idea that there are probably some practices in our relationship (and those of couples in our reference class) that, although they look benign to us now, would after a certain amount of consciousness-raising come to be seen by us as toxic.
I consider this very plausible (and I can think of attitudes held by me in the past, about gender and other things, which seemed trivial but which I now regard as toxic).
I am really interested in moving from the abstract to the specific though. So seconding Bugmaster’s comment, I’m interested in concrete things that occur typically in the context of what you might call a moderately “liberal feminist” relationship which I ought to regard more seriously. Think back to the last time you spent time with a moderately liberal feminist, middle-to-upper-class couple. What sorts of things would you see to critique?
To contextualize a strongly liberal feminist/tumblr-feminist couple, I’d add maybe the following few things:
Compulsory political support of various institutions that exist on the backs of women to serve men, such as prostitution and pornography, with the implication of being “prudish” if she objects
Compulsory sexuality, sexual availability, and pervasive sexualization, again with the implication of being a “prude” or “sex-negative” or “anti-sex” if she objects
Compulsory individualist conceptions of gender (“gender is entirely based on identity,” “genderbread people” ala my original comment), and as a consequence, a return to individualist attributions of gendered success or failure, and a lack of emphasis on social problems as a cause for individual deficiencies
To contextualize it further, an undergrad psychology class would teach that there are three relationship types common to modern society: traditional, modern, and egalitarian. Traditional relationship types would be considered patriarchal by liberal feminists and are dominated by men. Modern relationship types have a senior-partner junior-partner dynamic, where nominally women have input but ultimately everything is decided by men. Egalitarian relationships are most common in non-heterosexual relationships, and have equally shared power and a much higher focus on friendship and companionship than either of the two previous types. I would guess that any liberal feminist heterosexual couple would fall firmly on the traditional side of a modern relationship type.
Thanks, your description of the spectrum of relationship types is quite clear. That said, I find it difficult to reconcile what I know of liberal feminism (which is, admittedly, not as much as a liberal feminist would) with your description of it (though I’m not sure what a “tumblr-feminist” is):
Compulsory sexuality, sexual availability, and pervasive sexualization, again with the implication of being a “prude” or “sex-negative” or “anti-sex” if she objects
Can you link to some examples ? Every liberal feminist I’ve ever seen always makes it a priority to combat the treatment of women as mere sex objects.
As I understand it, a liberal feminist would indeed characterize a woman who objects to sex in principle, and wants all men and women to stop having sex with each other, as “sex-negative”. At the same time, though, that same liberal feminist would defend any specific woman’s right to express her sexuality in whatever way she chooses, even if she chooses not to express it at all. IMO these two positions are entirely compatible.
Every liberal feminist I’ve ever seen always makes it a priority to combat the treatment of women as mere sex objects.
No, you’re confusing liberal feminism with radical feminism.
Liberal feminism has been historically pro-porn, pro-prostitution, and supportive of other various things that radical feminists think are objectifying and oppressive. The most liberal shade of liberal feminism is “empowerment” feminism, where doing things that are patriarchal are okay, because women are “empowered” now to… starve themselves and get breast implants.
In contrast, radical feminism has traditionally fought against porn, supported body-positivity and body acceptance over accepting patriarchal beauty norms under the guise of “empowerment,” and in general, is critical of desires as having causal origin within patriarchy, rather than being ontologically basic objects.
Actually, I would maybe characterize that as the fundamental split between radical and liberal feminists—liberal feminists treat “desire” as a semantic stopsign, whereas radical feminists push through it, and unsurprisingly find patriarchy.
1st wave—Susan B. Anthony, Women’s Suffrage, “voluntary motherhood” (i.e. allow contraceptives for married couples, but sex is for married people only) ~1920s 2nd wave—de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”, Andrea Dworkin, anti-pornography movement ~1960s 3rd wave—sex positivity feminism ~1990s
Each movement was a reaction to perceived shortfalls in the prior intellectual movement. You talk about things like 2nd wave was a reaction to 3rd wave.
I’m more sympathetic to Dworkin than the sex-positive folks, but there’s a lot more to the other side than you suggest. One can be sex positive without supporting breast implants for everyone.
I think that history is mostly orthogonal to our current topic. Even if eridu is wrong about history, he could still be right about all of his other claims.
One can be sex positive without supporting breast implants for everyone.
Indeed, and “sex positive” does not, IMO, immediately imply “want to make sex compulsory”. I am personally volleyball-positive, in that I wish everyone who’s interested in volleyball could enjoy doing so with other volleyball-lovers. But that doesn’t mean that I want to force everyone to play volleyball all the time, regardless of whether they feel like it or not.
I thought I had replied to this comment. Maybe it was deleted, maybe it was lost on my end.
Third-wave “feminism” is a mostly patriarchal reaction to second-wave feminism.
Second-wave feminists were primarily fighting things that third-wave “feminists” endorse, like pornorgraphy, sexualized violence, sexualization and objectification of women and girls, and other similar things. As such, second-wave was a reaction to the elements of patriarchy that third-wave feminism adopted.
Third wave feminism is chiefly this endorsement of compulsory sexuality, plus an individualist “identity” conception of gender that is actively harmful to feminist struggle.
One can be sex positive without supporting breast implants for everyone.
But you can’t really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types, and you certainly can’t be sex-positive without supporting the notion that consent is possible under patriarchy, which seems to either deny patriarchy or deny its coercive power (which is mostly the same in my opinion).
This probably isn’t a discussion we should have here, though.
Third wave feminism is chiefly this endorsement of compulsory sexuality, plus an individualist “identity” conception of gender that is actively harmful to feminist struggle.
Of course, third-wave feminists say that it is your brand of radical feminism that is “harmful to feminist struggle”. I would love to see some long-term studies that provide some evidence one way or the other—but, as far as I understand, liberal feminists don’t have the funding, and radical feminists believe that the very act of gathering evidence harms their cause… so we’re kind of stuck in a “she said / she said” territory here.
But you can’t really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types...
There are several initiatives on the liberal feminist side that campaign for the promotion of a healthy female body image, in all media including porn (*). On the flip side, there is tons of porn out there that promotes any body type you can imagine, and possibly a few that you cannot.
and you certainly can’t be sex-positive without supporting the notion that consent is possible under patriarchy
Agreed.
which seems to either deny patriarchy or deny its coercive power (which is mostly the same in my opinion).
I don’t think that the only possible conditions are either a). “the patriarchy doesn’t exist”, or b). “the patriarchy’s control over everyone is total and complete, people are zombies”.
(*) I’d google up some links, but something tells me I shouldn’t be doing that at work.
I don’t think that the only possible conditions are either a). “the patriarchy doesn’t exist”, or b). “the patriarchy’s control over everyone is total and complete, people are zombies”.
Agreed. A useful line of questioning for eridu might be “How much coercion is acceptable in sexual relations, given that essentially any outside causal influence can be glossed as some finite amount of coercion?”
On the one hand I think it’s an excellent point the feminists make that implicit/explicit consent to sex is not the end of the story ethically, if the consent is seen to be coerced by external factors (e.g., “Our relationship depends on his sexual satisfaction, and he has made me financially dependent on our continued relationship”).
On the other hand, it’s going too far if we say that the ONLY ethically acceptable motivation for sex is one’s own purely hedonistic desires (which are the only motivations I can think of that CANNOT be glossed as coercive).
one’s own purely hedonistic desires (which are the only motivations I can think of that CANNOT be glossed as coercive).
Sure they can! Someone has wired up your pleasure center to respond to doing what they want you to do, even though that course of action is ultimately self-destructive for you.
(Fictional example: the tasp in various Niven stories.)
“How much coercion is acceptable in sexual relations, given that essentially any outside causal influence can be glossed as some finite amount of coercion?”
radical feminists believe that the very act of gathering evidence harms their cause
That’s an awfully damning assessment. If true, it implies that radical feminists believe that their cause can be destroyed by the truth, and don’t think that it should be. I’m not convinced that this indictment, as stated here, is true of any actual radical feminist, though.
If true, it implies that radical feminists believe that their cause can be destroyed by the truth, and don’t think that it should be.
Not quite. I disagree with Eridu’s position, but it doesn’t come down to a Moore’s paradox situation. Eridu’s position is that there are truths that cause harm within certain social contexts, and that in those social contexts (but not otherwise) those truths ought to be suppressed.
This is pretty plausible if you think of some thought experiments involving vulnerable groups. Suppose that you are a rationalist/consequentialist cop in 1930′s Germany, and you are investigating a case in which a banker, who was Jewish, embezzled some money from the Society for the Protection of Cute Puppies. Although ceteris paribus, your job is to expose the truth and bring criminals to justice, in this case it might be a very good idea to keep this out of the papers at all costs, because due to anti-semitic narratives society lacks the ability to process this information sanely.
Eridu claims that because of sexist narratives, society lacks the ability to process the claims of evo-psych sanely.
I find it interesting that both you and MixedNuts have found it necessary to invoke Nazis in order to construct a marginally convincing case for your interpretations of eridu’s position. Your thought experiment boils down to an equation of “the patriarchy” as it exists in present-day Western society with Nazi Germany (which would put eridu in pretty clear violation of Godwin’s Law*), and MixedNuts’ counterexample to my proposed Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle is a variant on the classic example of when it’s not only morally acceptable but morally obligatory to lie: “when hiding Jews from the S.S. in one’s basement.”
It also seems as though the “certain social contexts” where the results of evo-psych research ought to be suppressed, according to eridu, are pretty much every social context that exists outside of Women’s Studies departments and the internal discussions of radical feminist organizations. That seems untenable to me.
I just realized that Godwin’s Law is meant to prohibit a special case of Yvain’s Worst Argument in the World: the case in which the archetypal member of the category into which one places X is Naziism.
The non-Eridu argument against evo-psych is that many such researchers are abusing/ignorant of the halo effect that leads to biased results/unjustified moral assertions about sex roles in society.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
This doesn’t constitute an argument here against evo-psych as an accurate description of reality. It does constitute:
A solid illustration of how social awkardness can result in doing harm to others despite all the best intentions.
An extremely weak appeal to consequences—an argument that evo-psych should not be studied because bad things could happen from people understanding evolutionary psychology. I describe it as weak since there is little indication that the insult Luke gave given his awareness of evo-psych is any worse than the insult he would have given if ignorant. For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
In conclusion, keep your moralizing out of my epistemic rationality! At least while posting on this site, please. You can argue that a particular subject should not be discussed here for instrumental reasons in accordance with your own preferences. However it is never appropriate (on lesswrong, I assert) to argue that a belief must be considered false because of perceived consequences of someone believing it.
The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. My first serious girlfriend wrote me a very long e-mail before our break-up, laying out her rational analysis of why she believed our relationship was untenable in the long term; she actually succeeded in persuading me to see it her way, which I’d been resisting for emotional reasons. That allowed us to have an amicable parting of ways, and we remain good friends to this day.
I’ll think about that—from the upvotes, it appears you’re not the only Less Wronger interested (at least, I assume an upvote to a one-liner request like that means “I’d like to see it, too”). I wouldn’t post an unedited copy, as there are some details in it that I consider very private, as, I think, would my former girlfriend. But I’ll take a look at it later and see what would need to be redacted. I would also have to ask her permission before posting any of it, of course, and I’m reluctant to bother her just now—she has a newborn daughter (as in, born last week), so I expect she’s rather preoccupied at the moment.
Heh. Even taking that into account, I still think your odds are better with a randomly chosen LWer as a recipient than a randomly chosen partner-of-a-female. But that’s admittedly a pretty low bar.
I would prefer to hear all the reasons, myself and am ten times more likely to choke on fluff like “It’s not you, it’s me.” than burst into flames because somebody criticized me. I need closure and feedback and for my life events to make sense. For those purposes, the only information I’d deem good enough is a serving of reality.
Shminux’s point, and the rest of this thread, is about predicting the behavior of typical women in order to make an accurate assessment about what breakup approach is best. Do you think that your preferences are typical for women, or even typical for women-who-LW-folks-date, many of whom are not themselves LWers?
According to Vladimir, LessWrong has somewhere in the ballpark of 600-1000 active users. According to Yvain’s 2011 survey, 92 of the 1090 respondents were female. If I alone would respond well, that increases the chances of a good response by an LW woman by over 1% (unless you want to include inactive members). Since Dave’s point is not “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than not.” and was “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than a random woman.” me saying that actually gives a potentially significant support to his point. If you calculate the chances of a random woman responding well to be under 1% (seems reasonable) and don’t consider inactive users to be an “LWer”, then I totally supported his point. If not, then all Dave needs to do to figure out whether he’s right is to count the number of LW women he is sure would respond well and compare the ratio with his estimate of how many random women would respond well. I doubt anyone here thinks the percentage of random women that would respond well is beyond the single digit percents. If that’s right, my saying so gave 10% or more of the support needed to think that he’s right. As for the behavior of the average LW woman, I have no idea. That I would respond well confirms that at least some LW women would respond well, which might help people figure out if it’s worthwhile to find out exactly how many of us there are.
Which doesn’t contradict Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date might be more likely to respond well.
Are you sure you know how you would react...
Totally sure. My last boyfriend attempted to give me fluff and I tore through it. I always want to get down to the bottom of why a relationship did not work. Even if reality is devastating, I want reality. You can tell I’m strong enough to deal with criticism because I invite it often. You can tell I’m strong enough to swallow criticism because of my elitism thread—check out the note at the top. I feel kind of dumb for not seeing these problems in advance (hindsight bias, I guess?). Now that I do see how awful my thread was—in public of all places—have I vanished, or gone crybaby or begged anybody for emotional support?
Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date
Just for clarity, I did not suggest the latter. What I suggested was that this sort of thing, initiated by the partner of an LW member, is more likely to work out well… put differently, that LW members are more likely to respond well (or at least less likely to respond poorly)… than for non-LWers.
The gender of the LW member, and the gender of the partner, is not strictly irrelevant but is largely screened off by their membership.
I make no such claims about the partners of LWers.
Since your initial (and highly promising) arrival, I must admit that I lost respect for you faster than I have for any other poster in the history of LessWrong.
Downvoted because I don’t like cheapshots. Criticisms about the community’s behavior in that thread should be confined to that thread, and should be substantive. The way you’re doing it now forces other commenters to choose between addressing your cheapshot and derailing the comment thread or allowing the cheapshot to go unchallenged.
I wouldn’t have downvoted if you’d used less strong language in your criticism or if you had supported your argument better. It’s okay for you to reference other threads as proof of things, in my book. But I don’t like that you asserted the behavior in that discussion was “completely irrational” without providing any sort of support for your argument; you just threw out an unfair label in a context where it was difficult to challenge it.
It seemed a reasonable to me; after all, shminux’s comment wasn’t random unrelated criticism, it was a germane followup to a previous comment. Posting it in the other thread eliminates the entire purpose of the comment.
I dispute the accuracy of shminux’s comment, and yet also feel reluctant to challenge the comment because it would be a digression from the topic of the above comments. That’s a problem.
I recognize the need to draw from other sections of the site in order to talk about LessWrong as a community; I’m fine with that. But if we’re going to do that then I think we need to at least use good arguments while discussing those other threads. Otherwise it becomes too easy to just criticize things in contexts where they’re difficult to challenge.
Don’t you? Fine, I’ll bite. While the bell curve is pretty wide for both genders, an average (western?) male tends to be more analytical and reserved and less emotional than an average (western?) female. At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well. Thus he would be (again, on average) more inclined to listen to reasoned arguments, as opposed to “It’s not working out between us” with some made-up excuses designed to make him feel better. Whereas she (on average) would be likely to take every logical argument as in Luke’s story, as a personal affront, insult and rejection. There are plenty of exceptions, but if you take 1000 break-ups, I’d wager that in the majority of the cases a bit of reason on the woman’s side would make it less painful for the guy, while a bit of logic on the man’s side would probably make it more painful for the girl than “it’s not you it’s me”.
I have no idea how same-sex or other less-standard breakups work out in terms of rationality.
At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well.
Your perception of the people you know plus cultural stereotypes is really pretty weak evidence. I could make the following argument: In my immediate family, the men are more emotional and less analytical/reserved than the women—they tend to get angry/aggressive in response to difficult things, whereas the women seem to stay calm. Plus, cultural stereotypes bear out the idea that men are more aggressive/angry than women. Therefore, men would be more likely to take this kind of letter badly.
I’m not making that argument, but I can’t see that it would be much weaker than yours.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
There’s a large difference between writing an analysis of what’s going wrong in a relationship based on information about the relationship itself and writing an evo-psych analysis which concludes that the other person has the whole weight of evolution against anyone finding them attractive.
It occurs to me that what you’ve done there is a common enough pattern, though I’m not sure it’s exactly a fallacy—seeing that something causes bad outcomes, but not being clear on what the scope of the something is.
Before long, Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. By then I knew I couldn’t give her what she wanted: marriage.
So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty. Now I realize that there’s hardly a more damaging way to break up with someone. She asked that I kindly never speak to her again, and I can’t blame her.
Here’s one I’ve tried to find. In the recent discussion of feminism, I remember someone (and I’m thinking it wasn’t eridu) saying that part of the purpose of the harsher attacks about racism and sexism was to make opposed people feel less sure of themselves in general.
One problem with lukeprog’s essay would be that it would muddle the evolutionary-cognitive boundary. The fact that I, in the 21st century, like big tits is logically distinct from the fact that human males, in the EEA, who slept with curvier women had more children in average, though the latter is the cause of the former.
What matter when deciding whether to use a program is what it does, not who wrote it (well, except for copyright-related reasons, but Azatoth isn’t going to sue me for infringement anyway).
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.” (That’s eridu).
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea. That is, this statement:
For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
is not true. “It’s just the way I am” is usually a false deflection of responsibility—invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility. If that weren’t true, lukeprog would not even have considered saying it to the woman.
On evo-psych generally:
Consider phrenology. The traits at issue were well worth studying. And as far as I know, the field used accepted practices of empiricism for its day. But the whole field went off track, to the point that essentially no phrenology results are actually useful for scientific research today. I think that the social pressures towards legitimizing our current normative practices put evo-psych (and to a less extend, all psychological research) at serious risk of wandering off into a similar wilderness.
If evo-psych manages to recover from what appear to be its current mis-steps I (but apparently not eridu) would welcome back with open arms.
invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility.
No, it doesn’t. There is no moral license to be human. If action X is harmful, ascribing an evolutionary cause to X doesn’t make it not harmful — and to a consequentialist it is harm that is at the root of immorality.
If evolution built me to rape nubile young womenfolk, well, evolution can just fuck off.
That’s the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they’re not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they’re indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. “X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past” does not mean “X is good,” nor does it mean “X is inevitable”—evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn’t build you “to rape nubile young womenfolk,” period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances—when rejected by a woman with whom you’re already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, probably more important, how you were socialized: these factors affect whether you feel any shame, empathy for your potential victim, fear of consequences, etc. that could outweigh the impulse to rape.
It’s also important to understand that evo. psych. is not saying that rapists are motivated by a conscious desire to reproduce: the impulse generally takes the form “I want to get my rocks off” and/or “I want to hurt this b!+(#,” not “I want to make a baby.” That’s probably true of the individuals committing the rapes even when rape is organized and officially sanctioned by military or political leaders as a way of “invading” an enemy population’s gene pool, as in Bosnia or the Sudan.
It’s also notable that evo. psych. tells us nothing about why any particular man committed rape while another man in similar circumstances did not—nor about why some men prefer large-breasted women and others don’t, for that matter. What it does offer is an explanation for why rape is part of the repertoire of human behavior at all. It’s entirely possible to imagine a mammal species in which no male ever attempts to copulate with an unwilling female, and female rejection instantly shuts off male desire. As I understand it, it’s even possible to identify such species in nature: IIRC, canines and the great cats, at least, have never been observed to engage in the kind of coercive copulation frequently seen in dolphins, chimps, orangutans, ducks, etc. That’s pretty much what evolutionary biology would predict, too: the big carnivores are so well-armed that the risk of serious injury either to the male, or to the female (preventing her from successfully bearing and rearing the male’s offspring), would most likely outweigh the reproductive advantage of copulating with more females than are receptive to the male’s advances.
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.”
No, and I’ve stated that stated that saying “never discuss evo-psych” is acceptable while muddling normative claims in with epistemic claims is not.
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results.
I assert that your argument centered around Luke’s essay to his girlfriend absolutely does not support this.
One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea.
It doesn’t provide such justification and even if it did this would not constitute evidence that evo-psych is epistemically inaccurate.
I’d like to request some constructive criticism: What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
I really do think that historical study of other cultures provides evidence that contradicts some psychological “findings.” But it is the nature of the endeavor that “harder” sciences like psychology carry more weight than softer sciences like history. I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes, but I acknowledge that doesn’t rise to the level of proof we would expect from a true “hard science” discipline like physics.
I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes,
I don’t see evidence of anything resembling a scientific process, tainted or otherwise, behind Justice Bradley’s patronizing pontification about “the proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex,” especially when the pompous old bastard specifically attributed his view of proper gender roles to “the law of the Creator.”
What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
Upvoted because I consider this question a far more useful one than many of the things that led up to it.
My own answer is, roughly speaking, the same for all cases where something potentially useful is being tainted by an external factor:
1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff, 2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and 3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
You seem to have done that, at least in a BOTE kind of way, and concluded that the tradeoff doesn’t justify the work. Which is cool.
It’s not clear to me whether anyone is actually disagreeing with you about that conclusion, or (if they are) whether they think your estimate of the work is too high, your estimate of the benefit too low, or your threshold tradeoff too low.
I upvoted both your post as well as the parent, for putting the issue much more clearly than anyone else:
1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff, 2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and 3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
That said, I disagree with TimS because I believe his estimated benefit is too low.
His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don’t know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the “ban sexual intercourse” cannon (that metaphor was, perhaps, not my finest achievement).
2). Speaking more generally, I believe that the benefits of any kind of scientific knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks in most situations (though of course there are limits), due to the compounding effects. For example, the first application of modern physics was the nuclear bomb: a device is literally capable of ending the world. However, our world would be a very different, and IMO much worse place, had quantum physics never been discovered.
I just want to clarify that I don’t advocate banning heterosexual intercourse. Even if I agree slightly more with eridu than you about how coercive ordinary sexual encounters are experienced.
I’m pretty sure that I disagree on both 1 (people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims) and 2 (there’s probably not much evo. psych that will be very useful in social engineering). But I’m honestly not certain which disagreement is larger.
I’m curious which of my estimates differs further from the LW average—but I’m not sure if actually discovering that would advance the particular goal of optimizing our stance towards evo. psych research.
people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims
That’s a much broader problem than the misunderstanding and misuse of evo. psych. I think one of the major aims of humanism/transhumanism should be getting more people to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements—between is and ought. And, given how pervasive that confusion is across human cultures, the roots of it might be a fruitful area of investigation for evo. psych., along with other branches of cognitive science.
I can’t help but notice that at least some radical feminists’ aversion to evo. psych. and related fields in biology stems from their failure to distinguish normative from empirical claims. A lot of the firestorm surrounding Thornhill and Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape came down to the critics indulging in the naturalistic fallacy (which is a pity, because there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of Thornhill and Palmer’s conclusions). Another example that springs to mind is this article by Andrea Dworkin, in which she detracts from an otherwise good argument by inserting a gratuitous slur on Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis that demonstrates a breathtaking failure of reading comprehension on her part.
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea.
I think there are reasons to distrust a lot of evolutionary psychology results, and I think Luke’s breakup letter was just as bad an idea as he’s presented it as, but I don’t think the latter provides much evidence for the former. The rules of social interaction are only tangentially related to empirical reality, and even severe violations of social etiquette don’t establish empirical falsehood. In fact, it’s generally considered polite to deemphasize a number of empirical truths which our culture considers awkward, such as differences in skill.
As to invoking evopsych to dodge responsibility for your sexual preferences, it seems to me that that’s only dishonest if the results it invokes are untrue in the first place. It’s impolite regardless, though; our culture smiles on only a fairly narrow set of mechanistic excuses for behavior, and that’s not one of them.
Well, maybe not just any feminist, but eridu specifically did claim that, since the findings of evolutionary psychology are frequently misused to advance the patriarchy, no one should study evolutionary psychology. As far as I can tell, he feels that way about all research that deals with sex and/or gender, not just evolutionary psychology specifically.
There were anti-Semitic pamphlets that quoted studies of Jewish populations where blood type B was most frequent and Aryan populations where blood type A was, kept quiet about studies showing the reverse, and used that as proof that Aryans and Jews were different races that shouldn’t mingle and should be ranked relative to each other. If someone thought that publishing counterpoints (the rest of the data, or pointing out that blood type distribution doesn’t imply any of the conclusions) would be ineffective and had instead advocated banning statistics on blood type, it’d be rather uncharitable to say “They believe gathering evidence hurts their cause”.
If someone thought that publishing counterpoints (the rest of the data, or pointing out that blood type distribution doesn’t imply any of the conclusions) would be ineffective and had instead advocated banning statistics on blood type, it’d be rather uncharitable to say “They believe gathering evidence hurts their cause”.
I don’t see what the difference is, in practice. In both cases, the person in question wants to ban research into blood types. One person wants to do it because he fears his position could be destroyed by the truth; the other one wants to do it because the research would give his opponents too much power. In both cases, though, the research is banned, and neither person knows whether his beliefs are true or not.
Are you still in the analogy here? There’s very little that blood type research can actually tell us for or against antisemitism—we don’t have to fear a result that would support it. The problem is that some possible results (all possible results, really), while not evidence for “Aryans rule, Jews drool”, will be used to support this assertion. We expect that the costs of people being persuaded to hold false antisemitic beliefs outweigh the benefits of better responses to epidemics or whatever we’re hoping to get out of the research. Likewise, eridu believes that ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be (I agree), but is misused to support some harmful gender roles (I agree). He also believes that it’s not really possible to mitigate the misuse, and so the costs of people being persuaded to hold false sexist beliefs outweigh… figuring out how parental grief works or something.
What you appear to describe is… to stretch the analogy past its snapping point, someone who thinks injecting type A blood into everyone will solve antisemitism, and is scared that blood type research would prove their intervention ineffective or harmful. While also being scared of the consequences of misuse.
For better or worse, you seem to have steel-manned eridu’s position. Eridu appears to believe that it is irrelevant whether ev psych (or any other empirical project) has anything to say about appropriate gender relations.
There’s very little that blood type research can actually tell us for or against antisemitism...
How do you know this, if not by looking at the result of blood type research (or, more likely, research on heredity in general) ? Similarly, how does eridu know that “ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be” ? If by “should be” you mean something like the naturalistic fallacy, then I’d agree; however, it’s still possible that ev-psych can tell us something valuable about why our current gender roles are the way they are.
To use another analogy, optics and genetics tell me why my eyesight is bad, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to throw up my hands and say, “oh well, guess I’m almost blind then”. Instead, I’m going to use this knowledge to acquire some corrective lenses.
someone who thinks injecting type A blood into everyone will solve antisemitism, and is scared that blood type research would prove their intervention ineffective or harmful.
Why does that someone believe that the intervention will actually be effective ?
How do you know this, if not by looking at the result of blood type research (or, more likely, research on heredity in general)?
I know people of various ancestries, including near-pure Jews and near-pure Aryans. The Jews are not less creative, weaker, sneakier, greedier, less heroic, or more bent on world domination than the Aryans. Looking at history, Jews are more likely than Aryans to create great work of art and make great discoveries, and it takes about equal digging to find an Aryan ancestor to any creative Jew than the reverse. In general, if I try to rank people from best to worst, I don’t find many ancestry-related clusters, which shows that ranking races from best to worst is not useful. Heredity research can tell me that intermarriage is not bad, but I can also observe that countries and cities with higher rates of intermarriage aren’t doing worse, haven’t lost their cultural identities, and, New York notwithstanding, promote equality rather than Jewish superiority.
Similarly, differences between genders that are relevant to gender roles ought to be salient enough that regular psychology can expose them (and so what if it’s culture-dependent, we’re working from currently existing culture) with no need for the subtler, bare-bones models ev-psych gives us.
Similarly again, figuring out that your eyes converge too strongly and you need divergent lenses is useful, in a way that screens off the usefulness of genetics of nearsightedness.
Why does that someone believe that the intervention will actually be effective?
Because it’s a stupid analogy. Maybe they believe that antisemitism is caused by people being in bad moods due to anemia, and they have a huge stash of blood that happens to be type A.
I know people of various ancestries, including near-pure Jews and near-pure Aryans. The Jews are not less creative, weaker, sneakier, greedier, less heroic, or more bent on world domination than the Aryans...
Ok, so what this sounds like to me is, “I’d go out and do a bunch of research, in order to work around my biases by using ironclad evidence”. As far as I understand, eridu claims that people would just use the evidence selectively to justify their biases, instead. For example, they might notice that the crime rate in NY is higher than in other cities, and exclaim, “Aha ! It’s all those evil Jews ! That proves it !”. Thus, you should avoid collecting any evidence at all, for fear of giving them too much ammunition. Yes, eridu singles out evo-psych specifically, but his reasons for doing so are not unique to evo-psych, AFAICT.
Similarly, differences between genders that are relevant to gender roles ought to be salient enough that regular psychology can expose them
Right, but it’d be good to know which differences (if any) are the results of biology. To use my earlier analogy (hopefully without straining it to the breaking point), there are lots of illiterate people around; but some are illiterate because they’d never been taught to read, whereas others are illiterate because their eyes cannot focus on the page. It is really helpful to know which are which.
Maybe they believe that antisemitism is caused by people being in bad moods due to anemia, and they have a huge stash of blood that happens to be type A.
My point is that, in order to have some sort of a justified belief in their remedy, they must have first studied various blood types, and blood disorders in general. Otherwise, they’d just be randomly transfusing blood into people for no good reason, thus (assuming they at least do so safely) wasting a bunch of resources and gaining little (though, admittedly, more than nothing) in return.
Ok, so what this sounds like to me is, “I’d go out and do a bunch of research, in order to work around my biases by using ironclad evidence”.
Hmm, what I think I’m saying is more like:
Do research in sociology, not biology. If you uncover differences it may be a good idea to look at their origins, but don’t go digging for possible sources of differences that don’t reveal themselves.
Use the interocular trauma significance test. Any difference large and widespread enough to make group-level rather than individual-level policy should hit you between the eyes.
If you uncover differences it may be a good idea to look at their origins...
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are many differences between genders. Even eridu would agree to this, IMO, since his stated objective is to eliminate gender in order to eliminate the differences.
Any difference large and widespread enough to make group-level rather than individual-level policy should hit you between the eyes.
That’s just a recipe for indulging your own biases, IMO. That said, I doubt that differences between gender currently justify group-level policy (other than in specialized cases such as medical treatment, etc.). We’re not arguing over whether gender bias exists (I believe that it does) or whether we should adopt patriarchal policies (I believe that we should not).
Rather, the argument is over whether the very act of studying specific aspects of human biology and/or psychology constitutes an extremely harmful act and should immediately be stopped. I believe that it does not.
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are many differences between genders. Even eridu would agree to this, IMO, since his stated objective is to eliminate gender in order to eliminate the differences.
This is why I think the distinction between gender and sex is so helpful. It is not obvious to me that there are gender differences, even though I agree with you that there are obvious sex differences. Eridu appears to want to eliminate sex differences, while I merely want to abolish gender differences.
Consider the taboo in modern society against female chest nudity. It’s obvious to any subscriber to National Geographic that this norm is not an inherent part of human society. So I think the norm is a gender-norm, not a sex-norm.
Properly speaking, evo. psych has nothing to say about gender and gender-norms. Only sex and sex-norms. But society as a whole resists the distinct, and scientists rely on the halo effect to support that blurring of what should be relatively distinct concepts.
Someone more radical than I would like point out that the distinction is much fuzzier than I suggest. (Consider social pressure to perform surgery to “fix” intersex infants). (shrug). There’s a lot of low hanging fruit in social engineering before a precise resolution of that issue is really necessary.
It is not obvious to me that there are gender differences, even though I agree with you that there are obvious sex differences. … Eridu appears to want to eliminate sex differences, while I merely want to abolish gender differences.
I don’t think I get what you mean by “sex differences” vs. “gender differences”; eridu claims he wants to eliminate gender, not sex. Can you explain your definitions ? You bring up the example below:
It’s obvious to any subscriber to National Geographic that this norm is not an inherent part of human society. So I think the norm is a gender-norm, not a sex-norm.
I agree with you there, and this is a gender difference, but I’m not sure how your view on this contrasts with eridu’s. Surely eridu doesn’t want to eliminate secondary sexual characteristics… does he ?
I think eridu wants secondary sex characteristics to stop being morally relevant (i.e. never treat women different than men). I think that’s impossible—but society is not careful about what really is a secondary sex characteristic.
I think eridu wants secondary sex characteristics to stop being morally relevant (i.e. never treat women different than men). I think that’s impossible...
As far as I can tell, so does he, which is why he wants to destroy gender altogether. Once he’s done, we won’t have “men” and “women” at all; we’d just have “people with sexual organs A” and “people with sexual organs B” (plus a small number of others with C, D, etc.). By analogy, today we (mostly) don’t have separate identities for different hair or eye colors; it’s just a meaningless biological quirk (again, mostly).
One problem with this goal is that if gender truly is dependent on sex to any meaningful extent, then the goal cannot be achieved through purely social means. This is one of the reasons why I believe that evo-psych specifically, and evolutionary biology in general, should not be banned, despite its possible negative consequences.
I should also mention that I am sympathetic to the goal; it’s not a bad idea. However, it would be an immense undertaking, and you don’t want to commit an immense amount of resources to a goal unless you can be reasonably sure it’s achievable at least in principle.
(On a sidenote, eridu did claim that “treating women different than men” is impossible, because the patriarchy is pervasive and omnipresent. Even when you think you’re treating women the same as men, you aren’t—which is why he’s against liberal feminism.)
(On a sidenote, eridu did claim that “treating women different than men” is impossible, because the patriarchy is pervasive and omnipresent. Even when you think you’re treating women the same as men, you aren’t—which is why he’s against liberal feminism.)
A very small piece of evidence that eridu might have a point: A while ago, I was faced with a person who I didn’t know at the time was a transexual in transition. I felt like I didn’t know what to do or say to them. (I’m reasonably sure I just looked blank at the time, or at least we’re on decent terms since then. I haven’t mentioned that reaction to the person, and they’ve since tranisitioned to a standard gender.)
It did feel to me as though I had separate behavior sets for dealing with men and with women, and was at a loss when I didn’t know which set to apply. I haven’t explored how the sets might be different, but maybe I should.
It did feel to me as though I had separate behavior sets for dealing with men and with women
Me too, but 1) the sets do overlap by a substantial amount, and 2) I think it’s more a case of potential sexual partners vs everyone else than of women vs men—with women I’m not sexually attracted to at all, I behave pretty much the same as if they were male (except for different cultural norms such as—in Italy—kissing them on the cheek instead of shaking hands, which I don’t consider any more relevant that the use of different pronouns). (Edited to replace ″romantic″ with ″sexual″ -- I’ve introspected myself and ISTM that the set of people with whom I’d use the first set of behaviours almost exactly coincide with the set of people with whom I’d want to have protected sex if they offered, and promised not to tell anybody and to try not to let that affect our future interactions in any way—which is a somewhat broader criterion than me being willing to have a monogamous romantic relationship with them.)
FWIW, I doubt I treat men I’m attracted to and women I’m attracted to the same way. Though introspection is a decidedly unreliable source of information about this sort of thing.
There’s much less commonality in how I treat people I’m not attracted to. Or at least less salient commonality. I really don’t know what to say about it. I mean, sure, there are women I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to… but there are also men I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to. Introspection fails to provide even unreliable hints on that question.
Also, the fact that there exist both men and women I’m not attracted to doesn’t make me particularly unique; I expect that’s true of everybody. So I wouldn’t have felt especially motivated to share that data point, even were it crisper. You had started out drawing the distinction between “potential sexual partner vs everyone else” and “women vs men,” though, so I thought the perspective of someone for whom “potential sexual partner” included both women and men (well, in principle, anyway; after 20 years of monogamy it’s somewhat theoretical) might be relevant.
Your comment was also immediately voted down. I brought it back to neutral karma. I haven’t been following this conversation, but it doesn’t seem worthy of immediate downvotes...
I guess you missed the part where people (not me personally, it was just made pretty clear) are downvoting everything in this thread in the hope that everyone would stop talking?
I’d considered the possibility, but the fact that the parents were significantly net-upvoted made it seem churlish to attribute downvotes simply to the thread it’s in. It seems more plausible now that you (and at least one other person) have endorsed it.
“Gender should be removed from society” is not a particularly rare opinion—unfortunately it is also not a particularly feasible one, at least not in the short term.
I should clarify that it seems not only infeasible in the short term but lacks anything resembling a clear path to get there. And while an uncharitable person might say the same about CEV, SIAI working on CEV doesn’t involve forcing everyone else to change their patterns of social interaction in service of goals that are not clearly defined.
The path from here to there is wildly unclear. But history shows social changes as large as the one I advocate for have actually happened. So there’s that.
If true, that does seem like a very good reason not to trust eridu or take anything he has to say seriously. As an evolutionary biologist, most familiar with this kind of anti-thought from the creationist quarter, I might state it as a Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle: “Any person who advocates ignorance or false beliefs about a subject as morally superior to true and accurate knowledge of that subject is not to be trusted or taken seriously on any subject.” (See here for a good example of a creationist who goes every last angstrom of the way to this reductio ad absurdum of his position.)
This recalls Steven Pinker’s critique of many aspects of twentieth century radical left-wing thought, including some radical feminist ideas, in The Blank Slate. Radical scholars in the social sciences clung (and, in at least some cases, are still clinging) to the increasingly untenable notion of the human mind as a tabula rasa for fear of what they perceive as disastrous moral consequences of it not being true, and decried every scientific advance that filled in some portion of the slate. Neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on pretending things are true because they think the world be better if they were, and there are an awful lot of people who could benefit from reciting the Litanies of Tarsky and Gendlin until they take them to heart.
As an aside, I have to wonder if the upvotes on my previous comment reflect a sober assessment of its quality, or simply the fact that “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be” is a huge, multi-colored, strobing applause light around these here parts. ;-)
It follows directly that you stop trusting people who tell you “Don’t tell me if you hide any Jews, I don’t want to let anything slip in front of the SS”. Is that actually a conclusion you wish to endorse?
No, but all that requires is adding the qualifier “academic” to the noun “subject” in my principle, so it can’t get misapplied to very unusual and extreme situations where knowledge of the specific situation could be more dangerous than the lack of that knowledge.
That’s one of the things that aggravates me about eridu. I’m far more sympathetic to second-wave than third-wave feminism. But I don’t think that being second-wave requires rejecting empiricism. (I suspect >90% of ev. psych results are wrong because of cultural bias, but that’s a separate assertion.)
So… what’s your position on trans people and non-binaries?
you can’t really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types
Mainstream porn has an incentive problem where it needs to appeal to a large audience or it won’t be profitable, but alt porn, especially by amateurs, can show varied body types. There are Tumblrs that do that—they’re reposting, not producing, so there’s still a bias toward conventionally attractive types, but they’re not judged differently.
Right, I know what tumblr.com is, but I still don’t know what a “tumblr-feminist” is.
No, you’re confusing liberal feminism with radical feminism.
I don’t think I am, that’s why I said “every liberal feminist...” above. My point was that, counter to what you said, liberal feminists would be strongly against “compulsory sexuality”, and definitely against objectification of women along any other property (including sex).
Actually, I would maybe characterize that as the fundamental split between radical and liberal feminists—liberal feminists treat “desire” as a semantic stopsign, whereas radical feminists push through it, and unsurprisingly find patriarchy.
As far as I understand from talking with yourself and liberal feminists (and reading your respective reading materials), the fundamental split is due to a difference in primary goals, which gives rise to very different intermediate goals.
The primary goal of radical feminism is elimination of the patriarchy. To this end, they want to put a stop to all activities that promote the patriarchy, such as PiV sex, heterosexual relationships in general, etc.
The primary goal of liberal feminism is to maximize the capabilities of women to achieve their individual goals. Since the patriarchy stands in the way of most of these goals, liberal feminists want to see it eliminated; however, they would seek to do so in a way that does not result in a net reduction in the capability of women to achieve their goals.
Thus, a radical feminist would seek to eliminate all PiV sex (somehow), since doing so would advance the goal of eliminating the patriarchy. A liberal feminist, on the other hand, would work toward a society where women who enjoy PiV sex can have it, and women who do not enjoy it feel no social pressure to have it regardless.
To put it in a different way, radical feminism (as I understand it from talking with you) is essentialist, as opposed to liberal feminism.
First, that which eridu calls tumblr-feminism is probably what I would call “not feminism.” People who invoke The Rules or who think being sexually forward is taking control of their sexuality are seldom actual doing anything to reduce patriarchy. Popular culture may call Snooki a “strong female,” but she is not following a feminist program.
Second, I agree with you that eridu’s philosophy seems incredibly essentialist. I just want to note that I don’t think Dworkin is essentialist, although she can be read that way.
People who invoke The Rules or who think being sexually forward is taking control of their sexuality are seldom actual doing anything to reduce patriarchy.
Either of these can be considered assertive, albeit in very different ways. Surely, among the culture hacks that would make women better off (at negligible social cost), encouraging them to be more assertive in general should be near the top of the list.
Oh, I see. I thought for a moment that mitigating the widespread occurrence of hierarchies and power relationships in the real world (as probably happens when assertive behavior becomes more commonly expected in a given culture) would be somewhat more consequential than “reducing patriarchy”, whatever that means.
If you truly want to become stronger, and not just mine this thread for positive karma, you will read actual radical feminist women and figure that out for yourself, rather than trying to extract information from me that I don’t fully have.
I can at least say that you’re very wrong about liberal feminism being against compulsory sexuality (liberal feminists support compulsory sexuality in that the actions they take make it more probable), about the goals of liberal feminism (you’re talking specifically about a subset of liberal feminists called equality feminists, but liberal feminists in general don’t really recognize patriarchy, or at least almost never use that term or a strong analysis of gender as a social class), and about the reasons why radical feminists believe what they believe.
I will say this again: I cannot give you the answers to these questions. I am going to stop playing “feminist AMA” now and leave you to either educate yourself or be content with the fact that you might be oppressing people.
you will read actual radical feminist women and figure that out for yourself
I did, believe it or not. My impression of “actual radical feminist women” has been largely negative; they seem to be more interested in winning battles than in acquiring true beliefs or solving any real-world problems. That’s probably why I find your views so fascinating, since you are actually willing (some of the time) to justify your claims.
I can at least say that you’re very wrong about liberal feminism being against compulsory sexuality (liberal feminists support compulsory sexuality in that the actions they take make it more probable)...
You are conflating two very different concepts here, by employing the very anti-pattern Yvain is describing in his post: ”Liberal feminism explicitly endorses compulsory sexuality” vs ”Liberal feminists endorse practices that, unbeknownst to them, lead to compulsory sexuality”
but liberal feminists in general don’t really recognize patriarchy, or at least almost never use that term or a strong analysis of gender as a social class
Can you offer some examples ? Every piece of feminist literature I’ve ever read talks extensively about patriarchy, privilege, and gender.
I am going to stop playing “feminist AMA” now and leave you to either educate yourself or be content with the fact that you might be oppressing people.
This is a false dichotomy. It is entirely possible for me to believe that I’m inadvertently oppressing people in several ways, while still disagreeing with your own claims.
“feminism is a movement which has ended, there is no longer any oppression of women.”
I think the problem with this statement is that “oppression” is a loaded word. Its meaning can range from “there exists a systemic bias against women” to “women are chained to the stove and are kept barefoot and pregnant at all times”. As Yvain points out in this very post, people tend to envision the latter even when the reality is closer to the former.
That said, I’m still not entirely clear regarding your response to simplicio. You say that, if only simplicio and his wife could extrapolate their CEVs, that would lead to
a re-evaluation of [simplicio’s] non-feminist past of at best mildly oppressive and at worst abusive and toxic.
I don’t know what that means, though. Which parts of their past, specifically, would simplicio and his wife—or, if you prefer, Average Het Male and Average Het Female—find “abusive and toxic” ?
Essentially, you were asked, “how would the thoughts and actions of a radical feminist couple differ from those of an average hetero couple ?”; and you replied by saying, “their thoughts and actions would be radically feminist”. While this is true, it is hardly informative.
I won’t respond to the first half of your post because you have done essentially nothing but rephrase my own comment in a seemingly argumentative tone.
Which parts of their past, specifically, would simplicio and his wife—or, if you prefer, Average Het Male and Average Het Female—find “abusive and toxic” ?
Sexual advances that seemed innocuous to the men making them would be perceived as any combination of coercive, inconsiderate, manipulative, objectifying, or something else I can’t think of at the moment
Tones of interaction and patterns of arguments that again, seemed innocuous to the men making them would be considered patronizing, condescending, paternalistic, etc.
Social behaviors that men previously accepted and may have argued for the legitimacy of such as pornography, prostitution, penis-in-vagina sex, body policing of women, objectification of women in media, objectifying language directed towards women, aggressive metaphors and language describing sex, and heterosexual relationships will be seen as tangibly oppressive and violent
Division of various tasks, such as any combination of housework, child-rearing, emotion work (especially emotion work), would be seen as unfair, constricting, and demanding
That was an unfocused four minutes of brainstorming, but if I sat down with a patriarchal textbook used in any undergrad relationship psychology class, I could probably write a novella.
At a first glance your type of feminism seems to seek to put both men AND women in smaller and darker cages, as it seems to seek to ban more and more behaviors for both genders, instead of permit more and more.
Seriously “penis-in-vagina sex”? I don’t think there’s ever been a society so oppressive to both genders as to ban even that.
Within the context of genders, those things are oppressive. I don’t imagine sex of any kind would be problematic in a feminist society.
If you want a more in-depth view of heterosexual sex under patriarchy, I recommend Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin.
But in short, consider the utility distribution of PIV sex for men, and consider it for women, under patriarchy, and consider whether it is really usually in women’s best interest to have PIV sex. I’ll leave this as an exercise for you, rather than spelling it out explicitly.
under patriarchy, and consider whether it is really usually in women’s best interest to have PIV sex.
What happens if a woman desires to have PiV sex, seeks out a man to have it with (rejecting unqualified men in the process), and enjoys the experience ? The reason Andrea Dworkin (and radical feminists in general) is often portrayed as “sex-negative” (*) is because, as far as I can tell, she denies that such a scenario can exist, thus directly contradicting the life experience of many women.
Thus, we end up in a peculiar situation where radical feminists appear to be seeking to actively make women’s lives worse, by denying them an activity that many women see as an important aspect of their self-expression (not to mention, a lot of fun).
Of course, a radical feminist might answer by saying, “my end goal is not to improve the lives of women, but to destroy the patriarchy by any means necessary”, but I’m not sure if any real radical feminists would answer this way.
(*) It’s also why Dworkin is considered to be a kind of troll by some liberal feminists; IMO unjustly so, since she sincerely believes the things she says.
I did read through Intercourse in college, but it was a long time ago, and, knowing my past self, I probably only skimmed it. My main impression of it at the time was that Dworkin a). really dislikes men, and b). dehumanizes women. IMO (b) is even worse than (a); at least she recognizes that men are people, albeit unpleasant ones.
Anyway, that was a bit off topic. What is it that I’m supposed to be figuring out by reading Dworkin ? And what happens if I do read the relevant passages, but still conclude that she is wrong ?
She talk about women’s wants a lot less than I expected. About cis women who want intercourse with cis men, she writes:
Women have wanted intercourse to work and have submitted—with regret or with enthusiasm, real or faked—even though or even when it does not. [...] Women have also wanted intercourse to work in this sense: women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too; and women want the human in men, including in the act of intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal power, women have believed in the redeeming potential of love. There has been—despite the cruelty of exploitation and forced sex—a consistent vision for women of a sexuality based on a harmony that is both sensual and possible.
She might be saying “Women only ever want intercourse with men they love”. Even if you count any kind of liking and desire for intimacy as “love”, this rules out cruising for casual sex.
She also says things about women wanting very gentle intercourse without thrusting, whereas men go poundy-poundy. This is quite unlike the reports of sex bloggers and friends, whose preferences are varied.
Then she says women who seek intercourse are like women who accept and perform genital mutilation and foot binding. So yeah, basically “hate it but brainwashed into thinking they like it”.
This seems to be completely unfalsifiable; anyone who says “But I like penis in my vagina, there are nerve endings there that like stimulated” can be told “You’re brainwashed by the patriarchy”, or “You’re not (enough of) a woman so you can never understand”.
There does seem to be a bit of a trope of certain sorts of scholars (the early Wilhelm Reich comes to mind) developing strong and specific opinions on what kind of sex other people are supposed to have — down to specific positions and motions! — in order to be enlightened, liberated, rational, or holy. One wonders by what means a person could arrive at such knowledge, and what other hypotheses were raised to attention and dismissed by evidence.
This isn’t just about sex, of course. There are all sorts of claims that people don’t really want what they say they want, and they don’t want what they seek out, either.
This essay introduced me to the idea that such claims are pervasive. Anyone have a more general overview?
Even at Less Wrong—you won’t really like that shiny toy so much, give the money to SI instead!
And yet people here, apparently with a straight face, have made analogous arguments about alcoholic beverages. If I claim I like Amaro Montenegro then I must have been brainwashed and/or be (consciously or subconsciously) lying for signalling reasons or something. How could I demonstrate that I actually enjoy its taste?
If I claim I like Amaro Montenegro then I must have been brainwashed and/or be (consciously or subconsciously) lying for signalling reasons or something. How could I demonstrate that I actually enjoy its taste?
Blind taste test. Preferably several, where you don’t know if Amaro Montenegro is among the drinks you’re tasting in any particular test.
If you can’t single out for a high rating the one that you profess to like the taste of, then you’ve falsified the hypothesis that you like it for the taste.
If you can single it out for a high rating in blind taste tests, and want to further test whether you actually enjoy it, or merely recognize it and assign a high rating for signalling purposes, get an MRI during the blind taste test.
MRI wouldn’t help. If you can recognize amaro, you’ll go “Oh, that’s amaro, I’m supposed to like this” and produce a pleasure response, the same way wines believed to be expensive do to identical wines believed to be cheap.
I think you could get somewhere by doing a taste test of several different amaros (which are not actually wine,) where rather than a blind test, the subject is incorrectly told that they’re all, say, privately brewed and distributed at a liqueur festival, or something along those lines, but one of them is really Amaro Montenegro.
That one doesn’t sound quite so bad; get MRId while drinking, and you can prove you really feel pleasure. That doesn’t disprove the brainwashing assertion (wines genuinely taste better with a price hike) but you can still answer “So what if I like it because of that? I like it. And it doesn’t even support a culture where 12% of the population has had amaro slipped into their drink.”
Well, I don’t want to want to spend more money on wine if I couldn’t tell it from cheaper wine in a blind tasting… (EDIT: But I don’t know what aspect of heterosexual intercourse that maps to, if any.)
Wine can taste Good or Bad, have a real cost that’s Cheap or Expensive, and be LabeledExpensive or LabeledCheap. Good Expensive wine is better value for money than Bad Cheap wine.
If Expensive wine is Good and Cheap wine is Bad and label is irrelevant, Good Expensive LabeledCheap wine ~ Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine > Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine ~ Bad Cheap LabeledExpensive wine.
If LabeledExpensive wine is Good and LabeledCheap wine is Bad and real price is irrelevant, Good Cheap LabeledExpensive wine > Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine > Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine > Bad Expensive LabeledCheap wine.
Learning that the latter model is true is only useful if you can pay for cheap wine then be told it’s expensive when you drink it. In most situations, you see what you’re paying for—wine is LabeledCheap iff it’s Cheap. Your only options are Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine and Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine, and you always prefer the former to the latter. So learning which model is true shouldn’t change your wine-buying habits.
That’s quite possible in real life, but then you don’t need all that evaluation of preferences in various models—you always buy cheap wine, regardless of label and taste.
I won’t respond to the first half of your post because you have done essentially nothing but rephrase my own comment in a seemingly argumentative tone.
That was not my intention. What I meant was, “we should taboo the word ‘oppression’, and it would be great if everyone else did, too”.
Thanks for your examples. One thing I noticed about them is that they are almost entirely male-centric. For example, you say,
“Sexual advances that seemed innocuous to the men making them would be perceived as any combination of coercive, etc.”
What about the women, though ? Would the women likewise perceive such behavior differently than they do now ? We are discussing feminism, after all, not male-ism.
Not to harp on this point, but you mention things like “penis-in-vagina sex” and “heterosexual relationships” in general as the kinds of behaviors that “will be seen as tangibly oppressive and violent”. Is it your contention that (most) women today see such behaviors in this negative light ? If not, then why not ? Is it because modern women are almost as brainwashed by the patriarchy as modern men, or for some other reason ? Or did I misinterpret your claim ?
The reason I ask is because, on its surface, this claim sounds like something a “straw feminist” might say, and I want to avoid jumping to any unwarranted conclusions.
child-rearing, emotion work (especially emotion work), would be seen as unfair, constricting, and demanding
What is “emotion work” ? This is the first time I’d seen this term.
Emotional work is everything one needs to do to maintain a positive affect because the positive affect is expected from your social role.
For example, you don’t think that the fast-food worker is really that happy to see you?
If one spouse in a relationship is expected to repress emotions in this way, that’s unfair. If society doesn’t give the spouse credit for the circumstance, that’s even worse.
Historically, that spouse was the wife—hence feminism’s concern about emotional work.
For example, you don’t think that the fast-food worker is really that happy to see you?
If one spouse in a relationship is expected to repress emotions in this way, that’s unfair. If society doesn’t give the spouse credit for the circumstance, that’s even worse.
Thanks, that’s a good example. I had encountered an instance of the phenomenon in the context of male demands for women to “just smile,” but had not generalized it.
What about the women, though ? Would the women likewise perceive such behavior differently than they do now ? We are discussing feminism, after all, not male-ism.
Yes. All my statements should be read as true for both partners.
Is it your contention that (most) women today see such behaviors in this negative light ?
No.
Is it because modern women are almost as brainwashed by the patriarchy as modern men, or for some other reason
Yes, because women are more “brainwashed” by the patriarchy than men.
I consider TimS’s explanation of emotion work to be accurate, with the possible addition of being responsible of the emotional well-being of others at the expense of one’s own well-being.
I am trying to be cautious when googling any terms [radical] feminists use, because the meanings they assign to them often differs radically from common usage. For example, words like “patriarchy”, “oppression”, “privilege”, etc., have very specific technical meanings in a [radical] feminist context, and if I googled them, I’d form a wrong impression. That is perfectly ok, IMO; every discipline has its jargon, f.ex. the words “client”, “handshake” and “slave” are used in computer science in radically different ways as compared to common speech.
Anyway, you said that “PiV sex” and “heterosexual relationships” would be seen by future utopian societies as “tangibly oppressive and violent”, but I find this statement difficult to reconcile with your earlier one, where you claimed that, in a feminist society, sex of any kind would be ok. If PiV sex is inherently oppressive, surely people wouldn’t engage in it, even in a feminist society ? On the other hand, if PiV sex is not inherently oppressive, it would seem that some people could enjoy it even today, if the right conditions are met.
I have a feeling I’m missing a key part of your argument, but I’m not sure what it is.
On the other hand, if PiV sex is not inherently oppressive, it would seem that some people could enjoy it even today, if the right conditions are met.
From what I’ve inferred (this inference may be wrong), eridu seems to be asserting that “radical feminists” (not necessarily including himself) believe that these conditions are currently impossible to be met. My intuition is that this is for the same reason that they became feminists in the first place (a feminist subset of anthropomorphic-like phenomena?) - that is, that they were/are surrounded with almost exclusively ultra-patriarchal-behaving groups, where it is common that men get blowjobs in return for opening car doors for women and obtain sex in return for gifting high-heeled shoes (and yet of course, the reciprocals do not apply).
I feel like most of what this position considers literally omnipresent in everyone but themselves is a poor representation of some cultures and social groups. For example, the PiV point is definitely not applicable everywhere. In my own circles, there is not a single man or woman that considers PiV sex in any way offensive, dominating, or any other of the qualities that would qualify it as “patriarchal”:
There are two people, they play a sport (something very fun for both), one of them happens to be a woman, the other happens to be a man. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
There are two people, they watch pictures of their childhood and reminisce on their grewing up together (something very personal and intimate for both), one of them happens to be a man, the other happens to be a woman. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
There are two people, they rub parts of their bodies together while having strong positive emotions (something very fun for both + something very personal and intimate for both), one of them happens to be a man, the other happens to be a woman. This particular woman-man combination happenstance happens to geometrically permit parts of their bodies to rub in a particular even-more-fun manner which is difficult for other gender combinations. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
By my understanding, even radical feminists agree with my conclusion that, ceteris paribus, none of those three situations are sexist or patriarchal. However, they appear to be implicitly assuming that the third is virtually impossible in our society, because all men are brainwashed to demand sex and deny denial, and all women are brainwashed to not enjoy sex by their own authority or somesuch.
I see and know of tons of “patriarchal” (gender-unfair, discriminatory, negative-emotion-inducing, etc.) behaviors, yes. Are those behaviors common in the circles I frequent? No.
No girls go around in quests of the romance of their prince charming, no would-be gentlemen open doors specifically for attractive women and no one else (in fact, we have a formula, which I devised long ago, for when it is best to open a door for someone and when it is best not to or to offer), no sex happens that isn’t wanted by both parties for the sex (and probably for that reason, it seems there’s a lot more of it going on than for the north-american average relationship), there’s a lot of reciprocal affection, no gender-specific hobbies that I can tell (the stereotypes of shopping, porn, sports games on TV, etc. really do not apply, seriously—in fact, if it’s stereotypically gender-based, it probably doesn’t apply to the people I frequent, unless it’s about reproductive organs bleeding on a monthly basis or wall-mounted urine receptacles or some other thing we literally physically can’t change).
I could go on and on and on (and on and on and on and on and more, but I’ll let you do the copy-pasting mentally and spare my fingers a bit—I must’ve rewritten this post five times overall with all the rewording and correcting and editing before-posting) about comparisons between behaviors I observe here in myself and my circles and what is stereotypical, or what has been mentioned here, but that’s not even the issue. I am being accused, nay, all people including me are being accused of recursive denial-in-denial that prevents even conscious effort towards nondiscrimination from not being “patriarchal”, whatever that word means.
Yes, I get confrontational about it, because yes, it goes against every evidence I have and everything I observe to accept this accusation. I have now read more wikipedia articles and feminist blogs than I care to count on the issue, and I have been extremely careful of selection bias, confirmation bias, privileging the hypothesis, etc., and yet I only see more evidence that the “Patriarchy” we are being accused of does not even exist in my current local subculture.
Yes, the “society at large” outside my own subculture is largely male-dominant in often subtle ways. However, the “society at large” is also experimentally stupid, able to completely do nothing while watching people die and being certain that they are dying, give people cruel and lethal treatment merely because someone tells them to with authoritative voice, etc.
I do not contest that there is a large patriarchy at work in most, not all, of society, but rather the idea that the patriarchy alone/itself deserves special correction, rather than first raising the sanity of everyone in all matters. This, however, is tangential.
What I am opposed to is the general claim that all society (including me and my circles/groups/subcultures/etc.) is necessarily very “patriarchal” and very gender-unfair and not improving nor making worthwhile progress of any kind, with the sole exception of a very specific subgroup that must identify themselves as Radical Feminists.
The above claim is both infuriating and extremely improbable, given the evidence that I see.
Going by all that I have explained in this comment, I therefore infer that it is not an argument that you are missing, but evidence—the same evidence that I am missing.
I’ll stake a 70% probability-in-my-model that either myself or eridu or both is/are missing key strong evidence and that this causes the disagreement, if there is indeed a real disagreement and not merely a problem of falling trees.
we have a formula, which I devised long ago, for when it is best to open a door for someone
What formula, out of curiosity? (In my case, I always hold doors open for people within a few metres behind me unless it’d be more cumbersome for me to do that than for them to open it again—e.g. if I’m carrying a box or something—regardless of their sex, age, physical attractiveness, marital status, and whether I know them.)
I do the same (with the radius of a few meters somewhat larger for elderly people), but I sometimes wonder whether my cutoff distance is the appropriate one, like in the Ambiguous Zone smbc.
In the situation described in the comic, I would ask “need help?” out loud without moving towards them until they say yes (where by “would” I mean ‘recommend’—not sure what I would actually do in such a situation, due to akrasia).
With doors, when there’s someone close but not that close, I push the door forward and move on, so that (if it’s slow enough) it will still be open by the time the person behind me arrives.
I happen to agree with you (I think), but still, it sounds like you’re generalizing from one example. Your personal life experience is no substitute for hard data. Furthermore, if eridu is right, then you are an incredibly poor judge of whether or not the interactions you describe are free of oppression in your personal sub-culture; thus, I doubt he’d find your post persuasive.
What I am opposed to is the general claim that all society … is necessarily very “patriarchal” and very gender-unfair and not improving nor making worthwhile progress of any kind, with the sole exception of a very specific subgroup that must identify themselves as Radical Feminists.
Agreed. As far as I understand, eridu believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of believes regarding gender and feminism, is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/its/etc. own best interests. Only radical feminists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
Eridu, would the above paragraph be a fair—if possibly somewhat harsh—summary of your views ?
Agreed. As far as I understand, eridu believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of believes regarding gender and feminism, is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/its/etc. own best interests. Only radical feminists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
As far as I understand, EY believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of beliefs regarding cognitive bias and probability theory is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/their best interests. Only Bayesian rationalists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
Which is to say, if non-Bayesians are predictably dumb, then a feminist (of any kind, even) would say that non-feminists are predictably dumb.
So yes, the above paragraph is fair, but it’s also misleading—my viewpoint on non-feminists is equivalent to LW’s collective viewpoint on Christianity.
As far as I understand, EY believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of beliefs regarding cognitive bias and probability theory is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/their best interests.
I don’t know if EY would agree with this statement or not. I personally would disagree, however. Sure, without the understanding of “cognitive biases and probability theory”, a person is liable to make suboptimal decisions. However, I believe that most people are competent enough to achieve at least some of their goals in a satisfactory fashion.
The difference between you and me, as far as I understand, is that you believe that unless everyone sets “destruction of the patriarchy using the methods of radical feminism” as their primary goal, they should not be allowed to make any decisions that you don’t approve of. I personally reserve that level of outrage for actions that clearly, demonstrably, hurt other people—f.ex., teaching creationism instead of evolution in schools, restricting women’s right to vote, etc. By contrast, I am perfectly content to let people spend (I would say, “waste”, but they’d disagree) their Sunday mornings in church, if they so choose.
To be sure, it’s fairly easy to demonstrate that a patriarchy of some sort does exist, and that it is harmful. But your concept of “patriarchy” is rather more all-encompassing than that held by most other feminists; and in some cases your claims border on extraordinary. That doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, only that I’m not ready to side with you until you (^) have provided overwhelming proof—which you had not done. I’m not saying that you can’t provide such proof, only that you haven’t so far.
(^) Or any other radical feminist, doesn’t have to be you specifically.
As far as I understand, EY believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of beliefs regarding cognitive bias and probability theory is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/their best interests. Only Bayesian rationalists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
“Bayesian reasoner” is a theoretical entity. The folks you meet on LW are “aspiring rationalists” (more or less), and it’s important not to confuse the two — especially important for aspiring rationalists. There is a big difference between learning about a few cognitive biases, and being capable of mathematically ideal reasoning on any topic relevant to one’s best interests. Anyone who claims the latter is, well, probably full of shit.
I happen to agree with you (I think), but still, it sounds like you’re generalizing from one example. Your personal life experience is no substitute for hard data.
He said:
I see and know of tons of “patriarchal” (gender-unfair, discriminatory, negative-emotion-inducing, etc.) behaviors, yes.
So it’s clear that he’s not claiming that his claims about his social circle apply to the rest of society.
and yet I only see more evidence that the “Patriarchy” we are being accused of does not even exist in my current local subculture.
There are lots of parts of popular culture that are fairly blatantly sexist (e.g. Barbie dolls and female body expectations). Does your subculture always condemn those aspects of popular culture? Does it do anything to change those norms?
If not, then “Patriarchy” exists to some degree in your sub-culture. Does eradicating Patriarchy enhance social justice? I think the answer is clearly yes.
Must it be your highest social-justice priority? I think there are reasonable arguments on both sides. For example, my day job is about dealing with disability discrimination in public schools. I wouldn’t assert that this does all that much to eradicate patriarchy.
Does your subculture always condemn those aspects of popular culture? Does it do anything to change those norms?
No and yes.
Many behaviors do clearly slip through the cracks. Present a “perfect Feminist” with the claim that they never act in any manner that could possibly be Patriarchal, and I’m sure most of LessWrong would dispute the claim and find evidence that This Human, Like Other Humans, Is Not Infinitely Perfect. I would like to think that I make no such bogus claims.
The Schelling point/fence, however, is that at the current state of behavioral patterns and rate of improvement in gender-fairness of “my” (for lack of a better label) subculture (and, if I may presume, many other subcultures made of smarter-than-average people) is currently right before the line whether spending more to eradicate Patriarchy becomes more damaging than the amount of patriarchy it would remove currently does, and the rate of improvement seems to me as to be faster than the accumulating-over-time damage of the remaining patriarchy—all obviously attributable to diminishing returns. Patriarchal behavior is, fortunately, not an infinite neg-resource. (a few applause lights here, but this was typed-as-thought, so leaving them in seems useful)
Now, as for whether Patriarchy is present, well, if defined as such (“to some degree”) it is obviously present in these subcultures in at least some way or another—it is even more unlikely that no “Patriarchy”-like behavior whatsoever exists than the claim I oppose in the grandparent.
However, I find that the above does not carve reality at its joints, to use LW jargon—the cluster of behaviorspace, which I was pointed to and told was “Patriarchy”, has mostly in common that it mostly generates or indirectly contributes to / allows gender-unfairness, social injustice, sexism, etc. Many key points like identity, control, status, “dignity” (technical meanings, not the religious-soul or similar connotations), subconscious conformity to expectations, anticipation-of-expected-behavior, behavior programming, subconscious reprogramming of believed-wants (though perhaps not necessarily of true wants), etc. seem to show up too in this space. The radical feminism portrayed in these threads sometimes appears to ignore this concept entirely, and assumes that anything that could, in at least some contexts, become a point of “Patriarchy”, is therefore Patriarchy, and is therefore something to be absolutely eradicated at all costs.
Therefore, if I write a user’s manual for Tampax products, I am an Unholy Beacon of Supreme Evil, for reasons I hope are obvious enough, and that I hope are either very strawman or sufficiently absurd to expose the need for a Schelling fence.
the current state of behavioral patterns and rate of improvement in gender-fairness of “my” (for lack of a better label) subculture (and, if I may presume, many other subcultures made of smarter-than-average people) is currently right before the line whether spending more to eradicate Patriarchy becomes more damaging than the amount of patriarchy it would remove currently does.
If this is true of your subgroup, your subgroup is wonderfully exceptional. It certainly isn’t true of most smarter-than-average subcultures.
One can argue about whether video gamer culture is above average intelligence (I suspect yes), but here is strong evidence it is nowhere near the marginal benefit line for gender relations. If video game culture were closer to the line, I would expect the described behavior (which is ridiculously unacceptable) would receive far more disparagement than it does receive.
The concept of fan service (particularly the way it is currently gendered) is similar evidence in the anime/manga subculture.
the current state of behavioral patterns and rate of improvement in gender-fairness of “my” (for lack of a better label) subculture (and, if I may presume, many other subcultures made of smarter-than-average people) is currently right before the line whether spending more to eradicate Patriarchy becomes more damaging than the amount of patriarchy it would remove currently does.
If this is true of your subgroup, your subgroup is wonderfully exceptional. It certainly isn’t true of most smarter-than-average subcultures.
Have you counted opportunity costs? Maybe there is some action his subgroup could take which would have a net positive effect towards eradicating patriarchy, but that would mean they could spend less time taking some other action which could have a larger positive effect towards some other goal.
Such an argument may not be as “dumb or straw-mannish” as all that, depending on your approach to prioritizing problems to solve.
For example, if you believed that destroying the patriarchy was possible given our current limited resources, and that doing so would ameliorate or eliminate a host of other problems, you might focus on it as the low-hanging fruit. Sure, building an FAI and ushering in the Singularity (just for example) would net you a much larger gain, but the amount of effort you’d have to spend on it, as well as the lower probability of success, makes it a less attractive goal overall.
So far nobody has completed the exercise I was slightly obtuse about asking for, which was to give a breakdown of the distribution of outcomes and expected utility for those outcomes of PIV sex for men and women under patriarchy (feel free to substitute varying different locales, such as “sex-positive liberal feminist patriarchy” and “christian conservative patriarchy” and even “DaFranker’s utopian subculture”).
I don’t think I have the cognitive context necessary to predict that. It’s only useful as a construct, in this case to make the point that humans are patriarchal because humans conform, and society is patriarchal—implying that if the same humans were in an environment where conforming meant being feminists, they would conform to that.
Fair enough. I guess in the context of that “end of the world” thought experiment discussed above, I was trying to picture how the relationship of the American Het Male and American Het Female would be different if they had internalized radical feminism.
I am sort of trying to reconcile the radicalness of your critique of gender relations with the mundaneness of gender relations between, to take the obvious example, myself and my wife. Neither of us are free of sexist attitudes, and yet ridding ourselves of them doesn’t seem like so urgent a project as you are urging. It seems like maybe we’d rather just go for a walk by the river.
I’m not trying to be flippant, just trying to understand where the urgency is coming from. Is it mostly a question of trying to prevent severe social ills related to sexism, such as rape? Or do you think that on the level of personal relationships between ordinary people, a lot of horrible shit is going on?
During the early days of feminist reawakening in the 60s and 70s, the main thrust of feminist activism came from consciousness-raising groups, where women talked about their experiences.
This revealed to them (and to the world) that they had massive pluralistic ignorance about things like domestic violence, marital rape, housework, and other various things ranging from extreme to mundane.
That sort of pluralistic ignorance is still common today about a variety of other things (recall that the last state to outlaw marital rape did so in 1993), especially since the prevailing meme is not “feminists have no legitimate position” but rather “feminism is a movement which has ended, there is no longer any oppression of women.”
In LW terms, I think that the CEV of your wife and possibly you would lead to radical feminism, and a re-evaluation of your non-feminist past of at best mildly oppressive and at worst abusive and toxic.
Thanks for the reply. What I’m getting from you is the idea that there are probably some practices in our relationship (and those of couples in our reference class) that, although they look benign to us now, would after a certain amount of consciousness-raising come to be seen by us as toxic.
I consider this very plausible (and I can think of attitudes held by me in the past, about gender and other things, which seemed trivial but which I now regard as toxic).
I am really interested in moving from the abstract to the specific though. So seconding Bugmaster’s comment, I’m interested in concrete things that occur typically in the context of what you might call a moderately “liberal feminist” relationship which I ought to regard more seriously. Think back to the last time you spent time with a moderately liberal feminist, middle-to-upper-class couple. What sorts of things would you see to critique?
My response to Bugmaster should cover that.
To contextualize a strongly liberal feminist/tumblr-feminist couple, I’d add maybe the following few things:
Compulsory political support of various institutions that exist on the backs of women to serve men, such as prostitution and pornography, with the implication of being “prudish” if she objects
Compulsory sexuality, sexual availability, and pervasive sexualization, again with the implication of being a “prude” or “sex-negative” or “anti-sex” if she objects
Compulsory individualist conceptions of gender (“gender is entirely based on identity,” “genderbread people” ala my original comment), and as a consequence, a return to individualist attributions of gendered success or failure, and a lack of emphasis on social problems as a cause for individual deficiencies
To contextualize it further, an undergrad psychology class would teach that there are three relationship types common to modern society: traditional, modern, and egalitarian. Traditional relationship types would be considered patriarchal by liberal feminists and are dominated by men. Modern relationship types have a senior-partner junior-partner dynamic, where nominally women have input but ultimately everything is decided by men. Egalitarian relationships are most common in non-heterosexual relationships, and have equally shared power and a much higher focus on friendship and companionship than either of the two previous types. I would guess that any liberal feminist heterosexual couple would fall firmly on the traditional side of a modern relationship type.
Thanks, your description of the spectrum of relationship types is quite clear. That said, I find it difficult to reconcile what I know of liberal feminism (which is, admittedly, not as much as a liberal feminist would) with your description of it (though I’m not sure what a “tumblr-feminist” is):
Can you link to some examples ? Every liberal feminist I’ve ever seen always makes it a priority to combat the treatment of women as mere sex objects.
As I understand it, a liberal feminist would indeed characterize a woman who objects to sex in principle, and wants all men and women to stop having sex with each other, as “sex-negative”. At the same time, though, that same liberal feminist would defend any specific woman’s right to express her sexuality in whatever way she chooses, even if she chooses not to express it at all. IMO these two positions are entirely compatible.
http://tumblr.com
No, you’re confusing liberal feminism with radical feminism.
Liberal feminism has been historically pro-porn, pro-prostitution, and supportive of other various things that radical feminists think are objectifying and oppressive. The most liberal shade of liberal feminism is “empowerment” feminism, where doing things that are patriarchal are okay, because women are “empowered” now to… starve themselves and get breast implants.
In contrast, radical feminism has traditionally fought against porn, supported body-positivity and body acceptance over accepting patriarchal beauty norms under the guise of “empowerment,” and in general, is critical of desires as having causal origin within patriarchy, rather than being ontologically basic objects.
Actually, I would maybe characterize that as the fundamental split between radical and liberal feminists—liberal feminists treat “desire” as a semantic stopsign, whereas radical feminists push through it, and unsurprisingly find patriarchy.
I’m confused by your history.
As I understood the history:
1st wave—Susan B. Anthony, Women’s Suffrage, “voluntary motherhood” (i.e. allow contraceptives for married couples, but sex is for married people only) ~1920s
2nd wave—de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”, Andrea Dworkin, anti-pornography movement ~1960s
3rd wave—sex positivity feminism ~1990s
Each movement was a reaction to perceived shortfalls in the prior intellectual movement. You talk about things like 2nd wave was a reaction to 3rd wave.
I’m more sympathetic to Dworkin than the sex-positive folks, but there’s a lot more to the other side than you suggest. One can be sex positive without supporting breast implants for everyone.
I think that history is mostly orthogonal to our current topic. Even if eridu is wrong about history, he could still be right about all of his other claims.
Indeed, and “sex positive” does not, IMO, immediately imply “want to make sex compulsory”. I am personally volleyball-positive, in that I wish everyone who’s interested in volleyball could enjoy doing so with other volleyball-lovers. But that doesn’t mean that I want to force everyone to play volleyball all the time, regardless of whether they feel like it or not.
I think you mean “compulsory”.
Indeed I do. Fixed.
I’d call this a “Freudian slip”, but that would probably get me shouted at by both sides in the conversation.
I thought I had replied to this comment. Maybe it was deleted, maybe it was lost on my end.
Third-wave “feminism” is a mostly patriarchal reaction to second-wave feminism.
Second-wave feminists were primarily fighting things that third-wave “feminists” endorse, like pornorgraphy, sexualized violence, sexualization and objectification of women and girls, and other similar things. As such, second-wave was a reaction to the elements of patriarchy that third-wave feminism adopted.
Third wave feminism is chiefly this endorsement of compulsory sexuality, plus an individualist “identity” conception of gender that is actively harmful to feminist struggle.
But you can’t really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types, and you certainly can’t be sex-positive without supporting the notion that consent is possible under patriarchy, which seems to either deny patriarchy or deny its coercive power (which is mostly the same in my opinion).
This probably isn’t a discussion we should have here, though.
Of course, third-wave feminists say that it is your brand of radical feminism that is “harmful to feminist struggle”. I would love to see some long-term studies that provide some evidence one way or the other—but, as far as I understand, liberal feminists don’t have the funding, and radical feminists believe that the very act of gathering evidence harms their cause… so we’re kind of stuck in a “she said / she said” territory here.
There are several initiatives on the liberal feminist side that campaign for the promotion of a healthy female body image, in all media including porn (*). On the flip side, there is tons of porn out there that promotes any body type you can imagine, and possibly a few that you cannot.
Agreed.
I don’t think that the only possible conditions are either a). “the patriarchy doesn’t exist”, or b). “the patriarchy’s control over everyone is total and complete, people are zombies”.
(*) I’d google up some links, but something tells me I shouldn’t be doing that at work.
Agreed. A useful line of questioning for eridu might be “How much coercion is acceptable in sexual relations, given that essentially any outside causal influence can be glossed as some finite amount of coercion?”
On the one hand I think it’s an excellent point the feminists make that implicit/explicit consent to sex is not the end of the story ethically, if the consent is seen to be coerced by external factors (e.g., “Our relationship depends on his sexual satisfaction, and he has made me financially dependent on our continued relationship”).
On the other hand, it’s going too far if we say that the ONLY ethically acceptable motivation for sex is one’s own purely hedonistic desires (which are the only motivations I can think of that CANNOT be glossed as coercive).
Sure they can! Someone has wired up your pleasure center to respond to doing what they want you to do, even though that course of action is ultimately self-destructive for you.
(Fictional example: the tasp in various Niven stories.)
Agreed; that’s a good way to put it.
That’s an awfully damning assessment. If true, it implies that radical feminists believe that their cause can be destroyed by the truth, and don’t think that it should be. I’m not convinced that this indictment, as stated here, is true of any actual radical feminist, though.
Not quite. I disagree with Eridu’s position, but it doesn’t come down to a Moore’s paradox situation. Eridu’s position is that there are truths that cause harm within certain social contexts, and that in those social contexts (but not otherwise) those truths ought to be suppressed.
This is pretty plausible if you think of some thought experiments involving vulnerable groups. Suppose that you are a rationalist/consequentialist cop in 1930′s Germany, and you are investigating a case in which a banker, who was Jewish, embezzled some money from the Society for the Protection of Cute Puppies. Although ceteris paribus, your job is to expose the truth and bring criminals to justice, in this case it might be a very good idea to keep this out of the papers at all costs, because due to anti-semitic narratives society lacks the ability to process this information sanely.
Eridu claims that because of sexist narratives, society lacks the ability to process the claims of evo-psych sanely.
I find it interesting that both you and MixedNuts have found it necessary to invoke Nazis in order to construct a marginally convincing case for your interpretations of eridu’s position. Your thought experiment boils down to an equation of “the patriarchy” as it exists in present-day Western society with Nazi Germany (which would put eridu in pretty clear violation of Godwin’s Law*), and MixedNuts’ counterexample to my proposed Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle is a variant on the classic example of when it’s not only morally acceptable but morally obligatory to lie: “when hiding Jews from the S.S. in one’s basement.”
It also seems as though the “certain social contexts” where the results of evo-psych research ought to be suppressed, according to eridu, are pretty much every social context that exists outside of Women’s Studies departments and the internal discussions of radical feminist organizations. That seems untenable to me.
I just realized that Godwin’s Law is meant to prohibit a special case of Yvain’s Worst Argument in the World: the case in which the archetypal member of the category into which one places X is Naziism.
The non-Eridu argument against evo-psych is that many such researchers are abusing/ignorant of the halo effect that leads to biased results/unjustified moral assertions about sex roles in society.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
This doesn’t constitute an argument here against evo-psych as an accurate description of reality. It does constitute:
A solid illustration of how social awkardness can result in doing harm to others despite all the best intentions.
An extremely weak appeal to consequences—an argument that evo-psych should not be studied because bad things could happen from people understanding evolutionary psychology. I describe it as weak since there is little indication that the insult Luke gave given his awareness of evo-psych is any worse than the insult he would have given if ignorant. For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
In conclusion, keep your moralizing out of my epistemic rationality! At least while posting on this site, please. You can argue that a particular subject should not be discussed here for instrumental reasons in accordance with your own preferences. However it is never appropriate (on lesswrong, I assert) to argue that a belief must be considered false because of perceived consequences of someone believing it.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. My first serious girlfriend wrote me a very long e-mail before our break-up, laying out her rational analysis of why she believed our relationship was untenable in the long term; she actually succeeded in persuading me to see it her way, which I’d been resisting for emotional reasons. That allowed us to have an amicable parting of ways, and we remain good friends to this day.
That’s amazing. Can we see a copy of the email?
I’ll think about that—from the upvotes, it appears you’re not the only Less Wronger interested (at least, I assume an upvote to a one-liner request like that means “I’d like to see it, too”). I wouldn’t post an unedited copy, as there are some details in it that I consider very private, as, I think, would my former girlfriend. But I’ll take a look at it later and see what would need to be redacted. I would also have to ask her permission before posting any of it, of course, and I’m reluctant to bother her just now—she has a newborn daughter (as in, born last week), so I expect she’s rather preoccupied at the moment.
I’m guessing that this is more likely to work out when it’s the female who decides to be rational about it.
I’m guessing it’s more likely to work out when it’s the partner of a LessWronger who initiates it, than when it’s the partner of a nonLessWronger.
I would have agreed with you if not for the recent completely irrational feminism and creepiness discussion.
Heh. Even taking that into account, I still think your odds are better with a randomly chosen LWer as a recipient than a randomly chosen partner-of-a-female. But that’s admittedly a pretty low bar.
I would prefer to hear all the reasons, myself and am ten times more likely to choke on fluff like “It’s not you, it’s me.” than burst into flames because somebody criticized me. I need closure and feedback and for my life events to make sense. For those purposes, the only information I’d deem good enough is a serving of reality.
Shminux’s point, and the rest of this thread, is about predicting the behavior of typical women in order to make an accurate assessment about what breakup approach is best. Do you think that your preferences are typical for women, or even typical for women-who-LW-folks-date, many of whom are not themselves LWers?
According to Vladimir, LessWrong has somewhere in the ballpark of 600-1000 active users. According to Yvain’s 2011 survey, 92 of the 1090 respondents were female. If I alone would respond well, that increases the chances of a good response by an LW woman by over 1% (unless you want to include inactive members). Since Dave’s point is not “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than not.” and was “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than a random woman.” me saying that actually gives a potentially significant support to his point. If you calculate the chances of a random woman responding well to be under 1% (seems reasonable) and don’t consider inactive users to be an “LWer”, then I totally supported his point. If not, then all Dave needs to do to figure out whether he’s right is to count the number of LW women he is sure would respond well and compare the ratio with his estimate of how many random women would respond well. I doubt anyone here thinks the percentage of random women that would respond well is beyond the single digit percents. If that’s right, my saying so gave 10% or more of the support needed to think that he’s right. As for the behavior of the average LW woman, I have no idea. That I would respond well confirms that at least some LW women would respond well, which might help people figure out if it’s worthwhile to find out exactly how many of us there are.
Two comments:
First, you clearly are not an average female.
Are you sure you know how you would react in both cases? People are notoriously bad at predicting their own behavior.
Which doesn’t contradict Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date might be more likely to respond well.
Totally sure. My last boyfriend attempted to give me fluff and I tore through it. I always want to get down to the bottom of why a relationship did not work. Even if reality is devastating, I want reality. You can tell I’m strong enough to deal with criticism because I invite it often. You can tell I’m strong enough to swallow criticism because of my elitism thread—check out the note at the top. I feel kind of dumb for not seeing these problems in advance (hindsight bias, I guess?). Now that I do see how awful my thread was—in public of all places—have I vanished, or gone crybaby or begged anybody for emotional support?
No.
I am stronger than that.
Just for clarity, I did not suggest the latter. What I suggested was that this sort of thing, initiated by the partner of an LW member, is more likely to work out well… put differently, that LW members are more likely to respond well (or at least less likely to respond poorly)… than for non-LWers.
The gender of the LW member, and the gender of the partner, is not strictly irrelevant but is largely screened off by their membership.
I make no such claims about the partners of LWers.
Since your initial (and highly promising) arrival, I must admit that I lost respect for you faster than I have for any other poster in the history of LessWrong.
But posts like this one give me hope.
Downvoted because I don’t like cheapshots. Criticisms about the community’s behavior in that thread should be confined to that thread, and should be substantive. The way you’re doing it now forces other commenters to choose between addressing your cheapshot and derailing the comment thread or allowing the cheapshot to go unchallenged.
I wouldn’t have downvoted if you’d used less strong language in your criticism or if you had supported your argument better. It’s okay for you to reference other threads as proof of things, in my book. But I don’t like that you asserted the behavior in that discussion was “completely irrational” without providing any sort of support for your argument; you just threw out an unfair label in a context where it was difficult to challenge it.
It seemed a reasonable to me; after all, shminux’s comment wasn’t random unrelated criticism, it was a germane followup to a previous comment. Posting it in the other thread eliminates the entire purpose of the comment.
I dispute the accuracy of shminux’s comment, and yet also feel reluctant to challenge the comment because it would be a digression from the topic of the above comments. That’s a problem.
I recognize the need to draw from other sections of the site in order to talk about LessWrong as a community; I’m fine with that. But if we’re going to do that then I think we need to at least use good arguments while discussing those other threads. Otherwise it becomes too easy to just criticize things in contexts where they’re difficult to challenge.
I’d like to hear other possible solutions though.
Why do you think so?
Why do you think a man would think so?
I don’t know! That was why I asked.
Don’t you? Fine, I’ll bite. While the bell curve is pretty wide for both genders, an average (western?) male tends to be more analytical and reserved and less emotional than an average (western?) female. At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well. Thus he would be (again, on average) more inclined to listen to reasoned arguments, as opposed to “It’s not working out between us” with some made-up excuses designed to make him feel better. Whereas she (on average) would be likely to take every logical argument as in Luke’s story, as a personal affront, insult and rejection. There are plenty of exceptions, but if you take 1000 break-ups, I’d wager that in the majority of the cases a bit of reason on the woman’s side would make it less painful for the guy, while a bit of logic on the man’s side would probably make it more painful for the girl than “it’s not you it’s me”.
I have no idea how same-sex or other less-standard breakups work out in terms of rationality.
At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well.
Your perception of the people you know plus cultural stereotypes is really pretty weak evidence. I could make the following argument: In my immediate family, the men are more emotional and less analytical/reserved than the women—they tend to get angry/aggressive in response to difficult things, whereas the women seem to stay calm. Plus, cultural stereotypes bear out the idea that men are more aggressive/angry than women. Therefore, men would be more likely to take this kind of letter badly.
I’m not making that argument, but I can’t see that it would be much weaker than yours.
There’s a large difference between writing an analysis of what’s going wrong in a relationship based on information about the relationship itself and writing an evo-psych analysis which concludes that the other person has the whole weight of evolution against anyone finding them attractive.
It occurs to me that what you’ve done there is a common enough pattern, though I’m not sure it’s exactly a fallacy—seeing that something causes bad outcomes, but not being clear on what the scope of the something is.
Here’s the quote:
Thanks for finding the post. It felt very awkward discussing an example when I couldn’t produce the example for examination.
You’re welcome.
Here’s one I’ve tried to find. In the recent discussion of feminism, I remember someone (and I’m thinking it wasn’t eridu) saying that part of the purpose of the harsher attacks about racism and sexism was to make opposed people feel less sure of themselves in general.
One problem with lukeprog’s essay would be that it would muddle the evolutionary-cognitive boundary. The fact that I, in the 21st century, like big tits is logically distinct from the fact that human males, in the EEA, who slept with curvier women had more children in average, though the latter is the cause of the former.
What matter when deciding whether to use a program is what it does, not who wrote it (well, except for copyright-related reasons, but Azatoth isn’t going to sue me for infringement anyway).
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.” (That’s eridu).
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea. That is, this statement:
is not true. “It’s just the way I am” is usually a false deflection of responsibility—invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility. If that weren’t true, lukeprog would not even have considered saying it to the woman.
On evo-psych generally:
Consider phrenology. The traits at issue were well worth studying. And as far as I know, the field used accepted practices of empiricism for its day. But the whole field went off track, to the point that essentially no phrenology results are actually useful for scientific research today. I think that the social pressures towards legitimizing our current normative practices put evo-psych (and to a less extend, all psychological research) at serious risk of wandering off into a similar wilderness.
If evo-psych manages to recover from what appear to be its current mis-steps I (but apparently not eridu) would welcome back with open arms.
No, it doesn’t. There is no moral license to be human. If action X is harmful, ascribing an evolutionary cause to X doesn’t make it not harmful — and to a consequentialist it is harm that is at the root of immorality.
If evolution built me to rape nubile young womenfolk, well, evolution can just fuck off.
That’s the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they’re not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they’re indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. “X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past” does not mean “X is good,” nor does it mean “X is inevitable”—evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn’t build you “to rape nubile young womenfolk,” period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances—when rejected by a woman with whom you’re already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, probably more important, how you were socialized: these factors affect whether you feel any shame, empathy for your potential victim, fear of consequences, etc. that could outweigh the impulse to rape.
It’s also important to understand that evo. psych. is not saying that rapists are motivated by a conscious desire to reproduce: the impulse generally takes the form “I want to get my rocks off” and/or “I want to hurt this b!+(#,” not “I want to make a baby.” That’s probably true of the individuals committing the rapes even when rape is organized and officially sanctioned by military or political leaders as a way of “invading” an enemy population’s gene pool, as in Bosnia or the Sudan.
It’s also notable that evo. psych. tells us nothing about why any particular man committed rape while another man in similar circumstances did not—nor about why some men prefer large-breasted women and others don’t, for that matter. What it does offer is an explanation for why rape is part of the repertoire of human behavior at all. It’s entirely possible to imagine a mammal species in which no male ever attempts to copulate with an unwilling female, and female rejection instantly shuts off male desire. As I understand it, it’s even possible to identify such species in nature: IIRC, canines and the great cats, at least, have never been observed to engage in the kind of coercive copulation frequently seen in dolphins, chimps, orangutans, ducks, etc. That’s pretty much what evolutionary biology would predict, too: the big carnivores are so well-armed that the risk of serious injury either to the male, or to the female (preventing her from successfully bearing and rearing the male’s offspring), would most likely outweigh the reproductive advantage of copulating with more females than are receptive to the male’s advances.
Evidently it didn’t.
Why did I interpret that as “evidently it didn’t fuck off” (rather than “evidently it didn’t build you that way”) on the first reading?
I interpreted it thus on not only my first, but all reading up until you posted this.
Thanks!
...
No, and I’ve stated that stated that saying “never discuss evo-psych” is acceptable while muddling normative claims in with epistemic claims is not.
I assert that your argument centered around Luke’s essay to his girlfriend absolutely does not support this.
It doesn’t provide such justification and even if it did this would not constitute evidence that evo-psych is epistemically inaccurate.
Fair enough.
I’d like to request some constructive criticism: What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
I really do think that historical study of other cultures provides evidence that contradicts some psychological “findings.” But it is the nature of the endeavor that “harder” sciences like psychology carry more weight than softer sciences like history. I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes, but I acknowledge that doesn’t rise to the level of proof we would expect from a true “hard science” discipline like physics.
I don’t see evidence of anything resembling a scientific process, tainted or otherwise, behind Justice Bradley’s patronizing pontification about “the proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex,” especially when the pompous old bastard specifically attributed his view of proper gender roles to “the law of the Creator.”
Upvoted because I consider this question a far more useful one than many of the things that led up to it.
My own answer is, roughly speaking, the same for all cases where something potentially useful is being tainted by an external factor: 1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff,
2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and
3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
You seem to have done that, at least in a BOTE kind of way, and concluded that the tradeoff doesn’t justify the work. Which is cool.
It’s not clear to me whether anyone is actually disagreeing with you about that conclusion, or (if they are) whether they think your estimate of the work is too high, your estimate of the benefit too low, or your threshold tradeoff too low.
I upvoted both your post as well as the parent, for putting the issue much more clearly than anyone else:
That said, I disagree with TimS because I believe his estimated benefit is too low.
I am curious as to your reasons for believing that, as opposed to believing that his estimate of the work involved is too high.
His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don’t know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the “ban sexual intercourse” cannon (that metaphor was, perhaps, not my finest achievement).
2). Speaking more generally, I believe that the benefits of any kind of scientific knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks in most situations (though of course there are limits), due to the compounding effects. For example, the first application of modern physics was the nuclear bomb: a device is literally capable of ending the world. However, our world would be a very different, and IMO much worse place, had quantum physics never been discovered.
I just want to clarify that I don’t advocate banning heterosexual intercourse. Even if I agree slightly more with eridu than you about how coercive ordinary sexual encounters are experienced.
Yes, my bad, I did not want to imply that you advocated anything of the sort.
I’m pretty sure that I disagree on both 1 (people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims) and 2 (there’s probably not much evo. psych that will be very useful in social engineering). But I’m honestly not certain which disagreement is larger.
I’m curious which of my estimates differs further from the LW average—but I’m not sure if actually discovering that would advance the particular goal of optimizing our stance towards evo. psych research.
That’s a much broader problem than the misunderstanding and misuse of evo. psych. I think one of the major aims of humanism/transhumanism should be getting more people to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements—between is and ought. And, given how pervasive that confusion is across human cultures, the roots of it might be a fruitful area of investigation for evo. psych., along with other branches of cognitive science.
I can’t help but notice that at least some radical feminists’ aversion to evo. psych. and related fields in biology stems from their failure to distinguish normative from empirical claims. A lot of the firestorm surrounding Thornhill and Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape came down to the critics indulging in the naturalistic fallacy (which is a pity, because there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of Thornhill and Palmer’s conclusions). Another example that springs to mind is this article by Andrea Dworkin, in which she detracts from an otherwise good argument by inserting a gratuitous slur on Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis that demonstrates a breathtaking failure of reading comprehension on her part.
I think there are reasons to distrust a lot of evolutionary psychology results, and I think Luke’s breakup letter was just as bad an idea as he’s presented it as, but I don’t think the latter provides much evidence for the former. The rules of social interaction are only tangentially related to empirical reality, and even severe violations of social etiquette don’t establish empirical falsehood. In fact, it’s generally considered polite to deemphasize a number of empirical truths which our culture considers awkward, such as differences in skill.
As to invoking evopsych to dodge responsibility for your sexual preferences, it seems to me that that’s only dishonest if the results it invokes are untrue in the first place. It’s impolite regardless, though; our culture smiles on only a fairly narrow set of mechanistic excuses for behavior, and that’s not one of them.
Well, maybe not just any feminist, but eridu specifically did claim that, since the findings of evolutionary psychology are frequently misused to advance the patriarchy, no one should study evolutionary psychology. As far as I can tell, he feels that way about all research that deals with sex and/or gender, not just evolutionary psychology specifically.
There were anti-Semitic pamphlets that quoted studies of Jewish populations where blood type B was most frequent and Aryan populations where blood type A was, kept quiet about studies showing the reverse, and used that as proof that Aryans and Jews were different races that shouldn’t mingle and should be ranked relative to each other. If someone thought that publishing counterpoints (the rest of the data, or pointing out that blood type distribution doesn’t imply any of the conclusions) would be ineffective and had instead advocated banning statistics on blood type, it’d be rather uncharitable to say “They believe gathering evidence hurts their cause”.
I don’t see what the difference is, in practice. In both cases, the person in question wants to ban research into blood types. One person wants to do it because he fears his position could be destroyed by the truth; the other one wants to do it because the research would give his opponents too much power. In both cases, though, the research is banned, and neither person knows whether his beliefs are true or not.
Are you still in the analogy here? There’s very little that blood type research can actually tell us for or against antisemitism—we don’t have to fear a result that would support it. The problem is that some possible results (all possible results, really), while not evidence for “Aryans rule, Jews drool”, will be used to support this assertion. We expect that the costs of people being persuaded to hold false antisemitic beliefs outweigh the benefits of better responses to epidemics or whatever we’re hoping to get out of the research. Likewise, eridu believes that ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be (I agree), but is misused to support some harmful gender roles (I agree). He also believes that it’s not really possible to mitigate the misuse, and so the costs of people being persuaded to hold false sexist beliefs outweigh… figuring out how parental grief works or something.
What you appear to describe is… to stretch the analogy past its snapping point, someone who thinks injecting type A blood into everyone will solve antisemitism, and is scared that blood type research would prove their intervention ineffective or harmful. While also being scared of the consequences of misuse.
For better or worse, you seem to have steel-manned eridu’s position. Eridu appears to believe that it is irrelevant whether ev psych (or any other empirical project) has anything to say about appropriate gender relations.
How do you know this, if not by looking at the result of blood type research (or, more likely, research on heredity in general) ? Similarly, how does eridu know that “ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be” ? If by “should be” you mean something like the naturalistic fallacy, then I’d agree; however, it’s still possible that ev-psych can tell us something valuable about why our current gender roles are the way they are.
To use another analogy, optics and genetics tell me why my eyesight is bad, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to throw up my hands and say, “oh well, guess I’m almost blind then”. Instead, I’m going to use this knowledge to acquire some corrective lenses.
Why does that someone believe that the intervention will actually be effective ?
I know people of various ancestries, including near-pure Jews and near-pure Aryans. The Jews are not less creative, weaker, sneakier, greedier, less heroic, or more bent on world domination than the Aryans. Looking at history, Jews are more likely than Aryans to create great work of art and make great discoveries, and it takes about equal digging to find an Aryan ancestor to any creative Jew than the reverse. In general, if I try to rank people from best to worst, I don’t find many ancestry-related clusters, which shows that ranking races from best to worst is not useful. Heredity research can tell me that intermarriage is not bad, but I can also observe that countries and cities with higher rates of intermarriage aren’t doing worse, haven’t lost their cultural identities, and, New York notwithstanding, promote equality rather than Jewish superiority.
Similarly, differences between genders that are relevant to gender roles ought to be salient enough that regular psychology can expose them (and so what if it’s culture-dependent, we’re working from currently existing culture) with no need for the subtler, bare-bones models ev-psych gives us.
Similarly again, figuring out that your eyes converge too strongly and you need divergent lenses is useful, in a way that screens off the usefulness of genetics of nearsightedness.
Because it’s a stupid analogy. Maybe they believe that antisemitism is caused by people being in bad moods due to anemia, and they have a huge stash of blood that happens to be type A.
Ok, so what this sounds like to me is, “I’d go out and do a bunch of research, in order to work around my biases by using ironclad evidence”. As far as I understand, eridu claims that people would just use the evidence selectively to justify their biases, instead. For example, they might notice that the crime rate in NY is higher than in other cities, and exclaim, “Aha ! It’s all those evil Jews ! That proves it !”. Thus, you should avoid collecting any evidence at all, for fear of giving them too much ammunition. Yes, eridu singles out evo-psych specifically, but his reasons for doing so are not unique to evo-psych, AFAICT.
Right, but it’d be good to know which differences (if any) are the results of biology. To use my earlier analogy (hopefully without straining it to the breaking point), there are lots of illiterate people around; but some are illiterate because they’d never been taught to read, whereas others are illiterate because their eyes cannot focus on the page. It is really helpful to know which are which.
My point is that, in order to have some sort of a justified belief in their remedy, they must have first studied various blood types, and blood disorders in general. Otherwise, they’d just be randomly transfusing blood into people for no good reason, thus (assuming they at least do so safely) wasting a bunch of resources and gaining little (though, admittedly, more than nothing) in return.
Hmm, what I think I’m saying is more like:
Do research in sociology, not biology. If you uncover differences it may be a good idea to look at their origins, but don’t go digging for possible sources of differences that don’t reveal themselves.
Use the interocular trauma significance test. Any difference large and widespread enough to make group-level rather than individual-level policy should hit you between the eyes.
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are many differences between genders. Even eridu would agree to this, IMO, since his stated objective is to eliminate gender in order to eliminate the differences.
That’s just a recipe for indulging your own biases, IMO. That said, I doubt that differences between gender currently justify group-level policy (other than in specialized cases such as medical treatment, etc.). We’re not arguing over whether gender bias exists (I believe that it does) or whether we should adopt patriarchal policies (I believe that we should not).
Rather, the argument is over whether the very act of studying specific aspects of human biology and/or psychology constitutes an extremely harmful act and should immediately be stopped. I believe that it does not.
This is why I think the distinction between gender and sex is so helpful. It is not obvious to me that there are gender differences, even though I agree with you that there are obvious sex differences. Eridu appears to want to eliminate sex differences, while I merely want to abolish gender differences.
Consider the taboo in modern society against female chest nudity. It’s obvious to any subscriber to National Geographic that this norm is not an inherent part of human society. So I think the norm is a gender-norm, not a sex-norm.
Properly speaking, evo. psych has nothing to say about gender and gender-norms. Only sex and sex-norms. But society as a whole resists the distinct, and scientists rely on the halo effect to support that blurring of what should be relatively distinct concepts.
Someone more radical than I would like point out that the distinction is much fuzzier than I suggest. (Consider social pressure to perform surgery to “fix” intersex infants). (shrug). There’s a lot of low hanging fruit in social engineering before a precise resolution of that issue is really necessary.
I don’t think I get what you mean by “sex differences” vs. “gender differences”; eridu claims he wants to eliminate gender, not sex. Can you explain your definitions ? You bring up the example below:
I agree with you there, and this is a gender difference, but I’m not sure how your view on this contrasts with eridu’s. Surely eridu doesn’t want to eliminate secondary sexual characteristics… does he ?
I think eridu wants secondary sex characteristics to stop being morally relevant (i.e. never treat women different than men). I think that’s impossible—but society is not careful about what really is a secondary sex characteristic.
As far as I can tell, so does he, which is why he wants to destroy gender altogether. Once he’s done, we won’t have “men” and “women” at all; we’d just have “people with sexual organs A” and “people with sexual organs B” (plus a small number of others with C, D, etc.). By analogy, today we (mostly) don’t have separate identities for different hair or eye colors; it’s just a meaningless biological quirk (again, mostly).
One problem with this goal is that if gender truly is dependent on sex to any meaningful extent, then the goal cannot be achieved through purely social means. This is one of the reasons why I believe that evo-psych specifically, and evolutionary biology in general, should not be banned, despite its possible negative consequences.
I should also mention that I am sympathetic to the goal; it’s not a bad idea. However, it would be an immense undertaking, and you don’t want to commit an immense amount of resources to a goal unless you can be reasonably sure it’s achievable at least in principle.
(On a sidenote, eridu did claim that “treating women different than men” is impossible, because the patriarchy is pervasive and omnipresent. Even when you think you’re treating women the same as men, you aren’t—which is why he’s against liberal feminism.)
A very small piece of evidence that eridu might have a point: A while ago, I was faced with a person who I didn’t know at the time was a transexual in transition. I felt like I didn’t know what to do or say to them. (I’m reasonably sure I just looked blank at the time, or at least we’re on decent terms since then. I haven’t mentioned that reaction to the person, and they’ve since tranisitioned to a standard gender.)
It did feel to me as though I had separate behavior sets for dealing with men and with women, and was at a loss when I didn’t know which set to apply. I haven’t explored how the sets might be different, but maybe I should.
Me too, but 1) the sets do overlap by a substantial amount, and 2) I think it’s more a case of potential sexual partners vs everyone else than of women vs men—with women I’m not sexually attracted to at all, I behave pretty much the same as if they were male (except for different cultural norms such as—in Italy—kissing them on the cheek instead of shaking hands, which I don’t consider any more relevant that the use of different pronouns). (Edited to replace ″romantic″ with ″sexual″ -- I’ve introspected myself and ISTM that the set of people with whom I’d use the first set of behaviours almost exactly coincide with the set of people with whom I’d want to have protected sex if they offered, and promised not to tell anybody and to try not to let that affect our future interactions in any way—which is a somewhat broader criterion than me being willing to have a monogamous romantic relationship with them.)
FWIW, I doubt I treat men I’m attracted to and women I’m attracted to the same way. Though introspection is a decidedly unreliable source of information about this sort of thing.
What about men you’re not attracted to and women you’re not attracted to?
There’s much less commonality in how I treat people I’m not attracted to. Or at least less salient commonality. I really don’t know what to say about it. I mean, sure, there are women I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to… but there are also men I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to. Introspection fails to provide even unreliable hints on that question.
Also, the fact that there exist both men and women I’m not attracted to doesn’t make me particularly unique; I expect that’s true of everybody. So I wouldn’t have felt especially motivated to share that data point, even were it crisper. You had started out drawing the distinction between “potential sexual partner vs everyone else” and “women vs men,” though, so I thought the perspective of someone for whom “potential sexual partner” included both women and men (well, in principle, anyway; after 20 years of monogamy it’s somewhat theoretical) might be relevant.
Did this comment go from +2 to −1 in, like, five minutes? Why? (Upvoted back to zero—I don’t think it deserves being negative.)
Your comment was also immediately voted down. I brought it back to neutral karma. I haven’t been following this conversation, but it doesn’t seem worthy of immediate downvotes...
Apparently? Not sure why.
I guess you missed the part where people (not me personally, it was just made pretty clear) are downvoting everything in this thread in the hope that everyone would stop talking?
I’d considered the possibility, but the fact that the parents were significantly net-upvoted made it seem churlish to attribute downvotes simply to the thread it’s in. It seems more plausible now that you (and at least one other person) have endorsed it.
“Gender should be removed from society” is not a particularly rare opinion—unfortunately it is also not a particularly feasible one, at least not in the short term.
Agreed, but the short-term infeasibility alone should not disqualify the goal completely; if that was the case, the SIAI wouldn’t exist.
(to be fair, I personally don’t endorse donating money to SIAI, but I have additional reasons)
I should clarify that it seems not only infeasible in the short term but lacks anything resembling a clear path to get there. And while an uncharitable person might say the same about CEV, SIAI working on CEV doesn’t involve forcing everyone else to change their patterns of social interaction in service of goals that are not clearly defined.
The path from here to there is wildly unclear. But history shows social changes as large as the one I advocate for have actually happened. So there’s that.
Shouldn’t we draw up a better map of the road from here to there before beginning our journey?
Agreed.
Edited to add: I am just such an uncharitable person :-/
If true, that does seem like a very good reason not to trust eridu or take anything he has to say seriously. As an evolutionary biologist, most familiar with this kind of anti-thought from the creationist quarter, I might state it as a Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle: “Any person who advocates ignorance or false beliefs about a subject as morally superior to true and accurate knowledge of that subject is not to be trusted or taken seriously on any subject.” (See here for a good example of a creationist who goes every last angstrom of the way to this reductio ad absurdum of his position.)
This recalls Steven Pinker’s critique of many aspects of twentieth century radical left-wing thought, including some radical feminist ideas, in The Blank Slate. Radical scholars in the social sciences clung (and, in at least some cases, are still clinging) to the increasingly untenable notion of the human mind as a tabula rasa for fear of what they perceive as disastrous moral consequences of it not being true, and decried every scientific advance that filled in some portion of the slate. Neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on pretending things are true because they think the world be better if they were, and there are an awful lot of people who could benefit from reciting the Litanies of Tarsky and Gendlin until they take them to heart.
As an aside, I have to wonder if the upvotes on my previous comment reflect a sober assessment of its quality, or simply the fact that “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be” is a huge, multi-colored, strobing applause light around these here parts. ;-)
It follows directly that you stop trusting people who tell you “Don’t tell me if you hide any Jews, I don’t want to let anything slip in front of the SS”. Is that actually a conclusion you wish to endorse?
Edit: mantis is correct, see eir reply below.
No, but all that requires is adding the qualifier “academic” to the noun “subject” in my principle, so it can’t get misapplied to very unusual and extreme situations where knowledge of the specific situation could be more dangerous than the lack of that knowledge.
That’s one of the things that aggravates me about eridu. I’m far more sympathetic to second-wave than third-wave feminism. But I don’t think that being second-wave requires rejecting empiricism. (I suspect >90% of ev. psych results are wrong because of cultural bias, but that’s a separate assertion.)
I think the book, “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” does a pretty good job of disproving that there is any single body type people look for in their porn.
So, are you saying consent is something that doesn’t actually exist and never has? That would seem to be a confused definition of consent.
So… what’s your position on trans people and non-binaries?
Mainstream porn has an incentive problem where it needs to appeal to a large audience or it won’t be profitable, but alt porn, especially by amateurs, can show varied body types. There are Tumblrs that do that—they’re reposting, not producing, so there’s still a bias toward conventionally attractive types, but they’re not judged differently.
Right, I know what tumblr.com is, but I still don’t know what a “tumblr-feminist” is.
I don’t think I am, that’s why I said “every liberal feminist...” above. My point was that, counter to what you said, liberal feminists would be strongly against “compulsory sexuality”, and definitely against objectification of women along any other property (including sex).
As far as I understand from talking with yourself and liberal feminists (and reading your respective reading materials), the fundamental split is due to a difference in primary goals, which gives rise to very different intermediate goals.
The primary goal of radical feminism is elimination of the patriarchy. To this end, they want to put a stop to all activities that promote the patriarchy, such as PiV sex, heterosexual relationships in general, etc.
The primary goal of liberal feminism is to maximize the capabilities of women to achieve their individual goals. Since the patriarchy stands in the way of most of these goals, liberal feminists want to see it eliminated; however, they would seek to do so in a way that does not result in a net reduction in the capability of women to achieve their goals.
Thus, a radical feminist would seek to eliminate all PiV sex (somehow), since doing so would advance the goal of eliminating the patriarchy. A liberal feminist, on the other hand, would work toward a society where women who enjoy PiV sex can have it, and women who do not enjoy it feel no social pressure to have it regardless.
To put it in a different way, radical feminism (as I understand it from talking with you) is essentialist, as opposed to liberal feminism.
Two points from my perspective:
First, that which eridu calls tumblr-feminism is probably what I would call “not feminism.” People who invoke The Rules or who think being sexually forward is taking control of their sexuality are seldom actual doing anything to reduce patriarchy. Popular culture may call Snooki a “strong female,” but she is not following a feminist program.
Second, I agree with you that eridu’s philosophy seems incredibly essentialist. I just want to note that I don’t think Dworkin is essentialist, although she can be read that way.
Either of these can be considered assertive, albeit in very different ways. Surely, among the culture hacks that would make women better off (at negligible social cost), encouraging them to be more assertive in general should be near the top of the list.
They are assertive. They just don’t reduce patriarchy.
Oh, I see. I thought for a moment that mitigating the widespread occurrence of hierarchies and power relationships in the real world (as probably happens when assertive behavior becomes more commonly expected in a given culture) would be somewhat more consequential than “reducing patriarchy”, whatever that means.
Not everything assertive reduces the relevant hierarchy.
If you truly want to become stronger, and not just mine this thread for positive karma, you will read actual radical feminist women and figure that out for yourself, rather than trying to extract information from me that I don’t fully have.
I can at least say that you’re very wrong about liberal feminism being against compulsory sexuality (liberal feminists support compulsory sexuality in that the actions they take make it more probable), about the goals of liberal feminism (you’re talking specifically about a subset of liberal feminists called equality feminists, but liberal feminists in general don’t really recognize patriarchy, or at least almost never use that term or a strong analysis of gender as a social class), and about the reasons why radical feminists believe what they believe.
I will say this again: I cannot give you the answers to these questions. I am going to stop playing “feminist AMA” now and leave you to either educate yourself or be content with the fact that you might be oppressing people.
I did, believe it or not. My impression of “actual radical feminist women” has been largely negative; they seem to be more interested in winning battles than in acquiring true beliefs or solving any real-world problems. That’s probably why I find your views so fascinating, since you are actually willing (some of the time) to justify your claims.
You are conflating two very different concepts here, by employing the very anti-pattern Yvain is describing in his post:
”Liberal feminism explicitly endorses compulsory sexuality”
vs
”Liberal feminists endorse practices that, unbeknownst to them, lead to compulsory sexuality”
Can you offer some examples ? Every piece of feminist literature I’ve ever read talks extensively about patriarchy, privilege, and gender.
This is a false dichotomy. It is entirely possible for me to believe that I’m inadvertently oppressing people in several ways, while still disagreeing with your own claims.
I think the problem with this statement is that “oppression” is a loaded word. Its meaning can range from “there exists a systemic bias against women” to “women are chained to the stove and are kept barefoot and pregnant at all times”. As Yvain points out in this very post, people tend to envision the latter even when the reality is closer to the former.
That said, I’m still not entirely clear regarding your response to simplicio. You say that, if only simplicio and his wife could extrapolate their CEVs, that would lead to
I don’t know what that means, though. Which parts of their past, specifically, would simplicio and his wife—or, if you prefer, Average Het Male and Average Het Female—find “abusive and toxic” ?
Essentially, you were asked, “how would the thoughts and actions of a radical feminist couple differ from those of an average hetero couple ?”; and you replied by saying, “their thoughts and actions would be radically feminist”. While this is true, it is hardly informative.
I won’t respond to the first half of your post because you have done essentially nothing but rephrase my own comment in a seemingly argumentative tone.
Sexual advances that seemed innocuous to the men making them would be perceived as any combination of coercive, inconsiderate, manipulative, objectifying, or something else I can’t think of at the moment
Tones of interaction and patterns of arguments that again, seemed innocuous to the men making them would be considered patronizing, condescending, paternalistic, etc.
Social behaviors that men previously accepted and may have argued for the legitimacy of such as pornography, prostitution, penis-in-vagina sex, body policing of women, objectification of women in media, objectifying language directed towards women, aggressive metaphors and language describing sex, and heterosexual relationships will be seen as tangibly oppressive and violent
Division of various tasks, such as any combination of housework, child-rearing, emotion work (especially emotion work), would be seen as unfair, constricting, and demanding
That was an unfocused four minutes of brainstorming, but if I sat down with a patriarchal textbook used in any undergrad relationship psychology class, I could probably write a novella.
At a first glance your type of feminism seems to seek to put both men AND women in smaller and darker cages, as it seems to seek to ban more and more behaviors for both genders, instead of permit more and more.
Seriously “penis-in-vagina sex”? I don’t think there’s ever been a society so oppressive to both genders as to ban even that.
Shakers!
Ah, true. And they were rather egalitarian-minded too.
It’s not often one sees single-word comments this insightful on the Interwebz. Kudos!
Within the context of genders, those things are oppressive. I don’t imagine sex of any kind would be problematic in a feminist society.
If you want a more in-depth view of heterosexual sex under patriarchy, I recommend Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin.
But in short, consider the utility distribution of PIV sex for men, and consider it for women, under patriarchy, and consider whether it is really usually in women’s best interest to have PIV sex. I’ll leave this as an exercise for you, rather than spelling it out explicitly.
You might also want to read the blog articles from radtransfem.wordpress.com that I linked above.
What happens if a woman desires to have PiV sex, seeks out a man to have it with (rejecting unqualified men in the process), and enjoys the experience ? The reason Andrea Dworkin (and radical feminists in general) is often portrayed as “sex-negative” (*) is because, as far as I can tell, she denies that such a scenario can exist, thus directly contradicting the life experience of many women.
Thus, we end up in a peculiar situation where radical feminists appear to be seeking to actively make women’s lives worse, by denying them an activity that many women see as an important aspect of their self-expression (not to mention, a lot of fun).
Of course, a radical feminist might answer by saying, “my end goal is not to improve the lives of women, but to destroy the patriarchy by any means necessary”, but I’m not sure if any real radical feminists would answer this way.
(*) It’s also why Dworkin is considered to be a kind of troll by some liberal feminists; IMO unjustly so, since she sincerely believes the things she says.
Why don’t you read Intercourse for yourself and figure out if that is indeed the case?
Figure out if what is the case ?
I did read through Intercourse in college, but it was a long time ago, and, knowing my past self, I probably only skimmed it. My main impression of it at the time was that Dworkin a). really dislikes men, and b). dehumanizes women. IMO (b) is even worse than (a); at least she recognizes that men are people, albeit unpleasant ones.
Anyway, that was a bit off topic. What is it that I’m supposed to be figuring out by reading Dworkin ? And what happens if I do read the relevant passages, but still conclude that she is wrong ?
She talk about women’s wants a lot less than I expected. About cis women who want intercourse with cis men, she writes:
She might be saying “Women only ever want intercourse with men they love”. Even if you count any kind of liking and desire for intimacy as “love”, this rules out cruising for casual sex.
She also says things about women wanting very gentle intercourse without thrusting, whereas men go poundy-poundy. This is quite unlike the reports of sex bloggers and friends, whose preferences are varied.
Then she says women who seek intercourse are like women who accept and perform genital mutilation and foot binding. So yeah, basically “hate it but brainwashed into thinking they like it”.
This seems to be completely unfalsifiable; anyone who says “But I like penis in my vagina, there are nerve endings there that like stimulated” can be told “You’re brainwashed by the patriarchy”, or “You’re not (enough of) a woman so you can never understand”.
There does seem to be a bit of a trope of certain sorts of scholars (the early Wilhelm Reich comes to mind) developing strong and specific opinions on what kind of sex other people are supposed to have — down to specific positions and motions! — in order to be enlightened, liberated, rational, or holy. One wonders by what means a person could arrive at such knowledge, and what other hypotheses were raised to attention and dismissed by evidence.
This isn’t just about sex, of course. There are all sorts of claims that people don’t really want what they say they want, and they don’t want what they seek out, either.
This essay introduced me to the idea that such claims are pervasive. Anyone have a more general overview?
Even at Less Wrong—you won’t really like that shiny toy so much, give the money to SI instead!
This is one of my favorite essays on libertarianism, by the way.
Most likely they are just rationalizing in a pseudo-scientific/moralistic light whatever sexual fantasies/phobias they happen to have.
And yet people here, apparently with a straight face, have made analogous arguments about alcoholic beverages. If I claim I like Amaro Montenegro then I must have been brainwashed and/or be (consciously or subconsciously) lying for signalling reasons or something. How could I demonstrate that I actually enjoy its taste?
Blind taste test. Preferably several, where you don’t know if Amaro Montenegro is among the drinks you’re tasting in any particular test.
If you can’t single out for a high rating the one that you profess to like the taste of, then you’ve falsified the hypothesis that you like it for the taste.
If you can single it out for a high rating in blind taste tests, and want to further test whether you actually enjoy it, or merely recognize it and assign a high rating for signalling purposes, get an MRI during the blind taste test.
MRI wouldn’t help. If you can recognize amaro, you’ll go “Oh, that’s amaro, I’m supposed to like this” and produce a pleasure response, the same way wines believed to be expensive do to identical wines believed to be cheap.
Good point.
I think you could get somewhere by doing a taste test of several different amaros (which are not actually wine,) where rather than a blind test, the subject is incorrectly told that they’re all, say, privately brewed and distributed at a liqueur festival, or something along those lines, but one of them is really Amaro Montenegro.
That one doesn’t sound quite so bad; get MRId while drinking, and you can prove you really feel pleasure. That doesn’t disprove the brainwashing assertion (wines genuinely taste better with a price hike) but you can still answer “So what if I like it because of that? I like it. And it doesn’t even support a culture where 12% of the population has had amaro slipped into their drink.”
Well, I don’t want to want to spend more money on wine if I couldn’t tell it from cheaper wine in a blind tasting… (EDIT: But I don’t know what aspect of heterosexual intercourse that maps to, if any.)
Wine can taste Good or Bad, have a real cost that’s Cheap or Expensive, and be LabeledExpensive or LabeledCheap. Good Expensive wine is better value for money than Bad Cheap wine.
If Expensive wine is Good and Cheap wine is Bad and label is irrelevant, Good Expensive LabeledCheap wine ~ Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine > Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine ~ Bad Cheap LabeledExpensive wine.
If LabeledExpensive wine is Good and LabeledCheap wine is Bad and real price is irrelevant, Good Cheap LabeledExpensive wine > Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine > Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine > Bad Expensive LabeledCheap wine.
Learning that the latter model is true is only useful if you can pay for cheap wine then be told it’s expensive when you drink it. In most situations, you see what you’re paying for—wine is LabeledCheap iff it’s Cheap. Your only options are Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine and Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine, and you always prefer the former to the latter. So learning which model is true shouldn’t change your wine-buying habits.
Better value for money? If you check the coefficients on the perceived quality increase, they pretty strongly recommend saving your money.
That’s quite possible in real life, but then you don’t need all that evaluation of preferences in various models—you always buy cheap wine, regardless of label and taste.
Yes, that was my initial criticism of that argument. There are other flaws as well.
For what it’s worth, I second this recommendation. But the book is mostly literary criticism.
If her mother hadn’t had PIV sex, she wouldn’t exist in the first place.
That was not my intention. What I meant was, “we should taboo the word ‘oppression’, and it would be great if everyone else did, too”.
Thanks for your examples. One thing I noticed about them is that they are almost entirely male-centric. For example, you say,
What about the women, though ? Would the women likewise perceive such behavior differently than they do now ? We are discussing feminism, after all, not male-ism.
Not to harp on this point, but you mention things like “penis-in-vagina sex” and “heterosexual relationships” in general as the kinds of behaviors that “will be seen as tangibly oppressive and violent”. Is it your contention that (most) women today see such behaviors in this negative light ? If not, then why not ? Is it because modern women are almost as brainwashed by the patriarchy as modern men, or for some other reason ? Or did I misinterpret your claim ?
The reason I ask is because, on its surface, this claim sounds like something a “straw feminist” might say, and I want to avoid jumping to any unwarranted conclusions.
What is “emotion work” ? This is the first time I’d seen this term.
Emotional work is everything one needs to do to maintain a positive affect because the positive affect is expected from your social role.
For example, you don’t think that the fast-food worker is really that happy to see you?
If one spouse in a relationship is expected to repress emotions in this way, that’s unfair. If society doesn’t give the spouse credit for the circumstance, that’s even worse.
Historically, that spouse was the wife—hence feminism’s concern about emotional work.
Thanks, that’s a good example. I had encountered an instance of the phenomenon in the context of male demands for women to “just smile,” but had not generalized it.
Yes. All my statements should be read as true for both partners.
No.
Yes, because women are more “brainwashed” by the patriarchy than men.
I consider TimS’s explanation of emotion work to be accurate, with the possible addition of being responsible of the emotional well-being of others at the expense of one’s own well-being.
The term is very googlable.
These are all good answers.
I am trying to be cautious when googling any terms [radical] feminists use, because the meanings they assign to them often differs radically from common usage. For example, words like “patriarchy”, “oppression”, “privilege”, etc., have very specific technical meanings in a [radical] feminist context, and if I googled them, I’d form a wrong impression. That is perfectly ok, IMO; every discipline has its jargon, f.ex. the words “client”, “handshake” and “slave” are used in computer science in radically different ways as compared to common speech.
Anyway, you said that “PiV sex” and “heterosexual relationships” would be seen by future utopian societies as “tangibly oppressive and violent”, but I find this statement difficult to reconcile with your earlier one, where you claimed that, in a feminist society, sex of any kind would be ok. If PiV sex is inherently oppressive, surely people wouldn’t engage in it, even in a feminist society ? On the other hand, if PiV sex is not inherently oppressive, it would seem that some people could enjoy it even today, if the right conditions are met.
I have a feeling I’m missing a key part of your argument, but I’m not sure what it is.
From what I’ve inferred (this inference may be wrong), eridu seems to be asserting that “radical feminists” (not necessarily including himself) believe that these conditions are currently impossible to be met. My intuition is that this is for the same reason that they became feminists in the first place (a feminist subset of anthropomorphic-like phenomena?) - that is, that they were/are surrounded with almost exclusively ultra-patriarchal-behaving groups, where it is common that men get blowjobs in return for opening car doors for women and obtain sex in return for gifting high-heeled shoes (and yet of course, the reciprocals do not apply).
I feel like most of what this position considers literally omnipresent in everyone but themselves is a poor representation of some cultures and social groups. For example, the PiV point is definitely not applicable everywhere. In my own circles, there is not a single man or woman that considers PiV sex in any way offensive, dominating, or any other of the qualities that would qualify it as “patriarchal”:
There are two people, they play a sport (something very fun for both), one of them happens to be a woman, the other happens to be a man. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
There are two people, they watch pictures of their childhood and reminisce on their grewing up together (something very personal and intimate for both), one of them happens to be a man, the other happens to be a woman. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
There are two people, they rub parts of their bodies together while having strong positive emotions (something very fun for both + something very personal and intimate for both), one of them happens to be a man, the other happens to be a woman. This particular woman-man combination happenstance happens to geometrically permit parts of their bodies to rub in a particular even-more-fun manner which is difficult for other gender combinations. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
By my understanding, even radical feminists agree with my conclusion that, ceteris paribus, none of those three situations are sexist or patriarchal. However, they appear to be implicitly assuming that the third is virtually impossible in our society, because all men are brainwashed to demand sex and deny denial, and all women are brainwashed to not enjoy sex by their own authority or somesuch.
I see and know of tons of “patriarchal” (gender-unfair, discriminatory, negative-emotion-inducing, etc.) behaviors, yes. Are those behaviors common in the circles I frequent? No.
No girls go around in quests of the romance of their prince charming, no would-be gentlemen open doors specifically for attractive women and no one else (in fact, we have a formula, which I devised long ago, for when it is best to open a door for someone and when it is best not to or to offer), no sex happens that isn’t wanted by both parties for the sex (and probably for that reason, it seems there’s a lot more of it going on than for the north-american average relationship), there’s a lot of reciprocal affection, no gender-specific hobbies that I can tell (the stereotypes of shopping, porn, sports games on TV, etc. really do not apply, seriously—in fact, if it’s stereotypically gender-based, it probably doesn’t apply to the people I frequent, unless it’s about reproductive organs bleeding on a monthly basis or wall-mounted urine receptacles or some other thing we literally physically can’t change).
I could go on and on and on (and on and on and on and on and more, but I’ll let you do the copy-pasting mentally and spare my fingers a bit—I must’ve rewritten this post five times overall with all the rewording and correcting and editing before-posting) about comparisons between behaviors I observe here in myself and my circles and what is stereotypical, or what has been mentioned here, but that’s not even the issue. I am being accused, nay, all people including me are being accused of recursive denial-in-denial that prevents even conscious effort towards nondiscrimination from not being “patriarchal”, whatever that word means.
Yes, I get confrontational about it, because yes, it goes against every evidence I have and everything I observe to accept this accusation. I have now read more wikipedia articles and feminist blogs than I care to count on the issue, and I have been extremely careful of selection bias, confirmation bias, privileging the hypothesis, etc., and yet I only see more evidence that the “Patriarchy” we are being accused of does not even exist in my current local subculture.
Yes, the “society at large” outside my own subculture is largely male-dominant in often subtle ways. However, the “society at large” is also experimentally stupid, able to completely do nothing while watching people die and being certain that they are dying, give people cruel and lethal treatment merely because someone tells them to with authoritative voice, etc.
I do not contest that there is a large patriarchy at work in most, not all, of society, but rather the idea that the patriarchy alone/itself deserves special correction, rather than first raising the sanity of everyone in all matters. This, however, is tangential.
What I am opposed to is the general claim that all society (including me and my circles/groups/subcultures/etc.) is necessarily very “patriarchal” and very gender-unfair and not improving nor making worthwhile progress of any kind, with the sole exception of a very specific subgroup that must identify themselves as Radical Feminists.
The above claim is both infuriating and extremely improbable, given the evidence that I see.
Going by all that I have explained in this comment, I therefore infer that it is not an argument that you are missing, but evidence—the same evidence that I am missing.
I’ll stake a 70% probability-in-my-model that either myself or eridu or both is/are missing key strong evidence and that this causes the disagreement, if there is indeed a real disagreement and not merely a problem of falling trees.
What formula, out of curiosity? (In my case, I always hold doors open for people within a few metres behind me unless it’d be more cumbersome for me to do that than for them to open it again—e.g. if I’m carrying a box or something—regardless of their sex, age, physical attractiveness, marital status, and whether I know them.)
I do the same (with the radius of a few meters somewhat larger for elderly people), but I sometimes wonder whether my cutoff distance is the appropriate one, like in the Ambiguous Zone smbc.
In the situation described in the comic, I would ask “need help?” out loud without moving towards them until they say yes (where by “would” I mean ‘recommend’—not sure what I would actually do in such a situation, due to akrasia).
With doors, when there’s someone close but not that close, I push the door forward and move on, so that (if it’s slow enough) it will still be open by the time the person behind me arrives.
I sorta prefer a closed door to a door swinging toward my face.
I happen to agree with you (I think), but still, it sounds like you’re generalizing from one example. Your personal life experience is no substitute for hard data. Furthermore, if eridu is right, then you are an incredibly poor judge of whether or not the interactions you describe are free of oppression in your personal sub-culture; thus, I doubt he’d find your post persuasive.
Agreed. As far as I understand, eridu believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of believes regarding gender and feminism, is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/its/etc. own best interests. Only radical feminists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
Eridu, would the above paragraph be a fair—if possibly somewhat harsh—summary of your views ?
As far as I understand, EY believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of beliefs regarding cognitive bias and probability theory is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/their best interests. Only Bayesian rationalists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
Which is to say, if non-Bayesians are predictably dumb, then a feminist (of any kind, even) would say that non-feminists are predictably dumb.
So yes, the above paragraph is fair, but it’s also misleading—my viewpoint on non-feminists is equivalent to LW’s collective viewpoint on Christianity.
I don’t know if EY would agree with this statement or not. I personally would disagree, however. Sure, without the understanding of “cognitive biases and probability theory”, a person is liable to make suboptimal decisions. However, I believe that most people are competent enough to achieve at least some of their goals in a satisfactory fashion.
The difference between you and me, as far as I understand, is that you believe that unless everyone sets “destruction of the patriarchy using the methods of radical feminism” as their primary goal, they should not be allowed to make any decisions that you don’t approve of. I personally reserve that level of outrage for actions that clearly, demonstrably, hurt other people—f.ex., teaching creationism instead of evolution in schools, restricting women’s right to vote, etc. By contrast, I am perfectly content to let people spend (I would say, “waste”, but they’d disagree) their Sunday mornings in church, if they so choose.
To be sure, it’s fairly easy to demonstrate that a patriarchy of some sort does exist, and that it is harmful. But your concept of “patriarchy” is rather more all-encompassing than that held by most other feminists; and in some cases your claims border on extraordinary. That doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, only that I’m not ready to side with you until you (^) have provided overwhelming proof—which you had not done. I’m not saying that you can’t provide such proof, only that you haven’t so far.
(^) Or any other radical feminist, doesn’t have to be you specifically.
“Bayesian reasoner” is a theoretical entity. The folks you meet on LW are “aspiring rationalists” (more or less), and it’s important not to confuse the two — especially important for aspiring rationalists. There is a big difference between learning about a few cognitive biases, and being capable of mathematically ideal reasoning on any topic relevant to one’s best interests. Anyone who claims the latter is, well, probably full of shit.
He said:
So it’s clear that he’s not claiming that his claims about his social circle apply to the rest of society.
There are lots of parts of popular culture that are fairly blatantly sexist (e.g. Barbie dolls and female body expectations). Does your subculture always condemn those aspects of popular culture? Does it do anything to change those norms?
If not, then “Patriarchy” exists to some degree in your sub-culture. Does eradicating Patriarchy enhance social justice? I think the answer is clearly yes.
Must it be your highest social-justice priority? I think there are reasonable arguments on both sides. For example, my day job is about dealing with disability discrimination in public schools. I wouldn’t assert that this does all that much to eradicate patriarchy.
No and yes.
Many behaviors do clearly slip through the cracks. Present a “perfect Feminist” with the claim that they never act in any manner that could possibly be Patriarchal, and I’m sure most of LessWrong would dispute the claim and find evidence that This Human, Like Other Humans, Is Not Infinitely Perfect. I would like to think that I make no such bogus claims.
The Schelling point/fence, however, is that at the current state of behavioral patterns and rate of improvement in gender-fairness of “my” (for lack of a better label) subculture (and, if I may presume, many other subcultures made of smarter-than-average people) is currently right before the line whether spending more to eradicate Patriarchy becomes more damaging than the amount of patriarchy it would remove currently does, and the rate of improvement seems to me as to be faster than the accumulating-over-time damage of the remaining patriarchy—all obviously attributable to diminishing returns. Patriarchal behavior is, fortunately, not an infinite neg-resource. (a few applause lights here, but this was typed-as-thought, so leaving them in seems useful)
Now, as for whether Patriarchy is present, well, if defined as such (“to some degree”) it is obviously present in these subcultures in at least some way or another—it is even more unlikely that no “Patriarchy”-like behavior whatsoever exists than the claim I oppose in the grandparent.
However, I find that the above does not carve reality at its joints, to use LW jargon—the cluster of behaviorspace, which I was pointed to and told was “Patriarchy”, has mostly in common that it mostly generates or indirectly contributes to / allows gender-unfairness, social injustice, sexism, etc. Many key points like identity, control, status, “dignity” (technical meanings, not the religious-soul or similar connotations), subconscious conformity to expectations, anticipation-of-expected-behavior, behavior programming, subconscious reprogramming of believed-wants (though perhaps not necessarily of true wants), etc. seem to show up too in this space. The radical feminism portrayed in these threads sometimes appears to ignore this concept entirely, and assumes that anything that could, in at least some contexts, become a point of “Patriarchy”, is therefore Patriarchy, and is therefore something to be absolutely eradicated at all costs.
Therefore, if I write a user’s manual for Tampax products, I am an Unholy Beacon of Supreme Evil, for reasons I hope are obvious enough, and that I hope are either very strawman or sufficiently absurd to expose the need for a Schelling fence.
If this is true of your subgroup, your subgroup is wonderfully exceptional. It certainly isn’t true of most smarter-than-average subcultures.
One can argue about whether video gamer culture is above average intelligence (I suspect yes), but here is strong evidence it is nowhere near the marginal benefit line for gender relations. If video game culture were closer to the line, I would expect the described behavior (which is ridiculously unacceptable) would receive far more disparagement than it does receive.
The concept of fan service (particularly the way it is currently gendered) is similar evidence in the anime/manga subculture.
Have you counted opportunity costs? Maybe there is some action his subgroup could take which would have a net positive effect towards eradicating patriarchy, but that would mean they could spend less time taking some other action which could have a larger positive effect towards some other goal.
(This assumes that patriarchy is not the only problem in the world (nor the only problem worth trying to solve). I don’t expect anyone to disagree with that, but I’m afraid to “underestimate the universality of the law that there is no argument so dumb or straw-mannish that someone somewhere has not made it”.)
Such an argument may not be as “dumb or straw-mannish” as all that, depending on your approach to prioritizing problems to solve.
For example, if you believed that destroying the patriarchy was possible given our current limited resources, and that doing so would ameliorate or eliminate a host of other problems, you might focus on it as the low-hanging fruit. Sure, building an FAI and ushering in the Singularity (just for example) would net you a much larger gain, but the amount of effort you’d have to spend on it, as well as the lower probability of success, makes it a less attractive goal overall.
Yes.
That’s why I quoted that part of DaFranker’s post as opposed to some other part.
I explicitly mention marginal benefit in my first substantive example.
The post DaFranker is responding to concludes with the point that improving society need not include any activity directed at patriarchy.
I’m well aware of the concepts of opportunity cost, cost-benefit analysis, and diminishing returns.
Do you live on a commune or something?
So far nobody has completed the exercise I was slightly obtuse about asking for, which was to give a breakdown of the distribution of outcomes and expected utility for those outcomes of PIV sex for men and women under patriarchy (feel free to substitute varying different locales, such as “sex-positive liberal feminist patriarchy” and “christian conservative patriarchy” and even “DaFranker’s utopian subculture”).
(70% seems low.)