Do you recognize any difference between a man experiencing intense arousal ("smoldering libido") around a person's presence and their believing that an intimate relationship with that person would be beneficial?

I'm afraid I run in exactly this kind of failure mode. I have read a lot about the problems and dangers women face on a daily basis in interactions with men, I understand why they're creeped out, and I do my very best to avoid coming off as creepy. Together with my poor social skills and low empathy, this attitude leads to other problems. I turn down invitations by females (repeatedly by the same female, currently, though in the past it have been different females) which may or may not indicate romantic interest - invitations to the cinema, to their place, for studying, etc.. I refuse to hand out my cell phone number, I don't answer e-mails, I consciously avoid eye contact and try to get out of conversations quickly. I know that this creates huge amounts of disutility for all parties involved, whether there is a romantic interest on either one's behalf or not, and it certainly is stressful for myself and makes engaging with persons of the opposite gender unpleasant.

Though on the abstract level, with my "conscious" parts, I act this way, I frequently catch myself subconsciously participating in the "dance", which annoys me since most times there definitely is no romantic interest on her behalf. As soon as I notice this behaviour, I stop it. As the parent wrote, it's probably visible that I try to hide my sexual attraction, which comes across as creepy on its own. All in all, I regularly end up frustrated and wish I had no sexuality.

Chances are I'm not going to change anytime soon, and that is probably because I know of the vast damages I might be capable of causing if I act on anything although I am clueless about whether I should act and what I should do, which in turn is caused by my low social skills and empathy, which this way have no chance of improving, ever.

I feel like a greedy algorithm caught in a high-cost local minimum with even higher walls. This is, of course, my fault, and harrassment of females is a real problem not to be underestimated, even if it leads to the occasional frustrated and unhappy guy. There's other things in life which are fun doing, so I try to concentrate my efforts on those. Works pretty well so far, but avoiding those 50% of humans altogether is impossible, so my problems surface regularly.

I want to largely but not totally agree with this comment.

I agree that the sort of rhetoric that often gets used in talking about these things has these effects (and part of this post might). However, I think much of this post will actually help counteract that sort of thing.

See, here's my mental model: The sort of men we're talking about, who overcompensate to avoid being creepy -- they're doing this because they just know to not be creepy; they don't have a good concrete any idea of what that means, they just know the general direction of it and that it's bad. And so they step back from anything they think might at all be over the line and... well, you know the rest. Of course, they don't realize that they were never anywhere near the line in the first place, because the things that are actually over the line are things they wouldn't even think of doing in the first place. Having actual examples then is helpful because it allows you to see, "Wait, that's a typical example of what's over the line? I guess I was never anywhere near the line in the first place after all."

A lot of the rhetoric that gets thrown around about this sort of thing, it's easy to get the impression that if you ever ask twice about something, even if much time has passed and the context is totally different, you're not respecting their "no" and you're a bad person. This post might not help against that particular misconception[0] (and yes, might even reinforce it) because it doesn't address that particular axis; nonetheless, examples are helpful in addressing this sort of problem generally, I think.

(Examples of what is OK would help even more, but I guess this post is not really the place for that.)

[0]My own rule of thumb in general -- not specifically for things like this, where I have little experience, just when it comes to asking people for things in general -- is, asking a second time for confirmation is sensible; asking a third time is beginning to badger the person (assuming the context hasn't changed in a way that would affect the result). (I don't know, do people think that's a sensible rule of thumb? I should hope I'm at least correct in stating that the idea that asking for anything twice ever is disrespectful is a misconception...)

I don't agree. Treating these problems as skill deficits rather than inherent personal traits is a far better response. Instead of trying to hide one's sexuality (as if one's sex desire is inherently creepy), one should attempt to improve the skills so that one can display sexuality without being creepy.

More generally, people who don't care if they are creepy rely on a fair amount of social license to operate. If there were less social tolerance of creepy, even people who wanted to be creepy would do less creepy behavior.

I think it is smart to acknowledge that women often associate being alone with an unfamiliar man as a serious risk.

Smarter to acknowledge that for a women to be alone with an unfamiliar man often is a serious risk.

So obviously I recognize this view point (I'm one of those who called it an undesirable failure mode). But I actually am really perplexed by how someone could think this is the only option. I probably have a good bit of social and looks privilege[1] so maybe I just can't see it. Why can't you just worry a little less about coming off as creepy, smile at people and if they smile back go and say hello? Cultivate confidence, or fake it. Tell jokes. Just about everyone here is really smart and has interesting things to say. You don't have to spend ten years studying pick-up artistry to be able to meet women through friends and activities. Nice guys actually have sex all the time-- just maybe not with anyone they want or at the frequency they desire. Lots of women will find something wrong with you. Which is totally fine. Most women love flirting. I mean try not to do it when you're a stranger with zero shot and you're locked in an elevator with them, dressed in a trenchcoat and your only facial hair is that whisp of a mustache you didn't shave. But "not being creepy" shouldn't even be the tenth thing on your mind when you're meeting a woman unless someone has told you you have a problem.

[1] Relative to the LW median anyway. I couldn't come up with a way of saying this that didn't sound like a brag.

Maybe I'm not geeky enough (or not part of a culture enough): Is there a taboo against rejecting someone in geek culture? What exactly does that mean? It seems like a bizarrely bad rule in and of itself, not just because it is exploited by "creepy dudes".

Some meta observations:

You make rules. People abuse them. You make meta-rules against abusing the rules. People abuse the meta-rules.

You make rules to help less socially skilled people to raise from the bottom. More socially skilled people are better at playing these rules, so at the end, the less socially skilled people remain at the bottom. Any advantage you design for less socially skilled people, if it has positive total worth, it will be taken by the more socially skilled people.

I've always thought of this incident in terms of the calibration idea above.

The chance of his advance succeeding, given that in that context she was a celebrity and that they hadn't established any rapport, were incredibly slim. It was a total hail mary. And it was made in a context that made rejection more uncomfortable (confined space), and it was pretty directly sexual.

In short, the advance was wildly miscalibrated: it was such a stunningly bad bet, she concluded that he just didn't have her interests on the ledger at all. And that pissed her off, and I think that's thoroughly reasonable.

In high school, if a nerdy/awkward/unattractive boy showed interest or even spoke to a pretty, popular girl, he was often subjected to taunts of "creepy/stalker/weirdo" etc. The implicit demand is that loser men should not even dare speak to these women unless they have explicit permission.

It's important to note that "nerdy/loser/awkward/unattractive" men (and women) frequently in fact lack social skills, which is a major part of what leads to that label being applied in the first place.

I know people who would generally be considered physically unattractive but were very socially popular; similarly I know people who would generally be considered physically attractive who were socially unpopular despite this (significant) advantage.

Unfortunately, social skills are often difficult to learn or even notice one needs to improve, leading to widespread frustration among those who lack them but don't realize this fact.

My general recommendation is that anyone reading this comment should improve their social skills, and I say this not as an indictment of the social skill level of the average LW reader but rather as advice that applies to nearly everyone, regardless of current status.

It's worth noting that the actual event in the elevator wasn't actually all that bad (although it was creepy). Elevatorgate is only notable because it stirred the pot and brought a huge upwelling of rape threats and stuff like that to the surface.

He probably was shy, and didn't want to risk being shot down in front of people.

Citation needed.

Here is the original source text of ElevatorGate. (8-minute video, no transcription. Start around 3m15s to save 3m15s.). Here is her subsequent text response to comments.

I don't see anything in there about the character of the man, only his actions. And even if his character was as you have imagined it to be, so what? Being wrong does not excuse being wrong.

To avoid being creepy, the focus should be on keeping your model well-calibrated, and on being fairly risk averse.

How is he to get calibrated while being risk averse and not taking data? Calibration implies knowing the boundary between yes and no.

For the first time kiss, I thought the "suddenly" was exactly the wrong advice. The proper tactic, IMO, is to go slowly and incrementally. Confidence is projected by going slowly but with clear intent. That also allows a woman to decline graciously. She should not be asking "what was that", because you should have made it clear before doing it.

In most physical and emotional human endeavors, rushing is the sign of a mind focused on success/failure instead of the act. Do not try, do.

So, in the example of kissing that girl for the first time from before, I'd be suggesting he get verbal consent.

That seems a comment based in ideology, and not reality. I guess there must be some women for whom that would work, but I believe most women would find that a massive cold shower - perhaps permanently. The offer and consent should be nonverbal. Going slowly and incrementally allows you to minimize any delta between act and consent.

Here, read this post about ask culture and guess culture. Or get it closer to the source.

The point is that both men and women are immersed in guess culture from day 1 when it comes to romance, and so asking rather than guessing really is rude to average people, even though guessing carries very real costs.

The advocacy of 'confidence' in this context is properly about alief, not belief. You can appear and feel confident while also being well-calibrated with respect to the consequences of your social moves. Incidentally, I have to agree that the advice from reddit is high-risk - I would not support it unless perhaps you had very strong evidence that the woman is attracted to you, but even then, some residual risk remains.

I disagree about the externality from unwanted interaction being "priced out", since freaking people out is something guys would want to avoid at all costs.

The problem is, sexual advances are often gambles where the potential downsides are paid by the party approached, not by the one who does the approaching.

I don't think the potential downside of having to reject someone is much bigger than getting rejected.

It's valuable to learn to accept a rejection without feeling bad just as it's valuable to learn to give out rejections without feeling bad.

What's truly valuable is a well-calibrated and highly accurate model of how your advances will be received. That lets you carry off these high risk, high reward advances. But time and again I see people advocating confidence --- as though just predicting that every advance will succeed were the solution. Wishing does not make it so.

Confident advances are more likely to be successful and pleasent to the person being approached than unconfident advances.

What's truly valuable is a well-calibrated and highly accurate model of how your advances will be received.

There no way to develop a well-calibrated model without making some mistakes along the way.

"Often I hear guys complain that an advance is deemed "creepy" if it's unwelcome, but not if the same thing were said or done by an attractive man."

Yes that seems to be the crux of some criticism, and for good reason. Anyone who has been through high-school knows a lot of unattractive or socially undesirable men get tremendous backlash for behaviors that a desirable men get away with. It doesn't help that sometimes the word creep is a slur for an unattractive person hitting on another. The complaint goes beyond the double-standard, it sends a message that people have a right not to feel creeped out even when the feeling is unwarranted, and therefore benign behaviors (too much chatting or asking for a number) should be avoided altogether by some, specifically the awkward.

And many may also feel genuinely unsafe, but the advice given by many is to improve social skills or courting behavior, and this doesn't mitigate any real harm. The legitimate creep or the awkward geek is not any less dangerous because he read Dale Carnegie or a PUA website.

Granted, some of the anecdotes are cause for legitimate concern, but I'm not addressing those.

I'm not entirely sure of this either, but I think that if you happen to have a business card, then handing out one is relatively high-status. And if you don't, you can have some made for cheap.

On the rare occasions I've had the testicular fortitude to ask for anything from a woman, I've gone with asking for an email address rather than a phone number. Like the OP, I read "can I have your number?" as "Can I have a long-term license to annoy the crap out of you in future?" Though in my case it's just because I hate talking on the phone.

Asking for an email address seems to fit the social formula while being easily blackholeable at a future date.

In a situation like this I usually say something like "let's exchange our phone numbers".

I had exactly the same reaction. I believe (though have extremely small data number of data points) that offering a number instead of asking for one would be taken as low-status. On the other hand, I doubt that the balance between having a proposition accepted or denied is often that delicate. Presumably in most cases, by the time you're considering exchanging information, she or he has already made up their minds enough that such a small faux-pas wouldn't matter much.

There is something to be said about being confident enough that you don't follow the social script. Like seemingly most things in dating, the strategy doesn't matter very much - it's all about the way you portray yourself.

After a friend recommended giving women my number, I have completely stopped asking for theirs. With n=~10, only one has declined saying that it was my responsiblity to take hers. The others all seemed delighted that I was different, and willing to give them more of the direct power whether or not they'd like to see me again.

My general advice in this department would to be to completely forget that there is a script and simply experiment to see what works for you.

I feel like I'm restating the obvious, but things are nearly always more creepy when done by an unattractive person and nearly always less creepy when done by an attractive one, ceteris paribus.

I haven't seen attractiveness mentioned in any of the examples in this topic so far.

(???)

Personally I find it kind of invasive when people talk to me uninvited at all. But I can hardly hold other people responsible for not complying with my own, unknown-to-them social antipathies.

The issue is, should you let those folks know that you'd rather not be bothered? And if so, how to do so in a way that doesn't look like an outright rejection, or ascribing low status to them, since some people might be antagonized by that.

Personally I find it kind of invasive when people talk to me uninvited at all. But I can hardly hold other people responsible for not complying with my own, unknown-to-them social antipathies.

Sure you could. Others manage. You could demand that no one talk uninvited to anyone else. Or demand that they only speak to you when you've spoken to them first. Or only speak to you when you want them to. Just claim that your social antipathies are the right, good, and true antipathies, and anyone violating them is a moral leper.

Agreed that creepiness usually means disrespecting my boundaries in some way. I don't mind being flirted with initially, but if I'm not interested, and I let you know, I expect it to stop. Hitting on me even harder just makes me feel more uncomfortable and creeped out by you.

How do you go about "letting someone know?" There may be a gap here. I have a lot of difficulty recognizing an indirectly signaled No. (and indirectly-signaled Yes, for that matter) This has led to creeping people out when an explicit No would have been acted on immediately.

I do agree with your sentiment, however; someone who presses on when he's aware the woman wants him to go away isn't just creepy, he's a jackass.

According to the last survey, there are fewer LWers of races other than White, East Asian or Hispanic than female LWers.

I've never heard this topic even alluded to in in-person conversation between LW participants. It's possible I've been going to the wrong meetups, but the simplest explanation seems either to be that it's a lot more taboo in person or that most of the human biodiversity talk is coming from a relatively small number of very loud people, who may or may not be participating in the in-person community but who aren't numerous enough to be skewing it very much on average.

Both might be true, but I suspect at least the latter; even on the site I only associate the topic with a handful of names. This of course doesn't rule out discrimination from people who aren't loud HBD enthusiasts, but it does make that particular source of discomfort a little less plausible.

human biodiversity enthusiasts

On first seeing this, I assumed it was a reference to broad and varied sexual preferences.

Maybe it's alliances in action. I've had a few cases where I incurred justified (social) punishment of one kind or another, and certain people close to me had very nasty (and unjustified) things to say about the punisher. So far as I could tell, it wasn't because they'd thought through the situation and concluded I was in the right; it was just that I was part of their tribe and they were going to aggressively defend me.

I found the behavior incredibly frustrating.

I think that was probably your female friends' way of offering their sympathy. They probably didn't mean that she was a bitch to everyone always, but that what she did was not a nice, pleasant thing to do and since you only went on one date, then thinking of her as a bitch will make the experience easier to not be sad about.

It might sound really convoluted, but I've done this before (though not recently). "What a bitch!" makes a much better soundbite than "She was probably not interested and she was entitled to her preferences but not replying was a little not nice but maybe she was afraid to reject you to your face, but I'm sure she's probably a nice person, but you're a nice person and there are plenty of other even nicer ladies, so don't feel bad, etc."

Then all I hear about the internal experience of women is that interacting with men is uncomfortable and even frightening.

I can only think that what you're hearing from women about interacting with men is subject to a really odd selection effect.

Man, you wrote so much, without being any specific about the most interesting (and probably most emotionally sensitive for you) part of your comment -- what exactly is your definition of "being subhuman"?

Because people can use the same words to mean totally different things, especially with words like that. I can imagine some specific meaning behind them, but your meaning could be miles away. You could be a rapist monster unable to control your impulses. Or you could be an oversensitive guy who feels guilty and depressed for getting a boner in a politically incorrect situation. Or anything between that.

I am attracted to women, which makes them seem far more interesting than they actually are. I have a very hard time disengaging from friendship with a woman even when it's clear it's no longer worth it for me. It also makes it hard to interact with women on an intellectual or friendship level without creepily dragging it towards sexuality like some kind of subhuman. I'm starting to really hate this. Maybe If I were asexual I could be friends with women. Point two and three: Women seem more interesting than they are, and I can't trust myself around women.

I had this problem, and I eventually realized that some of the problem was I was poorly calibrated in my interpretation of certain signals from certain types of women. I interpreted the signals as "this woman is interesting," yet when I got to know those woman, I was not actually interested in their personality. I put a lot of effort into fixing this miscalibration, and I think it was worth the effort.

Further, what the socially privileged think of as a "small no" is not recognizable as such to the socially unprivileged.

This is a learnable skill. The fact that some high status people don't bother to learn it is a separate issue.

Really? I think a big no would be a lot more off-putting than a small one. I can totally see myself bulldozing small nos and then taking a big one seriously.

In my experience, constantly bulldozing my small nos creates a lot of unhappiness for me. The stakes at issue when my consent is at issue is not closely correlated to how much I am upset when my consent is overridden.

I used to offer numbers, but the incentives are such that I deliberately switched with exactly this in mind. If you want to fix this, give a fake number, say no, or somehow work on the incentives.

Yes, it's common to find that offering numbers doesn't work very well. One common thing is to ask to exchange numbers.

• Interacting with women is distressing.
• I become subhuman around women (like the examples in OP).

You're going to have a bad time, especially since your emotional distress can be sensed by others and unconciously make them more wary as well. When in doubt, you need to project yourself as outcome independent, i.e. you should not care whether the other person is interested in you. You can make this easier by practicing social interaction with other sorts of people, where sexuality or things like that are not going to be an issue.

Well. Dang it. I was hoping we could be friends.

FWIW, I endorse not interacting with people who don't interest you, especially when doing so is distressing and/or makes you behave in ways you consider subhuman.