[Content note: Gender, relationships, feminism, manosphere. Quotes, without endorsing and with quite a bit of mocking, mean arguments by terrible people. Some analogical discussion of fatphobia, poorphobia, Islamophobia. This topic is personally enraging to me and I don't promise I can treat it fairly.]
I.
"How dare you compare x to y" it was pretty easy actually
— HRH Misha (@drethelin) August 22, 2014
I recently had a patient, a black guy from the worst part of Detroit, let’s call him Dan, who was telling me of his woes. He came from a really crappy family with a lot of problems, but he was trying really hard to make good. He was working two full-time minimum wage jobs, living off cheap noodles so he could save some money in the bank, trying to scrape a little bit of cash together. Unfortunately, he’d had a breakdown (see: him being in a psychiatric hospital), he was probably going to lose his jobs, and everything was coming tumbling down around him.
And he was getting a little philosophical about it, and he asked – I’m paraphrasing here – why haven’t things worked out for me? I’m hard-working, I’ve never missed a day of work until now, I’ve always given a hundred and ten percent. And meanwhile, I see all these rich white guys (“no offense, doctor,” he added, clearly overestimating the salary of a medical resident) who kind of coast through school, coast into college, end up with 9 – 4 desk jobs working for a friend of their father’s with excellent salaries and benefits, and if they need to miss a couple of days of work, whether it’s for a hospitalization or just to go on a cruise, nobody questions it one way or the other. I’m a harder worker than they are, he said – and I believed him – so how is that fair?
And of course, like most of the people I deal with at my job, there’s no good answer except maybe restructuring society from the ground up, so I gave him some platitudes about how it’s not his fault, told him about all the social services available to him, and gave him a pill to treat a biochemical condition almost completely orthogonal to his real problem.
And I’m still not sure what a good response to his question would have been. But later that night I was browsing the Internet and I was reminded of what the worse response humanly possible. It would go something like:
You keep whining about how “unfair” it is that you can’t get a good job. “But I’m such a hard worker.” No, actual hard workers don’t feel like they’re entitled to other people’s money just because they ask nicely.
“Why do rich white kids who got legacy admissions to Yale receive cushy sinecures, but I have to work two grueling minimum wage jobs just to keep a roof over my head?” By even asking that question, you prove that you think of bosses as giant bags of money, rather than as individual human beings who are allowed to make their own choices. No one “owes” you money just because you say you “work hard”, and by complaining about this you’re proving you’re not really a hard worker at all. I’ve seen a lot of Hard Workers (TM) like you, and scratch their entitled surface and you find someone who thinks just because they punched a time card once everyone needs to bow down and worship them.
If you complain about “rich white kids who get legacy admissions to Yale,” you’re raising a huge red flag that you’re the kind of person who steals from their employer, and companies are exactly right to give you a wide berth.
Such a response would be so antisocial and unjust that it could only possibly come from the social justice movement.
II.
I’ve been thinking about “nice guys” lately for a couple of reasons.
First, I read Alas, A Blog‘s recent post on the subject, MRAs And Anti-Feminists Have Ruined Complaining About Being Single.
Second, I had yet another patient who -
(I feel obligated to say at this point that the specific details of these patient stories are made up, and several of them are composites of multiple different people, in order to protect confidentiality. I’m preserving the general gist, nothing more)
- I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife.
So I asked the obvious question: “What happened to your first four wives?”
“Oh,” said the patient, “Domestic violence issues. Two of them left me. One of them I got put in jail, and she’d moved on once I got out. One I just grew tired of.”
“You’ve beaten up all five of your wives?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yeah,” he said, without sounding very apologetic.
“And why, exactly, were you beating your wife this time?” I asked.
“She was yelling at me, because I was cheating on her with one of my exes.”
“With your ex-wife? One of the ones you beat up?”
“Yeah.”
“So you beat up your wife, she left you, you married someone else, and then she came back and had an affair on the side with you?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” said Henry.
I wish, I wish I wish, that Henry was an isolated case. But he’s interesting more for his anomalously high number of victims than for the particular pattern.
Last time I talked about these experiences, one of my commenters linked me to what was later described as the only Theodore Dalrymple piece anyone ever links to. Most of the commenters saw a conservative guy trying to push an ideological point, and I guess that’s part of it. But for me it looked more like the story of a psychiatrist from an upper-middle-class background suddenly realizing how dysfunctional and screwed-up a lot of his patients are and having his mind recoil in horror from the fact – which is something I can sympathize with. Henry was the worst of a bad bunch, but nowhere near unique.
When I was younger – and I mean from teeanger hood all the way until about three years ago – I was a nice guy. In fact, I’m still a nice guy at heart, I just happen to mysteriously have picked up girlfriends. And I said the same thing as every other nice guy, which is “I am a nice guy, how come girls don’t like me?”
There seems to be some confusion about this, so let me explain what it means, to everyone, for all time.
It does not mean “I am nice in some important cosmic sense, therefore I am entitled to sex with whomever I want.”
It means: “I am a nicer guy than Henry.”
Or to spell it out very carefully, Henry clearly has no trouble with women. He has been married five times and had multiple extra-marital affairs and pre-marital partners, many of whom were well aware of his past domestic violence convictions and knew exactly what they were getting into. Meanwhile, here I was, twenty-five years old, never been on a date in my life, every time I ask someone out I get laughed at, I’m constantly teased and mocked for being a virgin and a nerd whom no one could ever love, starting to develop a serious neurosis about it.
And here I was, tried my best never to be mean to anyone, gave to charity, pursuing a productive career, worked hard to help all of my friends. I didn’t think I deserved to have the prettiest girl in school prostrate herself at my feet. But I did think I deserved to not be doing worse than Henry.
No, I didn’t know Henry at the time. But everyone knows a Henry. Most people know several. Even three years ago, I knew there were Henry-like people – your abusers, your rapists, your bullies – and it wasn’t hard to notice that none of them seemed to be having the crushing loneliness problem I was suffering from.
And, like my patient Dan, I just wanted to know – how is this fair?
And I made the horrible mistake of asking this question out loud, and that was how I learned about social justice.
III.
We will now perform an ancient and traditional Slate Star Codex ritual, where I point out something I don’t like about feminism, then everyone tells me in the comments that no feminist would ever do that and it’s a dirty rotten straw man, then I link to two thousand five hundred examples of feminists doing exactly that, then everyone in the comments No-True-Scotsmans me by saying that that doesn’t count and those people aren’t representative of feminists, then I find two thousand five hundred more examples of the most prominent and well-respected feminists around saying exactly the same thing, then my commenters tell me that they don’t count either and the only true feminist lives in the Platonic Realm and expresses herself through patterns of dewdrops on the leaves in autumn and everything she says is unspeakably kind and beautiful and any time I try to make a point about feminism using examples from anyone other than her I am a dirty rotten motivated-arguer trying to weak-man the movement for my personal gain.
Ahem.
From Jezebel, “Why We Should Mock The Nice Guys Of OKCupid”:
Pathetic and infuriating in turns, the profiles selected for inclusion [on a site that searches OKCupid profiles for ones that express sadness at past lack of romantic relationships, then posts them publicly for mockery] elicit gasps and giggles – and they raise questions as well. Is it right to mock these aggrieved and clueless young men, particularly the ones who seem less enraged than sad and bewildered at their utter lack of sexual success?What’s on offer isn’t just an opportunity to snort derisively at the socially awkward; it’s a chance to talk about the very real problem of male sexual entitlement. The great unifying theme of the curated profiles is indignation. These are young men who were told that if they were nice, then, as Laurie Penny puts it, they feel that women “must be obliged to have sex with them.” The subtext of virtually all of their profiles, the mournful and the bilious alike, is that these young men feel cheated. Raised to believe in a perverse social/sexual contract that promised access to women’s bodies in exchange for rote expressions of kindness, these boys have at least begun to learn that there is no Magic Sex Fairy. And while they’re still hopeful enough to put up a dating profile in the first place, the Nice Guys sabotage their chances of ever getting laid with their inability to conceal their own aggrieved self-righteousness.
So how should we respond, when, as Penny writes, “sexist dickwaddery puts photos on the internet and asks to be loved?” The short answer is that a lonely dickwad is still a dickwad; the fact that these guys are in genuine pain makes them more rather than less likely to mistreat the women they encounter.
From XOJane, Get Me Away From Good Guys:
Let’s tackle those good guys. You know, the aw shucks kind who say it’s just so hard getting a date or staying in a relationship, and they can’t imagine why they are single when they are, after all, such catches. They’re sensitive, you know. They totally care about the people around them, would absolutely rescue a drowning puppy if they saw one.
Why is it that so many “good guys” act like adult babies, and not in a fetish sense? They expect everyone else to pick up their slack, they’re inveterately lazy, and they seem genuinely shocked and surprised when people are unimpressed with their shenanigans. Their very heteronormativity betrays a shockingly narrow view of the world; ultimately, everything boils down to them and their needs, by which I mean their penises.
The nice guy, to me, is like the “good guy” leveled up. These are the kinds of people who say that other people just don’t understand them, and the lack of love in their lives is due to other people being shitty. Then they proceed to parade hateful statements, many of which are deeply misogynist, to explain how everyone else is to blame for their failures in life. A woman who has had 14 sexual partners is a slut. These are also the same guys who do things like going into a gym, or a school, or another space heavily populated by women, and opening fire. Because from that simmering sense of innate entitlement comes a feeling of being wronged when he doesn’t get what he wants, and he lives in a society where men are “supposed” to get what they want, and that simmer can boil over.
I’ve noted, too, that this kind of self-labeling comes up a lot in men engaging in grooming behavior. As part of their work to cultivate potential victims, they remind their victims on the regular that they’re “good guys” and the only ones who “truly” understand them.
From Feminspire, Nice Guy Syndrome And The Friend Zone:
I’m pretty sure everyone knows at least one Nice Guy. You know, those guys who think women only want to date assholes and just want be friends with the nice guys. These guys are plagued with what those of us who don’t suck call Nice Guy Syndrome.It’s honestly one of the biggest loads of crap I’ve ever heard. Nice Guys are arrogant, egotistical, selfish douche bags who run around telling the world about how they’re the perfect boyfriend and they’re just so nice. But you know what? If these guys were genuinely nice, they wouldn’t be saying things like “the bitch stuck me in the friend zone because she only likes assholes.” Guess what? If she actually only liked assholes, then she would likely be super attracted to you because you are one.
Honestly. Is it really that unbearable to be friends with a person? Women don’t only exist to date or have sex with you. We are living, thinking creatures who maybe—just maybe—want to date and sex people we’re attracted to. And that doesn’t make any of us bitches. It makes us human.
From feministe, “Nice Guys”:
If a self-styled “Nice Guy” complains that the reason he can’t get laid is that women only like “jerks” who treat them badly, chances are he’s got a sense of entitlement on him the size of the Unisphere.Guys who consider themselves “Nice Guys” tend to see women as an undifferentiated mass rather than as individuals. They also tend to see possession of a woman as a prize or a right…
A Nice Guy™ will insist that he’s doing everything perfectly right, and that women won’t subordinate themselves to him properly because he’s “Too Nice™,” meaning that he believes women deserve cruel treatment and he would like to be the one executing the cruelty.
However, Feministe is the first to show a glimmer of awareness (second, if you count Jezebel’s “I realize this might be construed as mean BUT I LOVE BEING MEAN” as “awareness”):
For the two hundredth time, when we’re talking about “nice guys,” we’re not talking about guys who are actually nice but suffer from shyness. That’s why the scare quotes. Try Nice Guys instead, if you prefer.A shy, but decent and caring man is quite likely to complain that he doesn’t get as much attention from women as he’d like. A Nice Guy™ will complain that women don’t pay him the attention he deserves. The essence of the distinction is that the Nice Guy™ feels women are obligated to him, and the Nice Guy™ doesn’t actually respect or even like women. The clearest indication of which of the two you’re dealing with is whether the person is interested in the possibility that he’s doing something wrong.
Okay. Let’s extend our analogy from above.
It was wrong of me to say I hate poor minorities. I meant I hate Poor Minorities! Poor Minorities is a category I made up that includes only poor minorities who complain about poverty or racism.
No, wait! I can be even more charitable! A poor minority is only a Poor Minority if their compaints about poverty and racism come from a sense of entitlement. Which I get to decide after listening to them for two seconds. And If they don’t realize that they’re doing something wrong, then they’re automatically a Poor Minority.
I dedicate my blog to explaining how Poor Minorities, when they’re complaining about their difficulties with poverty or asking why some people like Paris Hilton seem to have it so easy, really just want to steal your company’s money and probably sexually molest their co-workers. And I’m not being unfair at all! Right? Because of my new definition! I know everyone I’m talking to can hear those Capital Letters. And there’s no chance whatsoever anyone will accidentally misclassify any particular poor minority as a Poor Minority. That’s crazy talk! I’m sure the “make fun of Poor Minorities” community will be diligently self-policing against that sort of thing. Because if anyone is known for their rigorous application of epistemic charity, it is the make-fun-of-Poor-Minorities community!
I’m not even sure I can dignify this with the term “motte-and-bailey fallacy”. It is a tiny Playmobil motte on a bailey the size of Russia.
I don’t think I ever claimed to be, or felt, entitled to anything. Just wanted to know why it was that people like Henry could get five wives and I couldn’t get a single date. That was more than enough to get the “shut up you entitled rapist shitlord” cannon turned against me, with the person who was supposed to show up to give me the battery of tests to distinguish whether I was a poor minority or a Poor Minority nowhere to be seen. As a result I spent large portions of my teenage life traumatized and terrified and self-loathing and alone.
Some recent adorable Tumblr posts (1, 2) pointed out that not everyone who talks about social justice is a social justice warrior. There are also “social justice clerics, social justice rogues, social justice rangers, and social justice wizards”. Fair enough.
But there are also social justice chaotic evil undead lich necromancers.
And the people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them – are blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort”.
IV.
And so we come to Barry’s recent blog post:
In pop culture, everyone – or at least, everyone who isn’t a terrible human being – eventually meets someone wonderful and falls in love.But in real life, that’s not how things always work. Some people don’t want romantic love at all. Others want romantic love but will never find it. That’s life. I’m beginning to accept, at age 45, that probably “true love” will never happen for me. I have a bunch of factors working against me – I’m physically conventionally unattractive, I badly lack confidence, I’m sort of a weirdo, as I get older I meet new people less often, etc..
To tell you the truth, I resent the situation. It’s not an all-consuming bitterness or anything – on the whole, I’m a happy guy – but I irrationally feel cheated of a fundamental human experience…
I bring this up because I feel my ability to enjoy complaining about my single state has been ruined by MRAs and anti-feminists.
Because in human culture, we do something called “signaling” a lot. And, on the internet, men complaining that they don’t have the romantic success they want, that they feel they should be more attractive to woman then they actually are in practice, etc., have all become signals used to indicate alliance with the manosphere.
Gore Vidal once groused that the once-useful word “turgid” now belongs to the porn writers, because it has become impossible to use the word without sounding like a porn writer. The manosphere has done something similar to unattractive men’s romantic problems. They’ve flooded the discourse with misogyny and anti-feminism, and it’s nearly impossible to rescue discussion of being male and unwanted from their bitter waters.
Let me start by saying I sympathize with Barry, as someone who has been in exactly his position. And that if anyone uses this post as an excuse to attack Barry personally, they are going to Hell and getting banned from SSC. They’re also proving the point of whichever side they are not on.
What I don’t sympathize with is Barry’s belief that this is somehow the fault of “the manosphere” “flooding the discourse”.
It would actually be pretty fun to go full internet-archaeologist on the manosphere, but a quick look confirms my impression that, although it is built from older pieces, it’s really quite young. There was a “men’s rights” movement around forever, but its early focus tended to be on divorce cases and fathers’ rights. Heartiste started publishing in 2007. The word “manosphere” was first used in late 2009. Google Trends confirms a lot of this.
So I think it’s fair to attribute low to minimal influence for Manosphere-type stuff before about 2005 at the earliest.
But feminists were complaining about “nice guys” for much longer. According to Wikipedia, the concept dates at least from a 2002 article called Why “Nice Guys” are often such LOSERS, which was billed as a “Bitchtorial” on feminist blog “Heartless Bitches International”
(Once again, I swear I don’t make up the names of these feminist blogs as some sort of strawmanning strategy. They just happen like that!)
Looking into “Heartless Bitches Internation”, its header image is the words “Nice Guys = Bleah!” and its blog tagline is “What’s wrong with Nice Guys? HBI Tells It Like It Is”. This was seven years before the term “manosphere” even existed.
I can’t Google Trends “Nice Guys”, because it picks up too much interference from normal discussion of people who are nice. But there is one more Google Trends graph that I think relates to this issue:
This is the same graph as before. You can’t tell, because I’ve added the word “feminism”, which has caused every other line on the graph to shrink into invisibility. The purple line is – what, twenty, thirty times as high as any of the others?
People were coming up with reasons to mock and despise men who were sad about not being in relationships years before the manosphere even existed. These reasons were being posted on top feminist blogs for years without any reference whatsoever to the manosphere, probably because the people who wrote them were unaware of its existence or couldn’t imagine what it could possibly have to do with this subject? Feminism – the movement that was doing all this with no help from the manosphere – has twenty times the eyeballs and twenty times the discourse-setting power as the manosphere. And Barry thinks this is the manosphere’s fault? On the SSC “Things Feminists Should Not Be Able To Get Away With Blaming On The Manosphere” Scale, this is right up there with the postulated link between the men’s rights movement and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The worst corners of the manosphere contain more than enough opining on how ugly women, weird women, masculine women, et cetera deserve to be unhappy. You are welcome to read, for example, Matt Forney’s Why Fat Women Don’t Deserve To Be Loved (part of me feels like the link is self-trigger-warning, but I guess I will just warn you that this is not a clever attention-grabbing title, the link means exactly what it says and argues it at some length)
I am not the first person to notice that the feminist blogosphere and the manosphere are in many ways mirror images of each other. Some feminists give incisive criticism of social structures that affect women; some manospherites give incisive criticism of social structures that affect men. On the other hand, some feminists are evil raving loonies and some manospherites are evil raving loonies. Feminists talk about male privilege and misogyny, manospherites talk about female privilege and misandry. Some people try to deny the symmetry, but that usually says more about what they pay attention to than it does the underlying territory.
No one says the only reason manospherites like to insult unattractive lonely women is because “it’s hard for women to complain about how they’re single without being mistaken for a feminist”, or that “the manosphere doesn’t mean all lonely women, it’s just talking about how offended they are that lonely women feel entitled to sex and objectify men”. In the case of men, everyone pretty much agrees that no, if you’re a certain kind of person, making fun of people for being unattractive and unhappy is its own reward.
The idea of deep genetic and personality differences between men and women is far too complicated to get into here, but I will say that if differences exist, I do not believe they are so great as to change fundamental human nature. For women just as well as men, for feminists just as well as manospherites, if you’re a certain kind of person, making fun of people for being unattractive and unhappy is its own reward. Hence everything that has ever been said about “nice guys (TM)”
The only difference between the feminists and the manosphere here is that people call out the manosphere when they do it. But the feminists have their little Playmobil motte, so that’s totally different!
V.
So am I claiming that the feminist war on “nice guys” is totally uncorrelated with the existence of the manosphere?
No. I’m saying the causal arrow goes the opposite direction from the one Barry’s suggesting. As usual with gender issues, this can be best explained through a story from ancient Chinese military history.
Chen Sheng was an officer serving the Qin Dynasty, famous for their draconian punishments. He was supposed to lead his army to a rendezvous point, but he got delayed by heavy rains and it became clear he was going to arrive late. The way I always hear the story told is this:
Chen turns to his friend Wu Guang and asks “What’s the penalty for being late?”
“Death,” says Wu.
“And what’s the penalty for rebellion?”
“Death,” says Wu.
“Well then…” says Chen Sheng.
And thus began the famous Dazexiang Uprising, which caused thousands of deaths and helped usher in a period of instability and chaos that resulted in the fall of the Qin Dynasty three years later.
The moral of the story is that if you are maximally mean to innocent people, then eventually bad things will happen to you. First, because you have no room to punish people any more for actually hurting you. Second, because people will figure if they’re doomed anyway, they can at least get the consolation of feeling like they’re doing you some damage on their way down.
This seems to me to be the position that lonely men are in online. People will tell them they’re evil misogynist rapists – as the articles above did – no matter what. In what is apparently shocking news to a lot of people, this makes them hurt and angry. As someone currently working on learning psychotherapy, I can confidently say that receiving a constant stream of hatred and put-downs throughout your most formative years can really screw you up. And so these people try to lash out at the people who are doing it to them, secure in the knowledge that there’s no room left for people to hate them even more.
I know this is true because it happened to me. I never became a manospherian per se, because two wrongs don’t make a right, but – as readers of this essay may be surprised to learn – I did become just a little bit bitter about feminism. If I hadn’t been so sure about that “two wrongs” issue I probably would have ended up a lot more radicalized.
Actually, that word – “radicalized” – conceals what is basically my exact thesis. We talk a lot about the “radicalization” of Muslims – for example, in Palestine. And indeed, nobody likes Hamas and we all agree they are terrible people and commit some terrible atrocities. Humans can certainly be very cruel, but there seems to be an unusual amount of cruelty in this particular region. And many people who like black-and-white thinking try to blame that on some defect in the Palestinian race, or claim the Quran urges Muslims should be hateful and violent. But if you’re willing to tolerate a little bit more complexity, it may occur to you to ask “Hey, I wonder if any of this anger among Palestinians has to do with the actions of Israel?” And then you might notice, for example, the past century of Middle Eastern history.
Yet somehow, when the manosphere is being terrible people and commiting terrible atrocities, the only explanation offered is that “you must hate all women” must appear in some sura of the Male Quran.
My patient – not Henry, the one I started this whole thing off with, the one who works two minimum wage jobs and wants to know why he’s still falling behind when everyone else does so well – he wasn’t listed as a danger to himself or others, so he had the right to leave the hospital voluntarily if he wanted to. And he did, less than two days after he came in, before we’d even managed to finalize a treatment plan for him. He was worried that his boss was going to fire him if he stayed in longer.
I didn’t get a chance to give him any medication – not that it would have helped that much. All I got a chance to do was to tell him I respected his situation, that he was in a really sucky position, that it wasn’t his fault, and that I hoped he did better. I’m sure my saying that had minimal effect on him. But maybe a history of getting to hear that message from all different people – friends, family, doctors, social workers, TV, church, whatever – all through his life – gave him enough mental fortitude to go back to his horrible jobs and keep working away in the hopes that things would get better. Instead of killing himself or turning to a life of crime or joining the latest kill-the-rich demagogue movement or whatever.
In the end what he wanted wasn’t entitlement to other people’s money, or a pity job from someone who secretly didn’t like him. All he needed to keep going was to have people acknowledge there was a problem and treat him like a frickin’ human being.
VI.
So let’s get back to Barry.
(remember, anyone who uses this article to insult Barry will go to Hell and get banned from Slate Star Codex)
Barry is using my second-favorite rhetorical device, apophasis, the practice of bringing up something by denying that it will be brought up. For example, “I think the American people deserve a clean debate, and that’s why I’m going to stick to the issues, rather than talking about the incident last April when my opponent was caught having sex with a goat. Anyway, let’s start with the tax rate…”
He is complaining about being single by saying that you can’t complain about being single – and, as a bonus, placating feminists by blaming the whole thing on the manosphere as a signal that he’s part of their tribe and so should not be hurt.
It almost worked. He only got one comment saying he was privileged and entitled (which he dismisses as hopefully a troll). But he did get some other comments that remind me of two of my other least favorite responses to “nice guys”.
First: “Nice guys don’t want love! They just want sex!”
One line disproof: if they wanted sex, they’d give a prostitute a couple bucks instead of spiralling into a giant depression.
Second: “You can’t compare this to, like, poor people who complain about being poor. Food and stuff are basic biological human needs! Sex isn’t essential for life! It’s an extra, like having a yacht, or a pet tiger!”
I know that feminists are not always the biggest fans of evolutionary psychology. But I feel like it takes a special level of unfamiliarity with the discipline to ask “Sure, evolution gave us an innate desire for material goods, but why would it give us an deep innate desire for pair-bonding and reproduction??!”
But maybe a less sarcastic response would be to point out Harry Harlow’s monkey studies. These studies – many of them so spectacularly unethical that they helped kickstart the modern lab-animals’-rights movement – included one in which monkeys were separated from their real mother and given a choice between two artifical “mothers” – a monkey-shaped piece of wire that provided milk but was cold and hard to the touch, and a soft cuddly cloth mother that provided no milk. The monkeys ended up “attaching” to the cloth mother and not the milk mother.
In other words – words that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has spent much time in a human body – companionship and warmth can be in some situations just as important as food and getting your more basic needs met. Friendship can meet some of that need, but for a lot of people it’s just not enough.
When your position commits you to saying “Love isn’t important to humans and we should demand people stop caring about whether or not they have it,” you need to take a really careful look in the mirror – assuming you even show up in one.
VII.
You’re seven sections in, and maybe you thought you were going to get through an entire SSC post without a bunch of statistics. Ha ha ha ha ha.
I will have to use virginity statistics as a proxy for the harder-to-measure romancelessness statistics, but these are bad enough. In high school each extra IQ point above average increases chances of male virginity by about 3%. 35% of MIT grad students have never had sex, compared to only 13% of the average high school population. Compared with virgins, men with more sexual experience are likely to drink more alcohol, attend church less, and have a criminal history. A Dr. Beaver (nominative determinism again!) was able to predict number of sexual partners pretty well using a scale with such delightful items as “have you been in a gang”, “have you used a weapon in a fight”, et cetera. An analysis of the psychometric Big Five consistently find that high levels of disagreeableness predict high sexual success in both men and women.
If you’re smart, don’t drink much, stay out of fights, display a friendly personality, and have no criminal history – then you are the population most at risk of being miserable and alone. “At risk” doesn’t mean “for sure”, any more than every single smoker gets lung cancer and every single nonsmoker lives to a ripe old age – but your odds get worse. In other words, everything that “nice guys” complain of is pretty darned accurate. But that shouldn’t be too hard to guess…
Sorry. We were talking about Barry.
I have said no insulting Barry, but I never banned complimenting him. Barry is a neat guy. He draws amazing comics and he runs one of the most popular, most intellectual, and longest-standing feminist blogs on the Internet. I have debated him several times, and although he can be enragingly persistent he has always been reasonable and never once called me a neckbeard or a dudebro or a piece of scum or anything. He cares deeply about a lot of things, works hard for those things, and has supported my friends when they have most needed support.
If there is any man in the world whose feminist credentials are impeccable, it is he. And I say this not to flatter him, but to condemn everyone who gives the nice pat explanation “The real reason Nice Guys™®© can’t get dates is that women can just tell they’re misogynist, and if they were to realize women were people then they would be in relationships just as much as anyone else.” This advice I see all the time, most recently on a feminist “dating advice for single guys” list passed around on Facebook:
Step I. Consume More Art By Women – I think it’s a good idea to make a deliberate year-long project of it at this time in your life, when you are trying to figure out how to relate to women better…Use woman-created media to to remind yourself that the world isn’t only about you + men + women who have/have not rejected you as a romantic partner.
I want to reject that line of thinking for all time. I want to actually go into basic, object-level Nice Guy territory and say there is something very wrong here.
Barry is possibly the most feminist man who has ever existed, palpably exudes respect for women, and this is well-known in every circle feminists frequent. He is reduced to apophatic complaints about how sad he is that he doesn’t think he’ll ever have a real romantic relationship.
Henry has four domestic violence charges against him by his four ex-wives and is cheating on his current wife with one of those ex-wives. And as soon as he gets out of the psychiatric hospital where he was committed for violent behavior against women and maybe serves the jail sentence he has pending for said behavior, he is going to find another girlfriend approximately instantaneously.
And this seems unfair. I don’t know how to put the basic insight behind niceguyhood any clearer than that. There are a lot of statistics backing up the point, but the statistics only corroborate the obvious intuitive insight that this seems unfair.
And suppose, in the depths of your Forever Alone misery, you make the mistake of asking why things are so unfair.
Well, then Jezebel says you are “a lonely dickwad who believes in a perverse social/sexual contract that promises access to women’s bodies”. XOJane says you are “an adult baby” who will “go into a school or a gym or another space heavily populated by women and open fire”. Feminspire just says you are “an arrogant, egotistical, selfish douche bag”.
And the manosphere says: “Excellent question, we’ve actually been wondering that ourselves, why don’t you come over here and sit down with us and hear some of our convincing-sounding answers, which, incidentally, will also help solve your personal problems?”
And feminists still insist the only reason anyone ever joins the manosphere is “distress of the privileged”!
I do not think men should be entitled to sex, I do not think women should be “blamed” for men not having sex, I do not think anyone owes sex to anyone else, I do not think women are idiots who don’t know what’s good for them, I do not think anybody has the right to take it into their own hands to “correct” this unsettling trend singlehandedly.
But when you deny everything and abuse anyone who brings it up, you cede this issue to people who sometimes do think all of these things. And then you have no right to be surprised when all the most frequently offered answers are super toxic.
There is a very simple reply to the question which is better than anything feminists are now doing. It is the answer I gave to my patient Dan: “Yeah, things are unfair. I can’t do anything about it, but I’m sorry for your pain. Here is a list of resources that might be able to help you.”
There is also a more complicated reply, which I am not qualified to compose, but I think the gist of it would be something like:
Personal virtue is not very well correlated with ease of finding a soulmate. It may be only slightly correlated, uncorrelated, or even anti-correlated in different situations. Even smart people who want various virtues in a soulmate usually use them as a rule-out criterion, rather than a rule-in criterion – that is, given someone whom they are already attracted to, they will eliminate him if he does not have those virtues. The rule-in criterion that makes you attractive to people is mysterious and mostly orthogonal to virtue. This is true both in men and women, but in different ways. Male attractiveness seems to depend on things like a kind of social skills which is not necessarily the same kind of social skills people who want to teach you social skills will teach, testosterone level, social status, and whatever you call the ability to just ask someone out, consequences be damned. These can be obtained in very many different ways that are partly within your control, but they are complicated and subtle and if you naively aim for cliched versions of the terms you will fail. There is a lot of good discussion about how to get these things. Here is a list of resources that might be able to help you.
Of course, then you’ve got to have your resource list. And – and this is the part of this post I think will be controversial (!), I think a lot of the appropriate material is concentrated in the manosphere, ie the people who do not hate your guts merely for acknowledging the existence of the issue. Yes, it is interspersed with poisonous beliefs about women being terrible, but if you have more than a quarter or so of a soul, it is pretty easy to filter those out and concentrate on the good ones. Many feminists will say there are no good ones and that they are all exactly the same, but you should not believe them for approximately the same reason you should not believe anyone else who claims the outgroup is completely homogenous and uniformly evil. Ozy has tried to pick out some of the better ones for you at the bottom of their their anti-Heartiste FAQ, and a guy called John on Tumblr has added to the discussion.
So I think the better parts of feminism and the better parts of the manosphere could unite around something like this, against the evil fringes of both movements. Not for my sake, because after many years I mysteriously and unexpectedly found a wonderful girlfriend whom I love very much. And not only for the sake of the nice guys out there. But also for the sake of women who want better alternatives to marrying someone like Henry.
And although Barry explicitly doesn’t want dating advice, I feel like this is meta-level enough that it doesn’t count. Stop blaming the men’s movement for the problem and notice the more fundamental problem that some parts of the men’s movement – as well as some parts of feminism are honestly trying to work on.
Come to the Not-Actually-Dark-But-Spends-Slightly-Less-Time-Loudly-Protesting-Its-Lightness Side, Barry. We have cookies! And basic human decency! But also cookies!
While I generally agree with your point, I would like to point out a few parts of your quote from feministe: “A shy, but decent and caring man is quite likely to complain that he doesn’t get as much attention from women as he’d like. A Nice Guy™ will complain that women don’t pay him the attention he deserves.” “The clearest indication of which of the two you’re dealing with is whether the person is interested in the possibility that he’s doing something wrong.” So those quotes, at least, do provide some distinction between the two. I’m sure that there are others who don’t make that distinction, but if I were you I would pick another piece of evidence for that point.
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It doesn’t provide a distinction, it provides an escape path:
-Your complaints make you a suspected Nice Guy™! Are you “interested in the possibility that [you are] doing something wrong”? If you repent and accept that you don’t deserve to get as much attention as you’d like to, you can be just a nice guy instead of a horrible rapey misogynist!
(Of course, if you choose to admit you don’t deserve attention, you can’t keep complaining about not getting any. You can’t both say you’re not boyfriend material and complain about girls not being attracted to you!)
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Also, when people spell out “what you’re doing wrong” and you say “no, I’m pretty darn sure I’m not doing any of that”, now you’re a DENYING horrible rapey misogynist.
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Yup.
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This verges on Kafka Trap territory. A Kafka Trap is where once an accusation has been made, any denial is simply more proof of the claim. For instance, any criticism of accusations of “mansplaining” are themselves examples of mansplaining.
The problem with the “interested in possibility that he’s doing something wrong” test is it’s being administered by the same person making the accusation, and how many people can be objective as to whether the target of their accusation is giving it sufficient consideration? What about the feminists making the accusation? Are they interested in the possibility that they’re doing something wrong? Furthermore, it may seem like they are dismissing the current incarnations out of hand, when in fact they have already heard the accusations, carefully considered them, and rejected them.
And how would this sound in SA’s Poor Minorities analogy? “The difference between a poor minority and a Poor Minority ™ is that the poor minority will respectfully listen as you explain that it’s really their fault.”
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As always, fantastic. As always, you will regret writing this.
I am continuously tempted to write a short ebook condensing my experience on how to deal with women of both feminist and non-feminist variety, and learn to overcome fear/broadcast intent without being terrified or opened up to being made fun of.
But more important things to write, unfortunately. Someone needs to write PUA without PUA.
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I’d like to suggest Married Man Sex Life by Athol Kay (it’s a blog and a book and a forum). He spent a lot of time in PUA and MRA fora, but his blog (edited by his wife) is aimed at people trying to have a healthy monogamous marriage and raise children. It has a lot less of the misogyny than most of the PUA stuff I’ve read.
(I actually learned a lot from reading Roissy, which I believe is Heartiste’s old blog. He’s very perceptive, and his essays on how to handle someone crying when you can’t do anything about the problem/when there is no underlying problem, and about how to be a good conversationalist, were excellent. But it did feel like treasure-hunting in a sewer: the presence of gold doesn’t eliminate the abundance of shit).
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Links to gold? (or if a linkback is asking for trouble, just a useful search string) Don’t want to slog through shit if I can help it. Much appreciated.
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Out of curiosity, Scott, when people turned the “shut up you entiteld rapist shitlord” cannon against you, did this happen outside the internet, or on an internet forum?
(I ask because typically emotionally traumatizing events happen “IRL”, from which I infer this happened IRL, which leads me to wonder if my experience of almost no one I meet in real life being at all familiar with any of these memes is somehow atypical)
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Also, generalizing from all the smart, upper-class, high IQ, kind men I know, I suspect that the statistical links between being smart, upper-class, nice, etc and virginity have a lot to do with those types of men being more picky in mate choice and generally more sociosexually restricted.
And while niceness and sociosexually restricted personalities might be biological thing to some extent, what else do you expect in a society where kids are told to wait before having sex? “Good” boys who listen to mom and dad and come from nice families tend to imbibe the values of self restraint and caution. “Bad” boys who don’t care what authority figures say, or who come from broken homes, will tend to follow their instincts, have sex with all willing parties, and be more bold in pursuit of sex. They’ll also know girls who grew up in similar circumstances and behave similarly, unlike their upper class counterparts.
(Keep in mind, if you’re male and have or would ever turn down casual sex for any reason, you’re already more sociosexually restricted than “Henry”.)
I’m not proposing an alternative to the whole dominance heirarchy theory here, btw…it’s totally true that dominance, power, and status is attractive to women. I’m only saying that core personality differences are just a very tiny part of the explanations behind the differing sexual histories of Barry and Henry. It’s got a lot more to do with their respective demographics.
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Yes, I completely agree with the above. There are probably a lot of factors behind the correlation between being a nice, academically motivated, “follow the rules” kind of guy and losing one’s virginity at a later age. It may be that the main cause of both conditions is a particular socioeconomic background. Also, I’m sure that the amount of time the average MIT graduate student spends studying is very directly related to their relative lack of a social life. But I will leave it to someone who is better with statistics and knows where to find the most useful relevant studies to unpack all the possible mechanics governing this correlation.
I will say that from my own experience that I do think that most straight women are attracted to guys who are kind and considerate, rather than those who tend towards the opposite. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that for whatever reason, kindness and consideration oftentimes go hand in hand with awkwardness and lack of confidence, and the latter traits are generally not attractive to women. It is a problem not only for the kind but awkward men looking to date women, but also for women who are seeking long-term (male) partners.
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Definitely. The best advice I could give my 18-year-old self would be “go to parties, hit on girls, and learn to enjoy drinking”. I think that would produce more of an increase in my lifetime subjective well-being than even “buy AAPL at 20″. (Assuming I’d listen to myself, which I probably wouldn’t).
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I can’t imagine how one would learn to enjoy drinking.
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Is that because alcohol tastes terrible, or because alcohol makes you feel terrible?
(If the first, really fruity drinks are the way to go)
(If the second, just act silly around drunk people. They won’t know)
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C) People acting drunk terrify me.
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Well, it may be a little better than getting in fights and using a weapon, but I still think it shouldn’t be that way. I shouldn’t – or more importantly, my kids shouldn’t – have to become heavy drinkers to avoid loneliness.
Anyway, I think it’s just a sliding scale from this to PUA stuff – stuff that works, that’s not the problem, but are you sure you want to turn yourself into that?
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In my personal experience, after getting progressively more inebriated five to ten times, you start to enjoy the lower stages of inebriation more. It’s like learning to enjoy spicy food, or anything else, really. After a couple of bad experiences, I didn’t drink again until my late 30s, and had a fear of losing control that sounds similar (to me).
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I think something like Berkson’s paradox (see “Searching For One-Sided Tradeoffs” on this blog) might be happening: even if among the general population kindness and consideration weren’t actually correlated with awkwardness and lack of confidence, they still would be among single guys, as the ones who are kind and considerate but non-awkward and confident tend to be already taken.
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This. Once I built confidence, became less awkward and shifted social group, I was suddenly in relationships, pretty consistently, where I had been single pretty consistently to that point. Those people I know/knew who were neither awkward nor confident had periods of singledom, but always gravitated into relationships eventually.
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I disagree with this idea. I think there are few things that a college aged virgin wants more than sex, and upholding the vague ideas of purity his parents taught on him isn’t one of them.
I would agree that yes, Smart Nice Guy (lets call him Sam) is pickier than Henry when it comes to women he’d date. However I think this mainly manifests in who Sam socializes with. He is pickier in his friend choices not in who he dates among his friends.
Really to say that this is causal reason Sam is not getting dates, you would have to show that Henry knowsway more people that he would like to have a relationship with than Sam, which I don’t think is true. This statement can not be true even while the statement “Henry would date any girl Sam would date, but Sam wouldn’t date most of the girls Henry would date” is.
And the idea that Smart people are significantly less sociosexual on average seems tentative at best. Again, there are few things that a college aged virgin desires more than sex. Is virgin Sam likely to turn down reasonably attractive acquaintance Jessica if she explicitly asks if he wants to be in an intimate relationship with her? Probably not.
Telling virgin Sam the reason no girls are attracted to him is because he is too picky and not sociosexual enough is one of the worst things you can say to Sam, and totally missing the underlying cause of his plight.
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Hello Typical Mind! My name is Brent. We haven’t met.
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I don’t think it’s that smart people have a lower sex drive, I think it’s that smart people don’t know what the social scripts around sex are. It’s the difference between someone walking towards a pond and a fish flopping in every direction to get to the pond. The second one expends more effort to get to the same place, and often doesn’t even go in the right direction.
I feel like I know many of the social scripts around friendship, and some of the unspoken rules of being in a relationship, but How the hell do you ask someone for sex? I mean, if you have been in a relationship for a while, I guess the topic comes up eventually, but the concept of not knowing someone and saying things that lead to having sex (aka hookup culture) produces the exact sort of bewildered incomprehension as an AI box experiment win. I can’t think of any combination of words that could possibly do that and it resembles some sort of witchcraft. How is it possible to ask someone for sex and not have it be horribly awkward and get instantaneously shot down in the absence of a multi-month relationship with that person?
(Of course, it’s certainly doable, because people do it all the time, but people who listened to the “be nice to them” paradigm and actually took it seriously are the people who never developed this ability.)
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Chiming in as a stereotypically smart guy to offer another data point and second basically all of the above. In my case, I’d also add equal incomprehension regarding how you even ask someone on a date.
(Or rather, the Internet has kindly furnished me with some quantities of scripts [read prototypical ways of indicating interest within a social context], but it has also made it quite clear that there is no universal script and that each only works with/will be understood and accepted by certain types of people (assuming first that they reciprocate your interest, of course) and that working out which is which is yet another fun game of incomprehension so at this point I’ve mostly given up.
It also probably doesn’t help that I have no idea how you work out when you want to ask someone out in the first place, so whee)
This is, I think, one of those (social) situations where having too much metacognition can actually fuck you over. ie, the world belongs to those who have enough metacognition to notice interesting things and come up with novel ideas but not enough metacognition to second-guess those ideas to oblivion (this is, I think, me rediscovering analysis paralysis due to sleeplessness)
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It might just be me, but I’ve folded “hanging out with friends” and “date” into the same mental bin. Both of them involve doing some interesting activity with someone you enjoy the presence of and plan to get to know better. So in a conversation, just ask “Hey, I will be doing X at time Y. Would you be interested in coming along?” Much lower-stress than asking someone on a date, wields preexisting friend scripts, and if they decline, you can always ask a different friend to come instead. It isn’t called a date, but it is a de facto date, and if they ask whether it is a date, say yes.
However, looking back on my life, calling something a date and making the romantic interest more explicit might be necessary for a relationship. Actually, I bet this “date” script explains why I have such a distorted girl friend:girlfriend ratio.
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I’ll share what I have been able to figure out of these social scripts. These aren’t necessarily the only ways to accomplish these tasks.
To ask someone out for a date, say “We should hang out some time. Want to give me your phone number?” Then as they are putting their number in to your phone, ask them if they’re more of a texting kind of person or a voice kind of person (assuming you’re equally comfortable with either. Personally I prefer voice because texting sucks up my attention when I’m trying to do other stuff. If you going to actually call her, maybe say when you’ll call, e.g. “I’ll call you around 6 PM on X day” so her phone won’t be off at that time (assuming she actually wants to take your call).)
To have sex with someone, put yourself in a context where you are both consuming alcohol. (Go to a bar, a party, or just buy beer from the liquor store on your way to the park.) As you’re hanging out with them, “accidentally” touch them a fair amount by brushing the side of your body against theirs, e.g. when you are walking together or sitting together. Pay attention to the way they respond to these touches. If they seem to shy away, slow down. If they don’t shy away, you’re good. Try to have a good time talking to the person and breathe long slow exhales to calm yourself down. As you feel comfortable doing it, gradually escalate touching by putting your arm around your date, resting your hand on her leg, etc. Eventually find an excuse to go somewhere more private where you can make out. (Examples: “want to go check out that grove of trees over there?” (incidentally one of the darkest groves of trees), “want to go take a walk outside?” (then we walked around behind the bar we were in and made out), etc.) Having interesting things you can show people in your room is useful, for instance.
Having sex is kinda the same way: once you’re in your room alone, continue to make out, take off your shirt, and gradually touch her more and more until you’re having sex (backing off if she seems uncomfortable).
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Well, if you’re curious, here’s my one-night-stand script for use at parties or other events where alcohol is consumed. I am a straight female.
1) Pick a guy who is reasonably attractive
2) Go start a conversation, same way you’d start a conversation with anyone you just met
3) Simply talk for a few minutes. If he seems creepy, abort mission. Otherwise, continue to step 4.
4) Keep talking, but now do it while touching his hand/arm, and keeping your face a bit closer to his than is generally considered approppiate. This nonverbally communicates wanting to kiss while maintaining plausible deniablity in case he simply wanted to talk.
5) Make out. This part is pretty fun in itself, so it goes on for a while.
6) At some point, one of you can ask a question in the vein of “Your place or my place?”, “Wanna go someplace more secluded?”, etc.
7) You go to that place and have sex.
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Credentials: I was a very smart guy, first kiss in my sophomore year of college, hit 22 and grad school with no sex; in the six years since then I’ve had double digits of sexual partners and have turned down several more, in an accelerating fashion (that is, I had three or four partners between 22 and 25, and I’ve had eight or so new ones since then). First some analysis, then some quasi-scripts.
My first observation is that I had way more opportunities for sex than I realized in high school and college. Like, situations that in retrospect were one step away from the girl saying “I’m really horny and attracted to you; please have sex with me now.” One of the major skills in getting-laid, and especially in getting one night stands, is being aware of what other people are thinking.
Another skill is the just-going-for-it skill. There were a few cases where I probably could have had sex and even knew that, but I either wanted to be cautious with my own emotional health or with that of my partner. Slightly graphic example: a girl I’d known and crushed on for a year, we were both tipsy, we wound up making out, then naked in bed, and she was rubbing her genitals on mine while saying “I really don’t want to have sex tonight” over and over. We didn’t have sex. Partly because I wasn’t ready yet (see previous paragraph) and partly because while I probably could have talked her into it, I would have felt like a terrible person. Henry probably doesn’t have this problem, which is part of why he gets laid more.
For the social scripts: it’s a dance of signalling interest and reading the other person’s signals. Importantly, there’s a general acceptance that if you signal interest in romance/sex in clear but deniable ways, then as long as you don’t suffer from already being labeled as creepy, people generally won’t call you out on it. (So “would you like to have sex?” can get you in trouble; “would you like to see my room” will get you in less trouble; “would you like to have dinner at my place” still less trouble). The fact that from a Bayesian perspective you’re sending a lot of information is irrelevant; what’s important is that you don’t say it explicitly out loud.
The rest of the signalling game mostly revolves around personal space. Most people keep a fairly large personal bubble. By the time you’re having sex with someone, you tend to have basically no bubble between you and them. The seduction/hookup interaction is driven by a gradual erosion of the bubble. You signal interest by standing a bit too close, paying a bit too much attention, and touching people.
Start all this gradually. One way to be “creepy” is to collapse the other person’s bubble too fast. So start by standing a couple inches too close, or by touching the person on the forearm. Forearm touches are safe. The important thing is to read the other person’s body language. People who are comfortable with you will
(1) not move away
(2) orient their torsos towards you
(3) make eye contact, sometimes break it by looking down
(4) not fold their arms or cross their legs.
People who are uncomfortable will move away, turn their torsos away, avoid eye contact by looking up or to the side, and hunch their limbs in like they’re trying to protect their head and abdomen from an attack. Obviously these are ends of a spectrum, and there’s some fine judgment in the middle which is hard to explain, but these are the signs to look for.
Probably the most reliable basic one is (2); it’s really, really hard to keep your torso oriented towards someone you don’t like. Next time you’re talking to someone moderately annoying, try to face them full on. See how psychologically difficult it is. The same is true in reverse. If you ever wind up talking to someone who’s turned away and talking to you over their shoulder, they’re really trying to leave and you should let them.
So: give a light touch, then see how they respond. If they respond with comfort signals, you can escalate a bit more. If they respond with discomfort signals, slow down or abort. And you can just keep gradually escalating (this list is off the top of my head, no guarantee it’s precisely accurate, and adjust to taste, but it’s in roughly the right order I think):
(1) brief forearm touch
(2) brief shoulder or outer thigh touch
(3) more sustained contact on arm or leg
(4) holding hand
(5) cuddling, arm around shoulders (I find it helpful to give a quick side hug in response to something they say, see if they try to move back out or if they want to stay in my arm)
(6) full-body cuddling, touching abdomen
(7) touching back of the head, touching face, kissing
(8) touching breasts if they have them. Around this point you should probably try to find a private location.
Quick edit: this doesn’t touch on how to be attractive. Just tools for figuring out whether someone right now is attracted to you right now, and what they’re interested in doing about it. The most important part is the “watching for whether they send interest signals or avoidance signals”.
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@Jadagul: You might want to find a private location before touching breasts. OTOH touching buttocks in public can be OK.
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“How the hell do you ask someone for sex?”
Get to know someone a little bit – to the point where, running into them on a street corner/at a party, you’d say “Hi”, but not necessarily any more.
Next time you know them, ask them to go and do a thing. Coffee/lunch is a good one if you have budget and daytime. Pub/cocktails is a good one if you drink. Museum/exhibition is good if you’re in a city. Exhibitions are particularly good, because there *will* be one that just opened you can suggest as new to both of you. If you’re on a campus or similar, hanging out watching [TV thing you both like] is a good cheap bet.
When this is done, suggest that it was fun, you should do it again. Unless somebody else crashed it, this was your first date with that person.
You then, as soon as the next opportunity arises (I would suggest ASAP), arrange to do another thing, of a different kind. If this one is going well, make a location shift (e.g. meet at a cafe, have a drink, go to a museum to look at stuff, then suggest going to get a drink/have dinner/go back to yours and let you cook/whatever). Then at some point when the two of you are physically close, either:
A) kiss this person. Recommendation from personal experience is a firm, mouth-closed kiss for a few seconds, then withdrawal. If you have judged the moment right, your date will probably kiss you back.
B) ask if you can kiss this person. Sounds a bit awkward, but in all honesty, if someone wants to kiss you they’ll probably excuse the momentary awkwardness and go for it.
The main reason why I developed this pattern is that kissing unequivocably puts some kind of physical intimacy on the table, but very few people (none in my experience) react so badly to one closed-mouth kiss that there’s a high risk to it. All you’re really risking is the acquaintanceship, and if you really like the person you’ve just crashed and burned trying to kiss, you’ll be able to salvage things.
And once you’re kissing, progressing to sex is just a matter of more kissing, “um, do you wanna?” *vague gesture elsewhere*, more kissing, offer to take back to “see [Example of Cool Thing At Your Place]” (Red Dwarf the sci fi comedy series has worked for me here), etc. After you have a willing attractive partner who is kissing you at your place, if you can’t manage to have sex…well, keep trying, either with that person or another person, because even if you can’t figure it out sooner or later one of them will crack and initiate it.
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In response to Icicle’s last comment (not able to reply directly to it):
In the past few years, I have generally been following the same approach of initiating a vaguely date-like one-on-one event while keeping the exact nature of said event ambiguous. I find it to be a less stressful way to get to know someone, not only when I’m unsure of their level of romantic interest, but when I’m not even sure how romantically interested I am in them. Several notes from my own experience trying this: (1) I’ve never been asked whether or not this is a date; (2) this method has resulted in exactly zero relationships; (3) this method has also resulted in exactly zero drama and pretty minimally awkward situations with said women. Make of that what you will.
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I am single and female and I really wish I could find guys like Barry more attractive. Unfortunately I can’t force myself to be attracted to decent but low status/awkward men* :(. If I could it would be pretty easy for me to find a long-term partner. The next best thing would be for these men to make themselves more attractive. I think some of the less evil PUA techniques might even work on me.
I think it may well be correct that helpful information for Barry type guys only exists in the manosphere. However, I’m unconvinced that it’s easy to avoid the poisonous views. I think decent men can certainly avoid turning in to Heartiste, but I reckon it’s probably difficult to avoid picking up some unpleasant views.
I am (I think, I hope) a relatively decent person and until fairly recently I held fairly unpleasant feminist views about nice guys etc. I never became a #killallmen type feminist, but I still ended up being nasty.
*I really really can’t and it makes me unhappy.
Edit: I’m not sure I’ve expressed myself terribly well here, and I’m happy to explain further if asked.
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“Unfortunately I can’t force myself to be attracted to decent but low status/awkward men”
Exactly, and that’s what the non-misogynist parts of PUA theory teach. It’s not a woman’s fault for not being attracted to socially unskilled men, any more than it’s a man’s fault for not being attracted to overweight women.
“I think some of the less evil PUA techniques might even work on me.”
PUA is fundamentally about projecting higher status, so this is almost certainly true.
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Actually, attitudes regarding overweight women are one of the things that I worry about even decent men might picking from the manosphere. I agree that it’s true that being slimmer (within reason – catwalk model thin is probably too thin for most men) increases dating opportunities for women. However, I think there are a large number of men who are attracted to women in the overweight/mildly obese catagory (probably the number gets smaller the more overweight the women are). I can’t find any actual data on this, but er, this reddit thread backs up what I’m saying.
Of course I don’t think that men should sleep with women they aren’t attracted to, but I think PUA types often shame men for dating overweight women, which seems really unpleasant. If men who are attracted to overweight women end up dating overweight women that is surely a good thing.
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Absolutely, and I didn’t mean to imply that either of the tendencies I mentioned are or should be universal. (Fortunately for me, my last girlfriend didn’t mind that I don’t exactly exude social dominance).
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I should also add that I’m not only attracted to high status men. There are plenty of sort of medium status men I’m attracted to – beta males in PUA language I guess. I’m just not attracted to low status men. I know lots of low status men though, and if I were attracted to them it would be very easy for me to find a partner.
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Well, given that if I don’t personally find overweight women attractive I am a fat-shaming shitlord, I’m not sure that that’s a valid metaphor. I’ve definitely been told that it isn’t a woman’s fault for being attracted to socially unskilled men, but I’ve also definitely been told that it’s my fault if I’m not attracted to overweight women.
(I have even been told, when I was dating thinner girls, that it was my fault for not encouraging them to gain weight.)
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(I have even been told, when I was dating thinner girls, that it was my fault for not encouraging them to gain weight.)
:O
Now I really have heard everything.
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I agree here. One thing I think about a lot on this subject: there’s lots of writing about “what kind of man women want to date.” But the sort of person you’d like to date isn’t necessarily the sort of person you’re attracted to–in fact, if you don’t count attractiveness in the list of things that make you want to date someone, they tend to be pretty orthogonal.
Guys asking the question are generally asking how to be attractive, and are getting answers that are basically, “well, in addition to being attractive, you should…” This isn’t helpful. But people keep doing it, I suspect because they don’t even consciously realize that they are.
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Christine Peterson claims that if you’re a woman looking for a life partner, feeling attracted to the person should not be considered a prerequisite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fn1PzTrb38 I’m not sure if this is good advice or not.
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Sometimes it’s the only prerequisite. Fact.
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BTW, our host’s (then future?) girlfriend once wrote an article about how in the present-day western world men tend to put very little effort in being attractive, compared to women. (Zie specifically talked about fashion but one could make a similar point about other components of attractiveness too.)
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+1 for being conscious about it!
I have a little bit of the same response. I think a lot of straight women do. The problem is that most people aren’t aware why they feel what they feel.
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I don’t think the no true scotsman cries are right, either, but I think they are close to right. But by being close to right they uncover a mess of other things. Ehh…
The “problem”—I do use this word loosely because I can’t think of a better one—is that anyone can be a feminist. There’s not a feminist guild. When you’re a republican, you are a registered republican, or you are actually in the party as a politician and therefore it’s a guild of sorts itself. But again there’s no feminist guild. Any idiot at Jezebel can claim they’re a feminist, and who is going to say otherwise? (This is NOT exclusive to feminism, FWIW.)
What are opponents going to do, cite some gender studies book to “prove” someone else is lying? Why should I accept that author’s definition? I know what it means to be a good plumber inasmuch as I know what happens when the plumbing isn’t working. What’s it mean to be a good feminist? Someone claims to be a mathematician, within reason I know how to resolve my doubts. It’s difficult to no-true-scotsman a mathematician, at least since Berkeley’s doubts were posthumously assuaged. Not all scientists publish novel papers because they don’t all pursue graduate degrees, but at least they can say, “I work in a lab for so-and-so.” Like, proving you’re a member of a group usually takes even just a little more than saying-so.
Anyone can be a feminist, and anyone can say anyone else isn’t a feminist. For all the crap published everywhere on the web and in books and letters and protest signs—for all if it, the term is still self-selective. And it’s scary to me that a self-selective ideological movement has become something in academia. It scares me when someone says, “If you’re not a feminist, you’re a misogynist.” Literally WHAT?
Is a second-wave feminist still a feminist today? What about a first-wave feminist? Does the very existence of these terms answer the question? I support women’s right to vote. “Yes, and? We’re past that now, shitlord.” OK thanks.
I could pick up a book, but would I get no-true-feministed out of discussions if I stuck to its prescriptions? (Philosophy in general has this problem, actually. Of course I assume feminism is philosophy and not religion in saying so.)
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I said this last time Scott covered feminism (or one time) and I’ll say it again. There’s more to social justice than the shit you read on the Internet.
Planned Parenthood is a feminist organization that works to provide reproductive health and other services to all women, regardless of their ability to afford it. Here’s another organization, Daughters of Eve, that works to protect women and girls from female genital mutilation. There are dozens more I could find who are all about real change in the world rather than blogging, tweeting, and spreading memes on Facebook.
(Note I don’t know if either of these organizations is particularly effective in the effective altruism sense, but that’s not my point).
That’s just two of many feminist activist organizations working on real change in the world to benefit women (though I’d argue that much of feminist activism is also good for men).
This isn’t to no-true-scotsman anyone. As you point out, anyone can claim to be a feminist and there’s no litmus test to say they’re right or wrong. I’m just pointing out that modern feminism is more than just these terrible blogs on the Internet.
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Agreed. I have had the pleasure of dealing specifically with PP in my life. That, among other things, helps ensure that I try to give feminism a generous benefit of the doubt. But how many of the internet generation have such experiences to draw on so they can look down a bully wearing a feminist mask and just shake their head instead of rage?
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Sadly, terrible blog internet feminism is more salient to most people than the groups that actually try to go out and help people. It was for me in the past (I am an ex-avid-follower of things like Pharyngula), and I credit Scott for gradually snapping me out of it by being the first highly thoughtful and sane dissenter that I came across, which didn’t mesh well with the whole “Everyone who disagrees is evil” concept.
My point is that the “real world positive change” feminism is less prevalent in the arena of memes than the “terrible blog feminism”, and that it should be permissible to generalize over a group without having to saturate the generalization with NAXALT.
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Interesting! Now that I read about it, I see the term “social justice” has been in use for over a century by all manner of groups that have nothing to do with mean people on Tumblr. But somehow aside from reading about it’s history I’ve never encountered it in any other context, and (unlike feminism) most of the people working on real-world positive change aren’t using the phrase very much.
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I usually see the word “social justice” I’m reference to a particular internet culture.
That said, I have a lot of respect for Planned Parenthood and donate to them regularly. My frustration with contemporary Imternet feminism does not extend to all things that have ever been called feminist.
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It’s hard to have a conversation about feminism without getting bogged down in the question of how to define feminism. This has bothered me ever since probably early college age when I realized that the brand of feminism many of my friends were advocating was in fact very different from what I saw as the self-evident, fundamental-civil-rights feminist beliefs my parents raised me with.
I’ve noticed that (unless I am seriously misreading him) Scott’s general attitude towards feminism is based on his impressions of the statements and behavior of self-described feminists rather than on the defining principles of any particular variety of feminism. I guess I can see some justification for this (arguments such as “in order to self-identify as a feminist, one should feel in accordance with most others who self-identify as feminists, rather than with a set of abstract principles which define a term nobody can agree on a definition for anyway”. It might be interesting to compare this to the issue of self-identifying as a Democrat or Republican, but I digress.)
However, I would counter this philosophy of defining feminism by those who call themselves feminists with the following points.
One: I don’t believe that the radical, social-justice-y feminists that Scott (and I, and probably many other people here) see via the internet on a regular basis are a good representation of the general feminist-identifying demographic. Think about it: which feminists are most likely to write articles that gain attention and are re-posted all over the internet? The more radical, combative ones who advocate the more sensational positions. In fact, those are the types who are more likely to go out of their way to be vocal in the first place.
Two: I believe there is a very small list of fundamental stances that almost all self-identifying feminists would agree with, even while differing widely on what concrete goals we should strive for in order to realize these ideals, as well as how to reach said goals. Maybe if we use the term “feminist” for anyone who aligns themselves with this basic platform, then we will be better equipped to engage with those on both sides of the fence and reach a better understanding. In other words, suppose you do advocate said basic platform but are frustrated with the more vocal, radical feminists on the internet. Now you may say “Look, I’m a feminist too, I agree with a lot of your fundamental objectives but feel that the kind of rhetoric you’re using is not only alienating to me but really damaging to our shared cause” rather than “I find your rhetoric alienating and therefore am not a feminist” (which is likely to get read as “am not part of your cause and therefore an enemy”).
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““Look, I’m a feminist too, I agree with a lot of your fundamental objectives but feel that the kind of rhetoric you’re using is not only alienating to me but really damaging to our shared cause” ”
Gets you labelled “concern troll”.
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Yup. And that is why you go into full rebellion rather than arrive late.
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That describes my position also.
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Right, our language doesn’t have a good way to distinguish between:
1) feminism as a set of beliefs that all/only/all and only feminists hold
2) feminism as the set of people who call themselves ‘feminists’
3) feminism as a set of political factions / institutional intelligences that one can join, be opposed to, be attacked by, etc.
4) feminism as a set of meeting points for feminists, and the effects and artifacts they produce
5) feminism as a set of observable effects / political victories in the world at large caused by a specific set of political factions / institutional intelligences and their meeting points
6) feminism as an abstraction over feminism₃ or feminism₂ that approaches feminism₁
To explain: feminism₁ should be clear; feminism₂ includes people like Susan B. Anthony and Valerie Solanas; feminism₃ includes things like ‘radical feminism’ and ‘fourth-wave feminism’; feminism₄ includes things like Jezebel and Planned Parenthood; and feminism₅ includes things like the push to shift the burden of proof in rape cases and the spread of the belief that skepticism about certain types of claim is morally wrong. Feminism₆ sounds like what you’re looking for: a basic platform constructed from “a very small list of fundamental stances that almost all self-identifying feminists would agree with”.
(There’s probably a better way to construct a typology like this; the above is just off the top of my head. Also, it seems that the type of thing that feminism₁ is rarely exists in practice. It doesn’t seem to in the case of feminism.)
This can be exploited: if you can get people to identify as 2), they’re more likely to end up in 3), influenced by 4), and working toward 5). There’s also temporal ambiguity, which also can be exploited: if you support past feminism₅, you should become a feminist₂ — and (this part is implied) support current feminism₅.
(This set of exploits creates political inertia: if X₃ won hard enough in the past to get people in the present to support its past X₅ victories, it becomes that much easier to get people to become X₂, join present X₃, and support present X₅. Opposing factions can try to work around this by claiming past X₃s — see: the Republican Party — but those usually turn out as cringeworthy rationalizations-of-current-membership that won’t convince anyone who’s not already there.)
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Radical feminist is a term with an actual meaning. Jezebel is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a radical feminist blog. You can identify a radical feminist by seeing if they are absurdly upset by BDSM, sex work, heterosexuality, or trans people.
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(just emphasizing not disagreeing): Just because a very large portion of feminists think of men poorly does not mean that the Men’s Rights Movement has any merit.
The proposed actions that the Men’s Rights Movement is pushing are insignificant in comparison to what is still needed to make women equal to men. Women are in hardly any politican positions or executive positions and this is an extreme problem. The problems men face from corporations and the government are inconsequential compared to those suffered by women.
Properly thinking people who notice that men do suffer problems would still first push for the resolution of the worst of women’s problems before the worst of men’s problems.
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“Properly thinking people who notice that men do suffer problems would still first push for the resolution of women’s problems before men’s problems.”
If the problems of men in Western society rate a 5 and the problems of women in Western society rate a 20, the problems of women in the Middle East are approximately 67.3 million. Are we obligated to fix that before trying to do anything else?
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My first thought is … yes. But then, from a utilitarian point of view, even greater global problems would be starvation, genocide, disease.
And I believe this. So, when I hear about feminists getting upset at something like … Elevatorgate, I always think ‘Rationally, this moral outrage is deeply misplaced’.
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But you can, perhaps, see how a man who has been denied custody of his children because of a biased court might not agree with you about the relative urgency of gender-neutral custody proceedings v. gender-proportional representation* in government and corporate boards?
*I think this is a terrible problem to prioritize in general. There are many countries in the world with much higher proportions of women in parliament than the United States, but some of them are much worse places to be a woman.
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Really?
Which ones? I come from the country that’s currently #2 on the list of those countries and I know American women who choose to live here rather than the US because they don’t want their daughters to grow up across the pond. A sample size of one, I admit, but I would really like to see which countries you are thinking about.
Edit: allright, never mind, there’s a new list out and places like Rwanda and Mozambique are new and exciting outliers. On the other hand, I am still able to find a strong correlation between women in parliament and how good/bad it is to be a woman adjusted for how good/bad it is to be a person in the same country.
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Yes, I’m also curious about this. I can hardly think of any. Malawi and Liberia come to mind, but those are (arguably) worse places to be a woman than the US only because they are not wealthy industrialized countries. And interpreting that as “clearly, wealth and industrialization should be a higher priority than gender balance in parliament” is only valid to the extent that one believes that a gender balanced parliament and wealth are anticorrelated.
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“The problems men face from corporations and the government are inconsequential compared to those suffered by women.”
Who, according to you, should decide the criteria by which a problem is deemed “consequential”? And to whom are the problems you’re talking about consequential or inconsequential? If you’re asserting that they’re inconsequential to me, could you please provide your reasons why?
(I ask the above questions partially sincerely, and partially to point out that in order to accept what you’re saying, I’d have to assume that you have the authority to decide what is of consequence and what isn’t. I don’t have any reason to believe you have any such authority, and I think that authority isn’t a substitute for having good reasons for something (LessWrong link), merely a (very useful) heuristic. I don’t see an argument (for what is consequential) in your post. So now, I’m left with neither an indication of your authority nor an argument. Could you please provide either?)
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First of all, there’s an ENORMOUS difference between “women have it harder than men” and “We should ignore the problems of men”. And the rhetoric usually says the latter. “I don’t care about your poor feefees” “male tears” etc.
Second: Men and Women are not separate species. Solving men’s romantic troubles, on the whole IS GOOD FOR WOMEN. Most of the population is heterosexual. Women don’t exactly want to be lonely either. For every man who gets into a long-term, pleasant relationship, guess what there’s probably a happy woman too!
Third: Bargaining and game theory. My computer is about to restart for a windows update but in summary it’s this: if you can’t admit that your bargaining partner has legitimate desires you will go to some effort to fulfill, they have no incentive to meet YOU halfway.
More later maybe.
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The PUA answer to that is “our culture is geared so that one man can far more easily and appropriately satisfy several women, than one woman can appropriately satisfy several men”. Therefore, a few men get all the women, the women get what they want, and the rest of the men can go fuck themselves.
Most redpill-style PUA is about becoming those men and throwing the rest to the wolves, which if you think about it is a terrible idea. If we’re all competing with each other, then all PUA skills are positional, and spreading game hurts your game.
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There’s enough women in the world that you gain more by having more confidence/money from being a popular PUA writer than you lose by improving the chances of the people who read/buy your stuff. If you make even $1 per schmuck you turn into a stud, and each stud takes home five more women every night than a schmuck, you’re a multi-millionaire before you’ve removed an appreciable fraction of the women from the dating market.
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yes, but that doesn’t incentivize the schmucks sharing the info, does it? because sure the peddlers will always rise to the top, but the rank-and-file are in an exponentiating tragedy of the commons scenario just waiting to happen.
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The social benefits of having a few guys who think you’re really cool and smart and know what’s what vis-a-vis women probably outweigh the impact on the dating scene of those guys becoming studs.
Yes it’s a tragedy of the commons, but there’s a huge commons, and so long as the PUA scene stays relatively small, it’s the semi-schmucks that will suffer from the overgrazing, not the studs. And wider social approbation will probably keep the PUA scene relatively small; I don’t forsee feminist tyranny being overthrown any time soon.
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mmm – that might be my problem; I’m approaching this from the perspective of a semi-schmuck.
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It’s not only the *women* market in play, it’s the *money* market. PUA coaches do it because it’s a way to make a living.
Importantly, PUA Coach is one of the “professions” where one can in principle make a *lot* of money (10M net worth for the most successful) while not being able to interface with the Establishment at all, because you look like a scam artist. This is a subset of the world of Direct Marketing, which is a fascinating alternate economy that most readers of this blog have never heard of and really should.
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Agree, Redpill/PUA is basically sacrificing yourself as a virgin to Moloch, if we should use slate star terminology.
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It wouldn’t be Moloch if it was that simple.
For the few men there’s only so many times you can hear “we’re not having sex tonight” (which is confirmation that you two are going to fuck) or “I don’t normally do this” or find out she’s got a boyfriend or a guy she lives with or a husband before you’re simply accept that women are almost always lying to everyone about everything sexual – most importantly to themselves.
For the women, they get deceived into thinking that they’re far more desirable than they actually are and so either settles for a guy she thinks is beneath her when her clock is winding down around 30 or never settles and winds up alone and miserable.
An unrestrained sexual marketplace is simply not a good idea.
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ISTM that at least in earlier times, the intended audience of PUAs tended to be previously-unattractive men, so the intended effect would be to increase the size of the first group of men which is not a zero-sum game.
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I think this analysis can be taken one step farther. The manosphere is a reaction to feminism, and feminism is a reaction to society as a whole.
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You say that ‘I don’t think I ever claimed to be, or felt, entitled to anything’, but I do wonder how this squares with saying that you ‘did think I deserved to not be doing worse than Henry.’ I’m not sure how clearly you can separate deserving something from being entitled to it.
This also gets at the problem I had with your early analogy with the complaints about poverty. I’m fairly left-wing, and as such pretty OK with the idea of some notional authority distributing money and material goods according to principles of justice. I am, in what I suspect is a pretty common reaction, horrified by the idea of such an authority attempting to distribute romantic or sexual goods.
Relationships of this kind don’t seem to be subject to the kind of moral rules about distributive justice, or fairness, or what have you, but rather to be expected to be decided according to individual values as personal decisions. As such there is at least some logic to the sense that any question of fairness is misplaced if applied to these questions, although the answer is not so much ‘this is fair’ as ‘this is a thing that doesn’t have to be fair’.
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An authority distributing goods is one possible solution to a problem, but it is not the only one, nor does its feasibility indicate whether a problem exists.
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Your comment reads to me as an extended just world fallacy: “Fixing the harm in the status quo would harm others; therefore it must not really be harm.”
Nope. The universe is perfectly capable of being morally unjust in ways that are difficult to fix. The “market” for love is only the most obvious example of this.
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If you like. The point is just that the harm to others here is so inherently connected to the harm to be fixed, rather than being simply some other consequence of a scheme to solve it, because the personal relationship is in itself the good in question.
I would tend to think that if someone deserves something, there would be some duty on other people in a position to do so to see that they get it, which I don’t see as being the case here.
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But it is the case here, if you’re a consistent utilitarian and there are no mitigating circumstances.
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I’m not a consistent utilitarian, so I guess there’s that. (To my mind, that’s not the line of thinking to which the concept of ‘desert’ belongs. Perhaps in the thinnest possible sense – everyone deserves to have their utility maximised with equal priority to everyone else.)
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And everyone has a duty to maximize everyone’s utility insofar as they can. Yes? This isn’t hard. Our interests create duties in others. It’s crazy but characteristic that feminists find this “oppressive” or something.
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“Relationships of this kind don’t seem to be subject to the kind of moral rules about distributive justice, or fairness, or what have you, but rather to be expected to be decided according to individual values as personal decisions.”
Why not? Why does everyone “deserve” a college education, and the fact that there are some people who can’t afford it a national disgrace, but if someone can’t get a girlfriend, well, sucks to be you? I’m not saying they should be treated exactly the same, but surely if you find “some people get more education than others” to fall into the “that’s a shame, in a perfect world things would be different, and it’s worth spending resources on a solution, if a solution exists” category, then so should “some people have more satisfying sex lives than others”.
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There’s plenty of precedent for publicly funded universal education, so extending it through college is just a matter of degree. And building and funding more colleges is a lot less morally repulsive than compelling some individual woman to have sex/a relationship with you. Finally, most men want to be wanted – they don’t actually desire a relationship with someone who’s being compelled.
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I think if we put our minds to it we could come up with a solution. http://imgur.com/IYhY0qY
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I’m curious: what exactly do you think socially-enforced monogamy is? If it was as socially unacceptable to have more than a “fair share” of wealth as it is to have more than one partner, we wouldn’t need an authority to distribute material goods!
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You should be more fair to Scott– he outright stated that he didn’t favor micromanaging people’s romantic lives or forcing anybody to have sex or be in a relationship with anybody else. So, I suspect that he understands this important difference between this case and material poverty, and would favor a solution based on education rather than forced redistribution.
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I understand that he doesn’t actually think people ought to be forced, but my question was how well the concept of deserving something fits in relation to denying the allegation of feeling entitled to it.
On some abstract level, as I think Scott has written, if you ought to do something then being forced to do it isn’t a moral issue – you never had the right not to do it anyway. Working backwards, if we agree that people ought not to be forced it would seem that they probably didn’t have a moral obligation to give the sex or relationship to whomever. My understanding of desert – don’t know if this is the problematic part for some people – here is that it would entail some duty on those who can to give a person what they deserve. As such, if no-one ought to be giving something to someone, it seems they cannot be said to deserve it.
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Right-wingers are the other way around. (The authority attempting to distribute romantic or sexual goods is known as the traditional norm of sex being restricted to lifelong monogamous marriages.)
(As for me, I disagree with the idea of distributing romantic goods, and I think that the right way to distribute sexual goods is to institute a basic income (financed via land-value taxes) and fully legalize prostitution.)
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It’s kind of funny that you draw up horrible pictures of sexual redistributionism, analogous to the pictures wealthy people draw of economic redistribution. Those two aren’t equivalent, of course (there might be a horribly totalitarian way to redistribute sex, but not love). But either way, it doesn’t matter. Since I am not a utilitarian like everyone seems to be around here, I can say with Thoreau:
No one demands that you fix all the woes of all the lonely people. No one is demanding any active change from you at all. But you should wash your hands of actively hurting them, e.g. by demonizing “nice guys” in clickbaiting online feminist rags like Jezebel.
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Presumably taking mild issue with a part of this post doesn’t commit me to a full-throated defence of abuse?
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Did you even understand the point of the analogy? You were precisely the intended audience. If you have even a modicum of intellectual integrity and reflectiveness you will be taken aback at the mismatch in your reactions to the two situations, which in fact ARE analogous, and not just come up with a question-begging explanation of how they are actually different.
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Link to your tumblr isn’t correct, it goes to
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/96169183246/of-course-you-cant-recall-it-you-live-inside-an
You need to take out the first part.
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Probably Scott left the http:// out of the URL and so it is interpreted as a relative one.
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A couple of typos, relevant for people following links or looking things up: (1) The “more about what they pay attention to” link is missing its http; (2) The first time you correctly say Sheng, but the second time you say Shang.
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?? No, that response – almost verbatim – comes from the libertarian / conservative right ALL THE DAMN TIME. I literally can’t make a “hey guys sometimes its hard to be poor” post in certain places without getting that shit. And not even conservative places, just like… political discussions on fetlife, for example, or on certain gaming / geek boards.
So this behavior is absolutely NOT unique to the Social Justice movement; most people think this way about powerless people that they don’t respect.
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I mostly agree with this, but there’s venom from the feminists that doesn’t come from the Bootstraps types. The rightist thinks you’re a bum; the leftist thinks you’re a rapist. It’s clear which one is worse.
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no, the rightist thinks you’re a murdering criminal druggie thug, which to me feels about on the same level as rapist.
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The rightist probably also thinks that you’re a rapist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case
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I think you’ve overestimated the number of rightists present in New York City during the 1980s and 1990s.
I’m not sure that folk accusing you of being a rapist are that much worse than folk giving ‘helpful’ advice that presumes you’re either a criminal, have sub-room temperature IQ, or both, though.
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<applauds>
(Well, mostly, but I can nitpick disagreements later.)
(Also your “what they pay attention to” link is broken, missing http://)
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Although, before I start going on about what here I disagree with, let me post a joke from Nazi Germany that I learned of from this Reddit thread. I don’t think I need to explain the analogy.
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snort How true.
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You think wrong.
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OK, maybe I just didn’t really think that, I was just feeling lazy and it was maybe a little off-topic.
Basically: First the feminists tell you that any realistic way you can think of of trying to initiate anything romantic/sexual is evil. Then, once you’ve finally resigned yourself to never doing so, they tell you that not doing so is evil.
Yes, it’s a double-bind we’ve discussed before, and there are actually substantial disanalogies here, but it was funny enough I thought it was repeating anyway.
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Godwin’s Law! You just lost!
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Laugh out loud brilliant. As entertaining as an episode of the first season of the Wire.
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While this post is amazing and slightly heartbreaking, I would like to point out something that went totally unmentioned.
Look at that seasonal trend on searches for feminism! Wow!
Every year, like clockwork, searches peaked in April and November, and then there was a little dip in winter and a big dip in summer. The dip in summer might be attributed to the school year – but what’s so special about April and November? And no, I checked, Women’s History Month is March, and its effect is imperceptible.
And then it turns out that the seasonal trend is decreasing. This might be blamed on increasing media saturation of feminism, as well as increased globalization counting more internet searches not linked to whatever seasonal cycle was active in 2004. But still! Wow!
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Britain has less of a winter dip: feminism, feminist. French.
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The graph is just the letter “M” repeated over and over. Yet another women’s issue co-opted by the patriarchy.
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The graph is just the letter “W” repeated over and over. Yet another men’s issue co-opted by feminism.
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“capitalism” and “socialism” show similar trends. Maybe midterms and finals?
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I think quite a bit of the awful people getting laid a lot is explainable by my “sluts are evil” theory. People with high sociosexuality tend to be very unpleasant people on a whole bunch of different dimensions (I am Niceness Georg); sociosexuality measures are primarily about desire for multiple and casual sexual partners, not how many partners you actually manage to get, although I would be interested in seeing how the correlations go if you leave out the questions that do involve number of sexual partners. And of course high levels of sexual success are basically only achieved by prioritizing getting laid a lot.
None of this, of course, comforts the MIT-attending virgin.
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What about those of us with high sexuality but low socio? I have very, very large amounts of success with a very, very tiny segment of the population (limited even further by my pickiness).
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Sociosexuality is the term for desiring lots of uncommitted sex with novel partners. I have a very high sociosexuality but I also hate leaving the house; those are not contradictory.
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And unfortunately, IIRC some of the studies that find a negative correlation between sexual success and agreeableness use the number of distinct partners as the proxy for sexual success, which means that two one-night stands will count more than being in a relationship with someone in which you’ve had sex 3000 times.
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had a similar experience growing up, tried to be a nice person, but had no luck dating girls
was creepy guy, thought i would be a virgin forever, no self-confidence
felt really unmasculine, like i was a pathetic loser who couldn’t fit that role at all
women keep their distance from me
wanted to kill myself
somehow this turned into the idea that maybe i was actually a woman or something
talked about this online, and was finally able to open up my feelings and be good friends with some people
got to the point where it felt like it was either get a sex change or kill myself
started thinking of myself as a woman, started taking estrogen, felt at peace
made friends more easily, felt like a friendlier person, finally found someone to date
feel my brain changing to be more ‘woman-like’, start being attracted to status/dominance
get lots of attention from men and women both, and just in general
women open up to me, we talk and laugh and cry together, and i have close female friends for the first time in my life
magically became super-attractive as a woman, like seriously 8 or 9 by my own high standards
feel bad because just not attracted to nice low-status guys, am attracted more to ‘bad boys’
feel bad because i remember how it feels
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So, basically you’re saying that (chemical) castration of Nice Guys is a thing that solves their problems.
Hmm, probably true. That actually is the standard solution widely in use when it comes to horses; only a few alpha males are allowed to be stallions, while most male horses are gelded and thereby end up with a less painfully stressful and more content life.
But I’m not sure humans are ready to hear that we should apply the same tried-and-true solution to them.
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not what i’m saying at all, just sharing my own story is all
probably most dudes would be suicidal on estrogen, like Alan Turing
mostly i just wanted to express the inherent frustration in the issue since i have felt both sides of it
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Turing was off of estrogen for a year before his death.
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If this is true generally it is SUPER IMPORTANT.
Here is a crank theory I want to test: “stereotypically masculine behavior is due to high testosterone, stereotypically feminine behavior is due to high estrogen, and people who display neither behavior are lower than average in sex hormone levels.”
This would explain a lot of what I see in the world, but I don’t know if it’s true.
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Is this greentext?
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forgot about the existence of personal pronouns, capital letters, full stops, and paragraphs with several sentences in them
(SCNR.)
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I’ve just reported my own comment as it’s neither nice nor necessary.
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bookmarked, especially for the agreeableness vs. sexual success references
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Hey, I’ve never gotten any cookies from this blog.
So if we abstract gender out of it, it’s a question of expecting fairness from life. E.g., I’m well-intentioned, I shower, and I don’t beat women, therefore I *deserve* a girlfriend. It’s unfair for women to demand men they are sexually attracted to. Or (to take an example from my life): I went to a good school, I got good grades, I *deserve* a job. It’s not fair that interviewers demand social skills.
And the feminist response, depressing as it is, is likely accurate: when your desired outcome depends on others’ actions, there is no reason to assume “fairness” will prevail.
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I have never said that I deserve a girlfriend. Or a job.
All I have said is that I will likely starve if I can’t pay for food, and that I will likely wither away if I am not shown affection.
And that the longer I go without eating, the harder it will be to perform well at a job interview, and that the longer I go without affection, the harder it will be to perform well when a girl smiles at me.
But I never said that I DESERVE to eat, or that I DESERVE affection. Just that I need it.
You used the word “deserve”. Not me.
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On the other hand, if I say “I am so hungry and I’m tired of being homeless, I need a job”, and you say “well here’s how you build a good resume, and here’s the skills companies like me are looking for!”… and then I show that I have those skills, and I build exactly the resume you asked for, and multiple companies choose to pass me over in exchange for people who do NOT have the skills you listed and who didn’t even submit a resume, I STILL won’t say that I “deserve” a job more than those people, but I’ll certainly make intimations that by the criteria you gave me, something is up.
And if when I say something is up, you say “STOP ACTING LIKE YOU DESERVE A JOB, YOU AREN’T OWED SHIT”, then I KNOW something is definitely up, because I may be many things, but stupid is not one of them.
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“I show that I have those skills, and I build exactly the resume you asked for, and multiple companies choose to pass me over in exchange for people who do NOT have the skills you listed and who didn’t even submit a resume…”
Ialdabaoth, wouldn’t that just mean that the criteria you were given for how to get a job are incomplete?
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Sure. But if they’re incomplete, then when I come back and say “I didn’t get the job anywhere, and I applied to a bunch of places, what gives?”, the answer should be “oh, we forgot these other things – did you wear a suit and did you shave and shower?”, not “QUIT WHINING YOU PATHETIC WORM, YOU AREN’T OWED A JOB!”
Also, when you get to the “wear a suit and tie, shower and shave”, I should be allowed to say “Umm, I’m homeless and have no money for clothes or for cleaning clothes, how am I supposed to do that consistently enough?” without you yelling at me for deserving to be jobless because I’m homeless. I’m not saying you should give me a job, just… you know, acknowledge that I’m in a shitty no-win situation and you’re sorry and you wish you could help but I’m just too stinky.
I can snap every single piece of this metaphor if you’d like, but I’m afraid I don’t have Scott’s rhetorical skills.
I’m also having a really bad day…week…, so it would be really awesome if Scott would step in and snap all these metaphors for me, and I would owe him one.
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Do you (or anyone) know a cite for purer form of the feminist response? I sort of want to argue it’s a terrible thing to say, but I’d like to at least start from an original version of the argument rather than just a reference to it.
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Well, yes, it is totally unfair that one cannot get a job without having social skills. It is particularly unfair to disabled people who may be incapable of learning said social skills. I am not sure what your point is.
I feel like… if someone is in a shit situation, then it is nice to be able to help them, but even if you can’t help them, you should at least let them acknowledge that the situation is shit.
Also, as Scott’s girlfriend, he has many more selling points than showering and not beating women. He is an excellent boyfriend and I highly recommend dating him to everyone.
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“Social justice chaotic evil undead lich necromancers” is quite possibly my favorite sentence of all time on this blog. It’s just so fun to say! ^o^
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I think I’d run into the “Nice Guy” (caps included) meme before running into Heartiste, etc because there were a lot of movies/novels/whatnot that seemed to argue that if guys were persistent enough, held enough stereos over their heads, won the big sportsball game, they would be awarded the girl that they wanted at the beginning of the movie.
That didn’t make them bad guys for wanting, but I remember having this kind of story called out as part of our background culture that could cause guys to get pissed at me for not playing by the normal rules, if I didn’t care about the stereo they were holding or the sportsball win or them just being generally around and nice. My impression was that I was being given the Nice Guy meme defensively, so I wouldn’t feel guilty/betrayalish for not wanting to date guys I didn’t want to date.
[quick disclaimer: the Jezebel stuff is gross and hateful, and doesn't help correct the error I'm describing above]
That’s my point on the good idea that “Nice Guys” can point to. Now here are my less cogent ideas on what frustrated nice guys can do. I’m in a quasi-similar position, in that I’ve had two boyfriends, don’t place a high probability on ever winding up with another, but really would like to wind up married and have children. I’ve been trying to figure out how to adjust my expectations without nurturing anger or resentment.
I have been having mixed success! The main thing I focus on is other ways to be close to/of service with people (sublimation, in the good sense). Eve Tushnet (a celibate Catholic lesbian) has written a lot of stuff I find helpful in her upcoming book.
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Catholicism is creepy
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Even if I agreed, this is a spectacularly unhelpful response.
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Can you be more specific? I *do* find Eve’s perspective helpful in my particular circumstances (and sexual orientation isn’t the reason why I don’t anticipate I’ll wind up married). She’s speaking from the experience of one particular class of the broader problem of not anticipating romantic relationships (not necessarily through any fault of your own).
ETA: I may have misunderstood which comment you found unhelpful, but if it was mine, I would appreciate the clarification.
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It was drethelin’s comment.
I agree with the top four paragraphs and not having read the book, can’t really make a judgement call on the fifth.
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I agree I just didn’t want it to leave unsaid and then for me to forget about it and go somewhere else but here’s a bit of an elaboration.
Normally I can accept that most people’s epistemology including my own is probably terrible. I can view the fact that billions of people think billions of others are going to burn in hell with equanimity.
Other times I get freaked the fuck out by people who believe in a “Loving” god that made them lesbians and then forbade them to have sex with women or whatever the fuck. It’s especially disturbing because Catholicism is the thing I seem to notice atheists convert to more than other things, and I just plain don’t grok that. So to me it’s really disturbing when people advocate self-abnegation and loneliness in the name of (something emotionally equivalent to believing Elvis is still alive).
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The reason you notice atheists converting to Catholicism is that it’s different enough from atheism to be worth bothering converting (unlike watered-down Protestantism or American Buddhism) but not totally beyond the pale in elite American society (unlike fundamentalist Protestantism or Islam).
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I’d be curious to hear why you think you aren’t likely to find another boyfriend if you’re interested in sharing. (For the sake of improving my models of single women and stuff.)
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I think you are too easily buying into feminist stereotypes about how MRAs MUST be evil because they oppose feminism so of COURSE the “manosphere” (a group whose only commonality is that they believe men have needs, placing them in their own distinct fringe) must be evil and corrupted too! PUAs and MRAs have nothing to do with each other and lumping them together in this way is buying into a lie feminists push in order to keep their stranglehold on the conversation. Feminism is corrupted by the fact that its core tenets are completely wrong and based in misandry. The MHRM is “corrupted” by the presence of people that aren’t actually a part of it.
Like, do you know what the ideology or worldview of MRAs is? You seem to just be taking the feminist assumption of “they must be for bad things” even as you reject the other feminist assumptions.
Also: It’s absurd and illogical to think that “the better parts” of feminism and “the manosphere” should team up. Because first off, the “the manosphere” is not united around any ideology or worldview, the only thing they have in common is the belief men have needs. Second, if you are just referring to MRAs… Look, I’m an MRA. Obviously. I reject feminism. I have looked at feminism, I have looked at what feminism claims to believe and claims to teach, what feminism actually believes and teaches, and the results of feminism’s actions, and I have concluded “Fuck that noise.” Feminism is wrong one hundred percent of the time. That is WHY feminism needs to be destroyed, not just ignored, because every person who subscribes to feminist ideology is one more person who will never, ever correctly analyze any single situation, and who will vehemently, violently oppose any effort at reform that might actually solve a problem.
What you’re saying to me is “You should find common ground with the people who are wrong one hundred percent of the time! You should team up with the people who are wrong one hundred percent of the time, listen to their completely wrong ideas, and cooperate and follow some of their completely misguided plans of action, in order to police your movement of people that aren’t actually in your movement!”
Feminists and MRAs cooperating isn’t like getting Democrats and Republicans to cooperate on a bill, it’s getting libertarians and Communists to agree how to solve a problem. Everything one side thinks will solve the problem, the other side will think makes it worse. It doesn’t matter how nice or reasonable they are, and it doesn’t matter if both of them are motivated by wanting good things. The fundamental ways of conceptualizing the world and analyzing problems to find a solution just don’t mesh.
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You could get libertarians and Communists to team up against Nazis. They don’t have *literally* opposite views, and neither do MRAs and feminists. MRAs want to improve the status of men relative to women, feminists want to improve the status of women relative to men, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t cooperate on something that improved the absolute status of both so long as it left the relative statuses the same.
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There is no such thing as “absolute status”. ALL status is relative.
What you GET are cooperations on “improving the status of feminist men and women and improving the status of MRA men and women relative to the status of everyone else”. Which is why, when a woman gets abused by an alpha male, her friends all take it out on a hapless Nice Guy – and when a trying-to-be-alpha gets shot down by a queen bee, he takes it out on a hapless fat chick.
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When I said “status” I did not mean “social status” but rather the general term meaning “position”, sort of like “how well is your life going”. I apologize for using confusing terminology.
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Did you mean “how well is your life going” in the sense of “position” or in the sense of “QALY”? because I think these are different things, and I don’t think the feminists or MRAs give a fuck about QALY at all, except as talking points to jockey for position.
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I mean QALY, and I am somehow not *quite* so cynical about the motives of the feminist movement as you are. People sometimes do work together to make the world a better place. That they are often too busy squabbling over relative power to do so doesn’t mean it can never happen.
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I actually thought you had the better of the argument with Veronica in the last thread, so I mention for your own calibration purposes that you’ve veered into “sounds unhinged” in this one. Claiming that feminism is a priori wrong about everything is an extraordinary claim.
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I don’t think it’s an indefensible one.
I forget if it was here or at LW that I read the article about how, stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence, you can’t find the correct path by just taking the opposite of what a stupid person says, and stupid people can be right sometimes by chance. And you are probably thinking something along those lines, right?
But I thought it was kind of missing half of the issue: first off, there’s seldom just one wrong answer and one right answer, there’s several “right answers” and theoretically infinite wrong ones. And second, if you don’t know how to reason or deduce or observe, you might sometimes get the right answer by chance, but if you know how to do it WRONG, it is entirely possible that you will never arrive at the right answer.
If you take a math test, and you don’t know how to find the area of a circle and just write random numbers down, you might get the right one by chance. If you take that test and you think the equation to find the area of a circle is er^2, then you will not get a single answer right. Your answers will be consistent, you can show how you got them, they’ll all match each other, and they will all be wrong.
Feminism’s worldview and interpretive framework are a faulty equation. By looking only at how women are victimized and how men are strong, by starting from the fundamental assumption that “sexism is hatred of and the desire to harm women”, applying the feminist interpretation to events will always, always lead you to a conclusion that is wrong.
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I’d expect at least a few circumstances where “hatred of and desire to harm women” is actually a moderately good description of events. At the very least, there’s not exactly a shortage of serial killers that specifically targeted women.
I’ve got issues with several common axioms in modern feminism — ignoring movement-agnostic issues like the atrocious math and questionable science, I think they looked at the dust-speck versus torture problem and picked the worst possible answer — but I find the claim that some group is /always/ wrong to be extraordinary enough to require additional group.
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There are serial killers who target women.
This stick out in our minds because it is unusual for women to be victims of violence instead of men, and it is more emotionally affecting than the targeting of men because we place much, much, much higher innate value on women’s lives.
If feminism were to claim “that guy hated women and wanted to hurt them,” and then ended that sentence and paragraph there, then it would be right. But feminism and feminists cannot stop there. They will invariably add on that this is an expression of our society’s accepted hatred for women, and normalization of harm to women, even though this is the complete opposite of the truth. They will then add that this means we need to “have a conversation” about how women don’t feel safe, and what men should do to make them feel safer, even though women are by every objective measurement possible much, much safer than men. The “conversation” will consist, as it always has, of shaming and blaming toward men for being Bad and not doing enough to place the well-being of women above their own, and the comprehensive removal of agency from all women.
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The MRM does not seem that bad right now. But I think its getting worse. I started to get worried once I saw “NAWALT” used seriously. This makes it harder for MRAs to stop the movement from unfairly attacking women. On top of this accusations of “Concern trolling” are used to shut down internal criticism.
On top of this A Voice for men is now more or less the undisputed center of the movement. Paul Elam is no Warrne Farrell (thankfully still active). AVFM runs the same over the top emotional crap that feminist sites strive on. For now I agree the MRM is better than feminism on average but I see the writing on the wall. My guess is the MRM will turn out no better than the feminist movement on average. Though maybe having two fighting movements is better than one uncontested one?
Also we both surely agree the Redpill stuff really is super terrible? r/redpill is a center of the movement and very representative. And yet they have a an article in the sidebar call “Woman: The Most Responsible Teenager In The House.” Lots of the CENTRAL redpill stuff is very sexist imo. Though I want to 100% agree redpill =/= MRM.
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Redpill is super terrible, but you just agreed that redpill != MRM, so why are we bringing it up?
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Wait, I misread you, when you said that /r/TheRedPill was central to the movement, I thought you were still talking about MRAs, so I didn’t know why you were bringing it up. But you meant that the Red Pill reddit is central to the Red Pill ideological movement. Which is true. Sorry for misunderstanding.
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MRAs want men to get custody of their children more often. Feminists want men to do more of the childcare. Why couldn’t they cooperate on a “make men more likely to be primary caregivers” goal? It seems like it would give both groups something they want.
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I would just like to add that Harry Harlow’s experiments laid the groundwork for Modern Neonatal Intensive Care Units, so there are probably something on the order of hundreds of thousands of people alive today who wouldn’t be if he hadn’t basically tortured cute baby rhesus monkeys to death… And before you ask yes the survival rate for premature babies pre- and post- were really that bad. It turns out they need to be touched often and gently in order to survive, go figure.
Science can be a bitch, but somebodies gotta do it.
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I agree with the utilitarianism. However, Harlow himself basically just didn’t care about baby animals, from what I’ve heard. So he’s not a hero, even if his actions could be defended as heroic in themselves.
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Someone who saved hundreds of thousands of human lives doesn’t count as a hero because he didn’t feel bad enough about the dozens of animals he harmed in the process? Get serious please.
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You may disagree but please be substantive about it. For better or worse, virtue ethics is a legitimate philosophical position with plenty of real adherents.
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http://lesswrong.com/lw/ll/mere_messiahs/
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Another honest, clearly-written and insightful post.
I have a couple of random semi-objections.
I’m 44 years old. I was in this terrible, unbearable situation of being the Nice Guy in the frickin 80s. 1992 was the worst year of my life. There WAS no internet, so I don’t really feel that it has any direct connection to the Manosphere or Feminosphere. It may be some kind of species-level problem.
You make the very valid point that the situation is Unfair. But…so what? Romantic success is not supposed to be Fair, and the world is full of Unfair things. That doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is how to deal with it.
Romantic success can at least to some extent be taught, like a set of skills, starting with smiling and flirting and so on. I even wonder whether these skills should be formally taught to young adults, with both genders participating in classes.
I also think you missed one or two chances at humor. Barry may be unsuccessful in the dating scene, but I’m guessing he may not be extremely happy to find himself romantically involved with the kind of woman Henry is sleeping with. You could probably base an entire sitcom around such a relationship.
Finally, if I were a single and romanceless woman I wouldn’t find much in your post to help. I wonder what they think?
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Feminism’s been around for a long time. It used to be called Women’s Lib and before that the Suffrage movement. But then women got votes and it became increasingly ridiculous to pretend they were enslaved, so the movement took on the modern name “feminism”, which is nice because it doesn’t name any specific goals that you could reach that would mean you could stop fighting on behalf of women.
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Smiling and flirting so aren’t necessary, and I wouldn’t recommend starting with them. (Plenty of unhappy Nice Guys actually do smile and flirt. It’s just that it’s called being a creep when it’s not a high-status guy doing it. So I’d instead recommend starting by getting high status. After that, it doesn’t even matter much whether one smiles — plenty of Bad Boys indeed don’t.)
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ding ding motherfucking ding.
I have the weird advantage of having been low status, then high status, then low status again, and this is all appallingly accurate.
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For something that’s not necessary, smiling and flirting seem to have gotten me quite a bit of sex. And I’m not sure if ‘high status’ is some kind of technical term, but in my experience it has little to do with being romantically successful.
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That’s not the point. Smiling and flirting will get you a lot of sex if you are the sort of person that just about anything would have got you a lot of sex.
In your case, I’m betting confidence is what gets you sex; you could display confidence through the right kind of smiling and flirting just as easily as you could display confidence through the right kind of aloofness and disregard. But being unconfident (and unattractive in other ways, such as signaling low-income or desperation) will cause any flirting you do to be the wrong kind of flirting, and cause any ignoring you do to be the wrong kind of ignoring.
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Why are you so certain that flirting and smiling aren’t important? I agree confidence is also important, but I don’t see why confidence should be the only important thing.
Also, it’s interesting to hear that you were low status then high status then low status. I’ve gone through that same sequence of events.
Prediction: status is more important for having sex with people you already know. For casual sex, it is less important.
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Presenting as being valuable. In most parts of American culture, this involves displays of income, height, musculature, not overweight, as well as certain levels of human contacts. Posture. It’s not what we mean when people say appearance, since much of it is in actions and not just looks, but it’s all very obvious in a short time of being near someone.
Essentially, what people actually mean when they say “confidence”.
I think the question isn’t whether it’s important. It’s that it’s never sufficient.
Smiling and flirting might well be important, if you’ve already got the other necessary traits. But if you don’t, they’re not only unhelpful, they’re much more likely to get you labeled as a creep.
There’s an OKCupid study that compared scores for ‘looks’ (taken when someone was shown only profile pictures) were compared against ‘personality’ (taken when someone was shown both profile pictures and text) — even if there /was no/ personality.
Interestingly, this isn’t limited to women or even het relationships. It’s a little more complicated for gay guys because the status for gay men is a lot more varied (bears are high status for some gay men, but low status for others, possibly related to age?), but it’s very present : if you present a high status Grindr profile during Pride, you’ll find yourself inundated with dicks, but low-status folk won’t get nearly the same level of attention.
((Caveat: I’m not really good at understanding human sexuality, and lack much interest beyond the academic, so this may be incorrect or incomplete.))
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Ialdaboath, my 22-year-old self would have laughed til he cried to hear your description of me.
I can assure you, my first relationship was one awkward fumbling moment from first word to break up.
Meeting women is not magical, half of it is trial and error.
Also, Gattsuru, your usage of ‘status’ just seems to be ‘whatever might make you attractive to women’, anything from height to muscles to wealth. Kind of obvious and not particularly useful, like saying women find attractive whatever women find attractive. And there’s no secret what those things usually are.
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I am a single and romanceless woman. My main question is, ‘where the heck are all the others’?
Like, this post focuses on guys. And maybe that’s totally appropriate because guys are eighty percent or ninety-five percent or whatever of the romanceless people. But I still wonder. I mean, there are three billion women on Earth, some of them must be romanceless. Is there a strange cosmic force keeping me from meeting them?
Just to make sure I don’t have my selection bias goggles on, I went through my women Facebook friends, and counted them one by one, up to about eighty. Some are rich, some are poor. Some are huge computer geeks, others keep getting infected with viruses because they install the Bonzi Buddy toolbar. Some are American, some European, some Asian. And, yes, some are overweight, or are just assholes. But every single one has had lots of attractive, successful, high-status partners.
I don’t get it, I really don’t.
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The fact that every one of the female friends you encountered had had “lots of attractive, successful, high-status partners” suggests that your friends probably aren’t a very representative sample group, since there just aren’t all that many attractive, successful high-status guys, and the ones who exist tend to be with women who also have those qualities.
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What’s more likely is that her group of friends isn’t a very honest sample group.
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As a perpetually single and romanceless male, I do feel bad that these discussions tend to be focused around romanceless males and the females who berate them for being “Nice Guys”, while completely ignoring perpetually single and romanceless females.
It does seem less common for a woman to receive little or no romantic attention, but I find it surprising that the vast majority of your female Facebook friends have had “lots of attractive, successful, high-status partners”. Of course, I don’t know much about your particular situation. I wonder how much of it may be demographics. I know that, for instance, my mother in her youth was very attractive and garnered a lot of romantic attention from men, yet she went years at a time in her adult life without dating anybody, because she was reasonably picky and just happened to be immersed in the wrong crowd.
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This is not true for casual sex, but (minus the relatively small effects of female bisexuality, cheating, and polyamory) for every man who is not having a relationship, there is a woman who is not having a relationship. Because math.
IME there seem to be quite a lot of complaints about the subject from fat women and black women.
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It doesn’t matter whether a person is a “hard worker”. Other people don’t owe them money without consent.
Money is the unit of caring. The whole point of money is that it can’t be redistributed without consent. Otherwise it stops being the unit of caring and becomes a worthless token.
Also, I seriously don’t understand how people can be allowed to have children they can’t afford to support. Children have a human right not to be forced to suffer from poverty, and other people have no obligation whatsoever to finance children they didn’t even bring into the world.
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So children have a human right to receive financial support from their parents without the parent’s consent?
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Yes, because the parents caused the costs, harm and suffering of the children, which they could simply have omitted.
If someone inflicts a cost or suffering on you, they owe you compensation.
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But if a billion people each cause you a tenth of a penny worth of hardship and suffering, who do you take the million dollars from?
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Those are certainly opinions!
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Scott: SEE?
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Oh, come on. He didn’t deny that it was hard to be poor, let alone accuse the Hard Worker of being a murderous thug. Not to deny that it happens, but it’s pretty obnoxious for you to use all caps while moving the goalposts.
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If money is the unit of caring, then I suppose it’s OK to let poor people starve (including kids). Their lack of money is proof that they don’t care about surviving.
Right? Otherwise money is meaningless. (You didn’t quite lay out the argument for why it was an either-or, why money must be the universal unit of giving a damn or else be meaningless, but I’m sure you have one.)
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>Their lack of money is proof that they don’t care about surviving.
Their lack of money is proof that other people don’t care about them surviving. Pretending otherwise, while the poverty is actually ongoing, is merely hypocritical.
If you cared about other people’s poverty, you would give them your own money, instead of formulating it as an abstract political demand that just so happens to be paid by others.
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Unless you’re a utilitarian rather than a virtue ethicist, and recognize that collective problems tend to require collective solutions.
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First, poverty is not a collective problem. If I don’t have any money, this is my individual problem. If you care about me not starving, you can give me your money or you can coerce strangers to give me theirs, but either way, you are solving my problem, not a collective problem.
Second, even if you are a utilitarian, you must recognize that money is only money to the degree to which it cannot be redistributed without consent. You can start the printing press or send people with guns to take people’s money, or hack bank accounts, whatever. But as soon as people realize that money is no longer a unit of caring, they will stop caring about productivity, efficiency, and investment – all of utilitarian consequence.
Finally, no one is a utilitarian. In practice, the word is a short-hand for “the ends justify the means”, which is a rhetorical token for “We are allowed to violate whomever or whatever we want, as long as we can present a vaguely okay-sounding rationale in the political arena”. People do it for ulterior motives, never for the greater good.
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You want to stop couples having children unless they meet your standards of being able to support them? I can see that going well, good luck. Next, eugenics?
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We do stop people from having sex with children, engaging in trade with children, employing children, etc. unless those interactions meet our standards (e.g. age of consent).
I see nothing obviously different about financial standards to bring children into the world. They don’t necessarily have to be high, but “not starving under age 5″ seems like a pretty good start.
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Or, in a civilised country, we can just make sure all parents of children are given enough money to feed their kids, all the time. We don’t even have to stop at age 5.
The cost isn’t even very high – child benefit is around £12 billion in the UK. That’s paid until the child leaves fulltime education/turns 18, and is £20 a week for one child. Compare with around £80 billion a year for pensions, or £40 billion a year on defence excluding nuclear weapons and research.
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I’m generally a lot more pro-feminism and pro-social justice than you, and I usually even find myself reasonably well accepted by others of such orientation. But I generally agree that feminists give terrible dating advice. I do think that there seem to be guys who fit the feminist stereotype of horrible Nice Guys, but I also think that internet feminist criticisms of the phenomenon often overreach and become misguided in the ways you describe. So not all feminists disagree with you (unless I’m kicked out of the club for this comment, which seems unlikely as if occasionally expressing criticism of the movement sufficed to get me ostracized, it would have happened a long time ago).
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Just a quick note: I think it would be better to attribute the post you attribute to a guy called John to drewlsummitt. The post at aguycalledjohn is a reblog of drewlsummitt’s post. (NB: I am aware that reblogging someone else’s post in its entirety (with attribution) is perfectly acceptable and normalized on Tumblr, and I’m not saying aguycalledjohn did anything wrong.)
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I wish you would tackle tougher targets. You should go live in a cave for a while and meditate on nature. Then you’ll be more likely to find fully novel insights. When you get involved in debates like this, your arguments are good, but they’re never important, in the sense they don’t change any of the paradigms I have. And it’s your ability to reshape my thoughts that keeps me reading your blog, and I humbly request you focus on that rather than drama. But that said, I totally understand the entertainment value of a good and personal argument.
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I disagree, and unironically believe that the beatings should continue until the morale improves.
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This “drama” is actually really important because there is a deficit of intelligent opposition to feminism, and on the margins, these sorts of posts are more useful than “live in cave for a while” insights. Also, insights are typically generated by interacting with the ideas of others and putting them together in a new way, and living in a cave inhibits that.
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Oddly enough, in that very comment section I linked more of his articles.
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Woohoo! Scott quoted someone who quoted me (on something I said on LessWrong).
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Excellent post, Scott. Another similarity between the manosphere and feminism is what – in 2nd wave feminism – is called the “click” moment – when you suddenly realize how *you are relentlessly treated like a second class citizen* which maps very well on the whole “red pill” metaphor.
Thing is – I think they’re both a little right. Betty Friedan spends a huge chunk of The Feminine Mystique on the messages of women’s magazines – both 2nd wave feminists and the denizens of the ‘sphere were taught that doing certain things were the path to happiness, and that turned out to be untrue.
So, following the ‘sphere really did make sense of my past failures with women (and successes) and helped me meaningfully with a bunch of areas in my life – my marriage, my inability to set personal boundaries, my conflictedness about masculinity. It felt seriously like a “click” moment, actually.
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Scott, I don’t necessarily disagree with much of this, but I have to say: part of the art of politics is selectively pointing out the bad tactics of your opponents. When done correctly this allows you to appear unbiased since you are technically only saying correct things, but you’re deceiving people into believing that your opponents are unusually bad. At this you are a master. I went into more detail here
You claim that this argument is representative of what people concerned with social justice think on the basis that lots of prominent feminists have made it. But who the fuck cares what prominent feminists think? I don’t care what Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins think about religion*. Anecdotal data, the feminists that I am acquainted with are well aware of the fact that for socially awkward men, approaching someone can be very difficult. However they would simply prefer it if said men understand their right to say no, without trying to make them feel bad.
*A master of rhetoric could easily use the very same tactic you are using to argue that atheists think that religion is evil and want to destroy it by cleverly quoting “prominent atheists”.
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He’s not just quoting prominent feminists but things that are repeated over and over again in comments and throughout the internet by many many people.
I also think lots of atheists DO want to to destroy religion. That’s something religious people should legitimately be concerned about.
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Nah. Well, not in my mostly-secular country, anyway. We’re approaching 50% non-religious in the UK, if indeed we haven’t passed it already, and most atheists here will go “Grr Magdalene Laundries” or “Grr Islamists” or whatever, but otherwise completely ignore religion.
The mosque down the street, the parish church over the road, are at no risk from us, because they aren’t a threat. We haven’t even got organised enough to kick the bishops out of the House of Lords, FFS, and we are half the population and nearly half the voters.
I think USian atheists are more likely to want to destroy religion, but USian atheists are much, much more threatened than UK atheists, be it with social disapproval, loss of employment, or indeed violence.
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It isn’t necessary for a majority of supporters of social justice to employ these arguments for them to be exceptionally damaging. I don’t think Scott chooses these arguments to eviscerate at random. He writes about them because he sees people getting hurt by them.
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People are getting hit left and right by the social justice community. Every other day I hear a new story like this . Unless you are particularly left-wing AND masochistic I don’t see how people can endure in this atmosphere.
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I suspect the way to think about feminists vs Henry is not the way Heartiste thinks about them. Rather, I think internet feminists tend to be very introverted women (that’s why they spend so much time on the internet) who suffer from social phobia. And since they’re scared of people in general, they’re scared of men in particular. The internet makes people less empathetic in general, so they go around yelling really loudly about how creepy guys who try to start conversations with them are, etc.
But in fact not all women are like that at all. You’ve got other women who are extremely extraverted who are not nearly as afraid of men. And if you look at women from the lower classes (where all this wife-beating tends to happen), women are more likely to be extraverted and more likely to be concerned about how powerful a man is than his feminism cred.
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This resonates with me (a guy, for the record) because I’m introverted enough that when I’m tired or stressed, I’m genuinely offended and angered by the idea that people would want to start talking to me if I don’t explicitly opt in. I don’t get randomly hit on a lot on the street, certainly not aggressively (see: I’m a guy), but the idea that people will talk to me can be very stressful.
I do notice that my female friends tend to roughly agree on the facts of what behaviors they expect out of men, but vary greatly on the “and therefore men are all scary and I can’t trust them” to “and so I’m going to go out and fuck lots of guys” spectrum. Has a lot more to do with their comfort with risk and openness to experience than it does with object-level beliefs about the risks of interacting with men.
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Two further notes:
1. I’ve noticed that a lot of SJers, or just liberals in general, don’t seem to grasp the notion of the contrarian hierarchy; the react to those above them on it the same as to those below them, when really entirely different responses are called for. This problem is probably not restricted to liberals at all, that’s just mostly who I’ve noticed it from because that’s who I talk to.
(That said, grouping the “manosphere” (as opposed to the Men’s Right’s Movement or PUA) in with the old-school sexists seems to be, uh, basically correct, from what little I’ve dipped my toe in there. Fundamentalists/reactionaries are not traditionalists/conservatives, etc., but while the difference is important in some contexts, it’s often ignorable. MRM meanwhile is definitely above feminism on the contrarian hierarchy; PUA’s position is unclear, possibly off in some other direction entirely. (Note that going up the contrarian hierarchy does not necessarily increase correctness at all!))
2. It’s interesting to see the different narratives (chronologies?) of how you get hostilities between feminist-types and MRM-types. (For simplicity, I’m going to use “MRM-types” to mean, like, “favors equality but is not a feminist” types, even though that includes people who are not MRAs (e.g. Scott, me). Because back in the “Words, Words, Words” thread, Barry was saying it goes the other way. (My experience agrees with Scott’s, unsurprisingly.)
Basically, Barry’s story: MRA-types are initially hostile to feminism, so feminism is hostile back.
As opposed to Scott’s story: MRA-types start out as unorthodox feminists, but after seeing how feminists treat heretics, they go into open rebellion. (Feminism “shot first”.)
Would be interesting to get more information on this. (Are non-terrible feminists hostile to MRA-types because MRA-types are hostile to feminists, because MRA-types associate “feminism” with the horrible sort and non-terrible feminists associate “feminism” with themselves? Really this last thing is a huge problem in itself — feminists just discounting the damage done by the worst ones, thinking, oh, those are clearly ridiculous, nobody would listen to them, and anyway a few extremists don’t define a movement… ignoring that they totally do, if there the ones who have the largest effects! But this is turning into a different comment which I mean to write elsewhere, so I’ll stop here.)
Honestly, it always seems kind of ridiculous when people attribute awful results to the MRM or the manosphere — these groups have no influence! (At least, not within the “garden”.
)
Edit: Also it’s worth pointing out that most of the reason I really don’t like the MRM is that it basically copies all the awfulness of feminism but with the genders reversed. If you’re a feminist complaining about the awfulness of MRM — look to your own movement! They learned it from you! (Or at least, that’s my story. I suppose Barry might disagree.
)
Edit: Also, this is important:
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Sincere question: how would you address people at different points on the contrarian hierarchy differently– particularly when people espouse views that are not actually all that different from groups lower on the hierarchy, as you pointed out?
Non-manosphere example: Mencius Moldbug is higher on the contrarian hierarchy than people who believe in liberal democrats, who are higher on the hierarchy than unreconstructed absolute monarchists (yes, this last group is relatively rare in developed countries, but your link accepts that this is the case in a lot of hierarchies). However, Moldbug supports the same sort of political system that Louis XIV would have. I imagine that the arguments I would use to convince people that Moldbug’s proposed system is bad would be roughly the same as the ones I would use to critique Louis XIV.
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The difference is that if B sits directly above A on the hierarchy, that means B’s standard arguments are meant to rebut A’s standard arguments. Or, B is taking into account things that A is not.
This means that if you’re B, you can repeat standard arguments, because there’s a good chance A hasn’t seriously considered them before. If they have, they’ve really thought about things seriously, then you may actually be in for an interesting debate! But it’s possible they haven’t. And then you won’t need to really seriously engage with them.
If you’re A, and you repeat standard arguments, B will already have counters prepared; you’ll look like an idiot for making such elementary mistakes! I mean, really, have you not familiarized yourself with the subject at all? If you want to talk to B, you have to do it seriously, not dismissively. If you treat them dismissively, you’re just showing that you don’t really understand their position (even if you can’t see this).
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But aren’t most people who are at “B” on the contradiction hierarchy just smart people who have rationalized their way into positions which are actually terrible and stupid by ignoring commonly-known evidence?
Consider the Moldbug example: I would say that two pretty good arguments against absolute monarchy are a) That absolute monarchies are not “idiot-proof” (like every other system that invests absolute power in a person who the populace has no mechanism for getting rid of short of outright rebellion, they’re not robust against terrible leadership), and b) Historical actually-existing absolute monarchies had terrible human rights records, and contemporary countries which are absolute monarchies (like Saudi Arabia) and de-facto absolute monarchies (like North Korea) are even worse. (These arguments could also be leveled against Stanlinist-era Soviet-style Communism as well– I would consider metacontrarian arguments for that position as misguided as Moldbug’s). These are structural flaws in absolute monarchy which you couldn’t remedy without making your hypothetical absolute monarchy *not* an absolute monarchy.
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No he doesn’t.
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Hey Scott, this is tangential to your post but do you have any idea why the google trends data for “feminist” shows a pretty clear seasonal variation?
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http://www.researchpipeline.com/wordpress/2013/05/29/seasonal-spikes-in-womens-rights/
I think I’ve found the answer and it’s rather amusing.
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Scott, this is quite off-topic, but your mention of monkey studies brought it to mind. Have you read “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan? I think you will really enjoy it and get a lot from reading it, if you haven’t read it already. It’s one of my favourites.
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A really, really good post based on more than ideology or even ideology comparisons but real data, like the linked studies. Thank you.
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I do not understand why everyone seemingly agrees no one “deserves” a boyfriend/girlfriend or a job. Decent people deserve to have their needs met. They deserve to live a life where their deeply held desires are fulfilled. This doesn’t mean rape or theft is ok, violence is not an answer to these problems. But it means that its a tragedy for a kind, beautiful man of 45 to be unable to find someone.
I can’t grasp how anyone says this stuff. I certainly feel I deserve a job and a significant other and a group of friends who love and respect me. So do most people. Are people just pretending to be humble or do they really not feel like they deserve these basic elements of a good life?
disclaimer: some people may not want this stuff, more power to them. I hope they find Buddhist peace or whatever they are looking for.
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God damn it, can we all *please* agree to unpack the expectations of our words here? This is exactly the sort of thing that we shouldn’t be wasting time on.
To be slightly less grumpy: “deserve” can mean two different things. You can “deserve” something in that it’s sad that you don’t have it and a hypothetical world in which you did would be a superior one, or you can “deserve” something in the sense that you think you ought to actually have it in this world. Wishes versus rights, if you will.
The problem here (beyond the basic is-redistribution-ok leftist-rightist debate which I am ignoring) is that while money and services are more or less fungible, jobs and relationships are very much not. We can tax people and redistribute money, or employ people to provide government services, without feeling like we’re forcing anyone to do anything. But you can’t really get someone a job or a girlfriend without going to a specific person and saying “employ this dude or else,” or “date this dude or else.”
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Those two definitions mean literally the same thing in the context of moral philosophy. Hand-wringing about mechanisms of enforcement and redistribution is an awful non sequitur.
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“One line disproof: if they wanted sex, they’d give a prostitute a couple bucks instead of spiralling into a giant depression.”
There are quite a few things wrong with that argument.
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Then perhaps a constructive contribution would be to point some of them out rather than making a contentless noise comment.
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There is social stigma against using prostitutes.
“What, can’t get a real woman to sleep with you, so you have to pay for it?”
Also, anecdotally I hear that a half-hour with a prostitute in my locality would run about half a week’s pay for a full-time minimum wage worker.
So yes, if someone really wants sex they can pay for it, but that could mean saving up for weeks (for someone facing both romantic and employment troubles, they’re looking at having to save the equivalent of 3 weeks of unemployment benefit in exchange for half an hour with a prostitute).
Not impossible, but really one hell of commitment.
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This is really interesting and comprehensive post. Without defending feminists or feminism, I do have a thought on one part of it: the analogy between nice guys and poor minorities. I would say the difference between Poor Minorities(tm) and Nice Guys(tm) is the resource that is being unfairly distributed: money vs. women. Money is an abstract, non-sentient entity, but women aren’t.
I’ve done my best to introspect on this and I honestly think the parts of me that sympathize with “Nice Guy bashing” aren’t doing so from a powerful playground bully mindset, but from a mindset of fear. As a woman, I fear the people who think that I should be redistributed to the men they deem most morally worthy.
I realize rationally that I have legal rights and no one can redistribute me in this way. But on the other hand, if “society” as a whole tips into this line of thinking, then powerful weapons can be used against me, social shaming being primary amongst them. I’m scared shitless of living in a society where I would be shamed out of making free choices in who to date. Hence the instinct to strike out, an instinct which I don’t actually follow, because I think the memes created are harmful to guys like past-you who are genuinely confused and upset.
But it’s damn hard sometimes — selection bias makes it so that I also run into the bad kind of Nice Guy more often than perhaps you would. And it’s hard not to get scared and cynical after the the nth time being harangued to about why you’re a shallow bitch and a horrible human being for liking tall guys, or fit guys, or guys with high IQ, and how girls like you will eventually get what’s coming to you in the form of a lonely spinsterhood rejected by all good men.
Like I said, I don’t endorse many of the ways women end up lashing out at Nice Guys / nice guys, but I don’t think it’s coming from a totally crazy or even powerful place. It’s coming from a place of justifiable fear.
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Thank you for sharing this perspective– I think that it’s actually the most important concern that Scott fails to consider here.
It seems like the best way to address the problem which Scott is pointing out here while still addressing these issues would be to focus efforts to solve it on making unattractive men more attractive rather than pressuring women to go out with men who they didn’t find attractive (which sounds shitty for everyone).
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Agreeing with what you said, I think it is important to draw a more clear distinction between bitter pursuers who think that the woman is a bad person for rejecting them, and the romantically unsuccessful, so the first group can’t use the second group as cover, and the second group doesn’t get stigmatized by the first group. Capitalization isn’t enough to draw a bright line between the two in people’s minds, so does anyone have ideas for some alternate word for the first category?
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I reckon the “nice guys” terminology is problematic, because I’d guess that a lot of “nice guys” (of both stripes) actually value being nice. I do. Why not just call the first group “bitter guys”, or “entitled guys” or something like that?
My mental response to that question is “you’re just making it easy for guilty parties to avoid identifying with the appropriate group”, but I also don’t know if that matters at all.
Sometimes, though, people going on about nice guys seem to be doing so partly because they want to distract from the idea that nice guys aren’t getting laid because they’re nice, and damn you for even considering it. I can see why these people wouldn’t want to revise their terminology, because it now fails to push the appropriate guilt buttons.
There really don’t seem to be many people who write about how to be nice and sexually successful. Given that most people seem to like sex, and most people who like sex like it with people they find attractive, it doesn’t seem an impossible task. I do have a suspicion, however, that the reason there appear to be a lot of silly games around getting laid are that in practice there are very often preferences or interests involved that are awkward in the open, and that this might be a source of difficulty for those aspiring to niceness.
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This is, of course, exactly the manosphere view on why women embrace feminism.
Point by point –
1) “I realize rationally that I have legal rights and no one can redistribute me in this way.”
Women personalize every discussion. If someone says “women’s free sexual choice is incompatible with the continuation of civilization”. Women only hear “we’re not going to let you date the guys you want”.
2) “But on the other hand, if “society” as a whole tips into this line of thinking, then powerful weapons can be used against me, social shaming being primary amongst them. ”
Women are herd creatures to a much greater degree than men are and will basically try to figure out what the culture asks of them and do it. When you’re born with a womb and therefore are almost guaranteed to successfully reproduce (historically true enough so to clearly shape psychology) might as well just go with the herd because it’s safer and safer is better when you start out ahead in life. Hence, women are more susceptible to social pressure and in fact are sensitive to the faintest hint of social pressure.
3) “I’m scared shitless of living in a society where I would be shamed out of making free choices in who to date. Hence the instinct to strike out”
The manosphere describes exactly how and why and when women will strike out due to fear. Fear of getting cut from the herd. Fear of social disapproval. Fear of loss of any amount of sexual autonomy.
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IIRC only about 80% of women who’ve ever lived reproduced before dying. This is higher than the 40% for men, but hardly “almost guaranteed”.
OTOH I suspect that most of the remaining 20% died as children, so if I interpret “born” less than literally you do have a point.
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I’m sure your comment is sincere and thank you for making it.
But … I must be missing something. Your fear is that you might end up living in a society where you will ‘sexually redistributed’ to men who are thought ‘morally worthy’?
What kind of society could that be? I just don’t get it. Some kind of fascistic nerdocracy?
Surely the trend in human development is the opposite? Where anybody can date anybody else? I’m just trying to picture a society where women are shamed into dating socially awkward men, to the detriment of good-looking or confident or fit guys…but I just come up blank.
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The real fear isn’t redistribution to “the most morally worthy”. It’s redistribution to someone who is appropriately sexually worthy. The sexual situation in which high-status males have access to many females and low-status males have access to none has, I think, obscured the real status of many women, to those women in particular most of all.
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To maybe reassure your fear, without necessarily defending Scott’s point: in the analogy, we don’t help the poor minorities by redistributing more money towards them, we stop mocking Poor Minorities and maybe offer real help and resources for them to turn themselves into middle-class minorities. If we did just redistribute money (as some feel we are now, with welfare programs and the like), Poor Minorities would get even more hatred and vitriol (as some feel they are now).
So it would be misguided to start shaming women into dating lonely men, and I think even some of those lonely men would argue against this hypothetical social practice. The real solution implicitly suggested looks more like providing resources for lonely men to turn themselves into the kind of men you actually like and don’t need to pressured in order to want to date.
I agree, a world where societal pressures take away your choice in dating is scary, and I would like to think I’d argue against that norm even if I was benefiting from it.
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This is a premise so contrary to reality that it beggars belief.
You wrote an entire post about giant differences between men and women specifically between what they find attractive!
Humans have concealed ovulation. Women are intensely interested in concealing their preferences in general as well as specifically. They’re even more interested in making sure that no one looks to closely into what their preferences actually are.
Women are physically smaller and are significantly weaker even at the same weight and level of musculature (take a martial arts class in a grappling art that has live sparring – women are basically as strong as children). They have smaller brains per body weight. Basically women are smaller, weaker and less intelligent but still have genetic aims. Of course they’re going to approach achieving their goals differently than men. Why on earth would anyone think otherwise? People’s psychologies are geared towards survival and reproduction. What actual reason is there for expecting men and women to have similar psychologies?
A group of men set out to understand how women actually think by conducting what’s basically the largest social science endeavor in history and have come to a bunch of conclusions about how women actually think which you simplify and reject because they’re about “women being terrible”. Here’s the thing – if you’ve been trying time and time again your whole life to build a bridge but the bridges keep collapsing and some group of guys go out and try to build bridges and fail at first but eventually succeed if you’re a rationalist you don’t get to reject what these guys say about metallurgy. If they tell you “this is how bridge building works” then they’ve basically proven it. They’ve taken their theory of women’s nature and turned it into engineering – which is the best proof there is in science.
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Metaphorically, the view is that they figured out arches make for good bridge-building structures, but they insist on hanging disco balls from every arch, and insist that the disco ball is an integral part of the bridge’s strength. You don’t think the disco ball is; you don’t know much about building bridges but it seems like you can build an arch without hanging a disco ball from it, and the ball doesn’t seem to contribute to the strength of the structure. You figure you could probably take advantage of the arch pattern, and then choose not to hang a disco ball from it.
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Nah, a more accurate analogy would be that the PUAs have built this giant suspension bridge and hung a disco ball from the top as an architectural flourish, and the feminists argue that the all those towers and cables are useless and probably hurtful anyway, and when asked why they shriek “Because the disco ball does nothing!”
And this isn’t even mentioning those feminists who implicitly argue that nobody should have bridges at all as they are inherently demeaning to rivers, and that only those strong enough to swim across should have the privilege of reaching the other side.
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Women are not less intelligent than men; women and men are not different species – half your genes come from your mother; and humans are social animals, with a lot of survival depending on the group’s success not the individual’s.
So What actual reason is there for expecting men and women to have similar psychologies? is simply answered – our basic psychologies are similar because they are based on similar brains, we have similar brains because of having similar genetics, and because apart from genes on the X and Y chromosomes, anything that is selected for in men will thereby appear in more women too.
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I’ll stand up for the “indefensible” position that “nice guys deserve wives”.
You like running water? Electricity? Eating fish? Eating anything that’s grown on a farm?
All of these are jobs that are basically done 100% by men and simply couldn’t be done by women who have neither the ability nor inclination for doing that type of work. Why should these guys get up and go to work on crab fishing boats? For money? Money isn’t worth much to men without prospects of intimacy. Men with any kind of self respect aren’t going to sacrifice their lives doing dirty thankless work for a wife who’s been with a dozen other men either. That women isn’t going to be too happy with her male equivalent either – not after she’s been fucked by a half dozen other guys who were more charming and sociopathic.
Women’s free sexual choice is a coordination problem that will destroy civilization very quickly.
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Ah, those poor old lonely thankless farmers and electricians!
Funny, the ones I know don’t seem to lack for a wife or girlfriend. Might have to do with their ability to provide for a family or something, who knows?
And to think, I was under the impression that countries with high levels of gender equality had high levels of economic development, with high life expectancies and living standards. But what would I know?
By the way my wife’s been with a lot more than a dozen other men – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. She also says I’m the most charming and good in bed of the lot – but maybe she’s just being nice.
Honestly, the idea that 12 sexual partners is a lot -what are you on?
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“simply couldn’t be done by women who have neither the ability nor inclination for doing that type of work”
When it became necessary, an awful lot of men who had no inclination to go to war found the ability and inclination (a lot of women too, when they’re allowed to, as my grandmother would testify).
If it were to become necessary, people would step up, be they men who don’t currently do those jobs, or women. Oddly enough jobs that are necessary tend to rise in either social pressure to do them or in rewards until enough people are found to do them.
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I liked the Heartless Bitches essay, as well as the companion xkcd (http://xkcd.com/513/). For me, the point is that it’s unreasonable to expect or resent someone for not going out with you when you haven’t taken the trouble to ask them out. Then “Nice Guy” denotes “A guy who doesn’t ask out women he’s attracted to, but instead expects them to magically be aware of his attraction.”
Incidentally, reading anti-Nice Guy propaganda was helpful for my romance. It let me say to myself “Damn it Patrick, I know that it’s unbearably awkward and painful to ask someone out, but if you don’t do it, you’ll be a Nice Guy. You ask him out this second or resign yourself to not being able to have any romantic experiences with him.”
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It’s purportedly “magic” for a straight woman to realize when a straight man is attracted to them – and yet it’s “creepy” for a straight man to be incapable of such sorcery. This is exactly the kind of doublespeak posts like these are aimed at, and for good reason.
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I shall now reveal to you the secret arts of getting a woman to know you’re attracted to them. You utter the incantation “I think you’re very attractive.” in their presence. If this is not possible, you can write this incantation down on a piece of paper and pass it to them.
That said, not being capable of this sorcery does not make you creepy, it makes you mute and paralyzed.
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I think you are misreading the comment you are replying to. The poster is saying that, per the standard memes about this topic, it would require “magic” for a woman to know whether a man is attracted to her without explicit indication, but it’s “creepy” if a man does not know whether a woman is attracted without an explicit statement.
Your comment totally fails to address this, and also prescribes a behavior that could be taken as “creepy” if done towards a woman who is not interested, along with a heavy does of mockery. “Lol, you’re too lame to even tell a girl you like her! What a failure!” That is kind of how your comment reads, and it is extra unkind, because it does not even address what the commenter was saying.
Please try applying the principle of charity to other commenters, as well as basic human kindness.
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“the only Theodore Dalrymple piece anyone ever links to”
I thought that was his ones about heroin withdrawal being no worse than flu. http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/3212846/withdrawal-from-heroin-is-a-trivial-matter/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Dalrymple#cite_note-Dalrymple_New_Statesman-19
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Dalrymple#cite_note-Dalrymple_New_Statesman-20
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I thought it was this one about poverty.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_2_oh_to_be.html
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“I do not think women are idiots who don’t know what’s good for them”
I do. Men are.
I think this is a significant part of the problem. Our society universally accepts women saying things like “men are shallow pigs” when they feel hard done by. An unattractive girl has accepted the simple reality that she is unattractive because of her appearance, and is allowed to blame men for not wanting “the real her”.
But women are shallow pigs as well. They are shallow in slightly different ways, but they are. Men can’t vent to their friends about this. So they go online to do it. The benevolent sexism surrounding women’s sex drive is a source of a lot of male misery. And feminism has trouble addressing the point because they cannot say “yes we too are pigs”. This feels like losing.
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I would like to comment on a few things:
First, I don’t agree with your reading of Barry’s blog. You assume that he is afraid of being labeled a “Nice Guy,” the concept of which has been around for a long time, but that didn’t really seem to be the issue for him at all. He explicitly says it’s because he doesn’t want to be associated with the ‘manosphere’ in any way, and he feels that complaints about lack of romantic success have become inextricably linked to that portion of the internet. To sum up, he doesn’t seem worried about how people will interpret his posts, like you seem to assume, as much as making sure he personally isn’t at all similar to people he dislikes.
Second, I do agree that the term ‘Nice Guy’ is a pretty horrible one, because semantics are important. People who don’t deserve it are swept up by this title because it was so poorly chosen, and it muddles what should be an useful concept. However, the idea of a “Nice Guy” is an important, useful concept. It does capture a behavior, a mindset, that should be discussed. There are men who believe that they are entitled to sex if they behave in certain ways, and that women who don’t respond are doing something wrong, and this is reinforced by our culture in many ways. I just wish it wasn’t tied into the term “Nice Guy,” which kind of ruins the whole discussion.
Third, I think it’s worth pointing out that women, completely objectively, have it worse online than men. There have been studies done on this (this one was the first one I found with a moment of googling). It happens to men, too, as you show in that link, but it’s just not comparable in amount or intensity.
Relatedly, I think an important aspect of this whole debate that you never mention is relative cultural power. To clarify, I believe, in today’s culture, women still have it significantly worse than men. It’s better than before, but still nowhere near equal. I believe the disparity is obvious, to the point that if you don’t see it or deny it, there is something wrong with your perception of the world. To this point, there is a difference between punching up at those with more power than you, and punching down at those with less. Dirty tricks should still be verboten, of course, but even when they are used, one side will get a lot more leeway than the other. This is the primary difference between the feminist internet and the ‘manosphere,’ to me. I don’t see the behavior of either side being worse than the other, but one is simply more unforgivable because they are punching down.
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Isn’t one of the central ideas behind the whole post that these women are punching down at low-status, low-power males rather than up at powerful (but therefore desirable) ones? You are, in fact, doing exactly what the post is trying to warn against: excusing genuinely awful behavior toward people who are trying in good faith not to be “Henry”s.
It should be obvious that low-status males who are trying to be good people have less power in sexual situations than almost any women. You can keep telling yourself that you and others are “punching up” at virgins, the physically unattractive, the mentally ill, and so on. But it is impossible to punch up at a punching bag. See this great post, linked above: http://mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-depression-privilege-and-online.html?m=1
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Moldbug on contempt vs. resentment is relevant here.
Are UR links in comments banned? I had a longer comment but it got silently eaten. Here’s the quote — Google for source.
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Say you have two groups: the Blues and the Greens. Blue/Green status is assigned at birth. Power is normally distributed within each group, but the Green bell curve is a standard deviation higher than the Blue bell curve. Within both groups, there is some fraction of the population, call them Crocodiles, that enjoys punching down, and wants to maximize their own personal power in order to maximize their number of potential targets. (We’ll assume that power is fixed-sum.)
Some Blues are dissatisfied with their lot, and appeal to ethical principles shared among a sufficient power-quantity of Blues and Greens in order to try to raise the Blue standard deviation. To do this, they form a group: the Whitecloaks. Whitecloak membership is, of course, open.
The Whitecloaks gain a sufficient amount of power to influence a sufficient power-quantity of Blues and Greens to do this — that is, more power than the Green average.
At this point, some Crocodiles realize what’s up, join the Whitecloaks, and do their best to rise through the ranks. They can’t attack Blues as long as there’s a risk of getting thrown out of the Whitecloaks by non-Crocodiles for contradicting the point of the Whitecloaks’ existence, so they only attack Greens, and do their best to appear to be normal Whitecloaks, rather than coming across as Crocodilian.
Eventually, enough Whitecloaks become convinced that it’s also acceptable to attack Blues who are read as opposing the Whitecloaks that it’s no longer unsafe for the Crocodiles within the Whitecloaks to attack those Blues. (It doesn’t matter whether or not the Crocodiles are responsible for this.) So the Crocodiles, who do their best to appear to be normal Whitecloaks, proceed to viciously attack those two groups.
Are Blues who are at risk of being read as opposing the Whitecloaks justified in opposing the Whitecloaks? Are Greens justified in opposing the Whitecloaks?
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You’ve let the manosphere into your garden. Quotes from the comments:
Time to do some weeding, eh?
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The post’s contention was that the manosphere is the only place people are saying something about lonely men that isn’t abuse. If the only person in town who knows how to grow chrysanthemums also happens to be a Nazi, and you really like chrysanthemums, you’re gonna end up with a few swastikas mowed into your lawn.
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The story about Chen Shen is part of the reason we have greater and lesser punishments for greater and lesser crimes; indeed, part of the reason we have the concept of greater and lesser crimes.
E.g. the punishment for robbery is less than the punishment for armed robbery because it creates an incentive against armed robbery.
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Hey, Scott. Thanks, of course, for the various flattering things you wrote about me in this post.
I want to respond to parts of this post, but before I do, I’m hoping you’ll clarify what you meant in a couple of key sentences.
You wrote (emphasis added by me):
What is the word “this” referring to in this sentence?
And from the ending (again, emphasis me):
Can you tell me what, specifically, “the problem” refers to in this sentence?
Thanks in advance for your help!
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I think you have fundamentally misunderstood the manosphere.
First of all, it is divided into two parts that are quite distinct: The Red Pill/Pickup, and the Men’s Right’s movement.
The Red Pill/PUA community is explicitly and proudly amoral. Their motto is, you’re losing? Well, it’s your fault for sucking so much, here are some things we think might help, if you don’t like it *get fucked.* Like, seriously, one of the first videos I saw from the PUA/TRP community had someone literally say that if you aren’t willing to go out and talk to girls, if you would rather stay inside with your computer, you should just kill yourself. It’s *not* a pro-man circlejerk, and the hate for “nice guys” on this part of the manosphere is very intense. Another example – there was a link to an advice column where a man said he was in a FLR – “female led relationship” – where his wife was fucking other women, and one of the most upvoted replies was that “men like this should be taken out and shot.”
There is nothing in TRP/pickup that I have seen that is not *actively hostile* to the notion that men deserve sex. The party line is, awesome people get sex, if you aren’t getting sex I guess you suck, here’s how to be awesome. “Tough love” for “nice guys,” if it can be called love at all.
The Men’s Rights movement is completely different, in that unlike TRP/pickup *it’s not directly about getting sex.* In fact getting sex is probably one of the least important things in the Men’s Rights sphere – the most important things are things like father/husband’s rights, gender imbalance in prison, lack of recognition for male victims of violence, false rape accusations, things like that. You ‘ll get a more sympathetic ear than average if you’re a “nice guy” wandering into a Men’s Rights area, but your problems getting sex are most certainly not topping the agenda there.
“But when you deny everything and abuse anyone who brings it up, you cede this issue to people who sometimes do think all of these things.”
*Where* in the manosphere do you find people who think all of these things? I am pretty familiar with the manosphere, and the vast majority of it fits into those two boxes I described. Neither of them have shown anything like unfair favoring of men, in my opinion – one of them has a great deal of hatred for women *and for men,* but that doesn’t fit your description.
The manosphere does not remotely approach being a pro-male equivalent of the pro-female circlejerk that is feminism. On the TRP/Pickup side, I’m not seeing the comparison. Seriously, find me examples of feminists upvoting a comment that says that women who don’t prioritize getting a man should commit suicide. On the MR side of the equation, the most influential commentator on the Men’s Rights side is a woman (GirlWritesWhat), and she hasn’t faced any significant attacks from the movement for her gender. I’m really not seeing parallels here.
Frankly it seems like you fall victim to the pervasive cultural bias towards recognizing attacks on women as glaring incidents and simply ignoring, or not noticing at all, attacks on men. This is the only way you’d be able to remotely see the “manosphere” as an opposite equivalence to feminism. Feminists vociferously attack men, even whole categories of men and are far less eager to attack women or categories of women (except when those women oppose feminism). TRP/Pickup communities vociferously attack women and men who fail to live up to their standard. Men’s Rights communities seem more concerned with political issues than with personal attacks most of the time, and when things do get personal being a man has no protective effect relative to being a woman in the way that the reverse applies for feminist attackers.
I see a lot of evidence that the gender differences in automatic in group bias (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15491274) apply to the respective movements. Basically feminists are sexist, TRP/PUAs think women and men are both equally worthless (though I have seen more calls for execution and suicide aimed at men than at women in that community) and you should get pussy while the pussy’s good, and Men’s Rights activists are genuinely attempting to bring justice to wronged men (can you tell whose side I am on?) I’m pretty open to being convinced I am wrong, but people will need to do something besides conflate TRP/PUA and MR and then ignore the anti-male side of TRP/PUA in order to convince me.
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