LW Women- Female privilege

This relates to something I've been concerned about in regards to social justice discussions-- the discussions actively discourage people from saying that they aren't being hurt even though they're in a group which (probably) gets hurt more than the other group on the same axis.

While I can see discouraging people from saying "I'm not getting hurt, therefore getting hurt almost never happens/doesn't matter", leaving out single data points about not getting hurt leads to another version of not knowing what's going on.

Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in an ideal world, we'd invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention.

If some women set themselves apart in this way with an unambiguous signal, I think they'd attract negative attention from people who disapprove of their attitudes.

It's possible they'd be at increased risk from sexually predatory men, but I think it's even more likely they'd be stigmatized by other women who take it upon themselves to enforce social norms.

I realize that there are fields in which men seem to perform better. But I had thought this was usually attributed to differences in brain architecture, not hormones.

Brain architecture is significantly influenced by hormones during the gestation period.

Regarding "get in the kitchen!" -- submitter seems to be making an implicit connotative jump, because she likes cooking, to take it as if the sentence were simply equivalent to "Go do your favorite thing!" But that's not the connotation that is usually there. The people saying something like that usually mean it more like "Go do this thing whether or not you like doing it all, because it's too low status for males to bother themselves with it."

Also of "you ought to be feeding us because you're not important/competent enough to otherwise contribute"

Regarding "get in the kitchen!" -- submitter seems to be making an implicit connotative jump, because she likes cooking, to take it as if the sentence were simply equivalent to "Go do your favorite thing!" But that's not the connotation that is usually there. The people saying something like that usually mean it more like "Go do this thing whether or not you like doing it all, because it's too low status for males to bother themselves with it." That may not be the intended connotation of everyone who says it, but it doesn't take that many bad apples in the barrel to get people pattern-matching, so this is what more feminism-inclined people hear when they hear "Get in the kitchen," and that's why they get offended.

I interpreted it in view of this:

I am most fulfilled when I'm in a M-dom f-sub relationship.

Which is to say, she feels fulfilled by being told to do something, and takes particular pleasure in it because it's something she's good at.

Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in, we'd invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention.

I like this idea, but it isn't obvious to me that the majority of wolf-whistlers will want to suppress their whistles when the signal is absent.

I realize that there are fields in which men seem to perform better. But I had thought this was usually attributed to differences in brain architecture, not hormones.

I've heard career advice for women to the effect of "If you are in a male-dominated field, you need to act more aggressive, or else men will walk all over you because of their different social style." Example: women get fewer salary increases simply because they don't ask for them.

(This advice is sometimes given with the implication that this difference in social styles is culturally-enforced, rather than biological; I don't know which of these factors is more important in creating the difference, but it does exist.)

I really like the red bracelet idea. That could work for both men and women who want to advertise themselves as open to being hit on, whether or not they are actually available.

I realize that there are fields in which men seem to perform better. But I had thought this was usually attributed to differences in brain architecture, not hormones.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio

Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in an ideal world, we'd invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention.

We did. It's called dressing provocatively.

It's just it got ruined when a bunch of people decided to complain about people wolf-whisling those wearing the bracelet.

I am reminded of this column. Summary:

I wish to dispel the notion that women are “more emotional.” I don’t think we are. I think that the emotions women stereotypically express are what men call “emotions,” and the emotions that men typically express are somehow considered by men to be something else.

I thought the present-day standard position among people who have actually thought about the issue...

By 'thought about the issue' do you mean that someone has gathered evidence to this effect? Why do you believe this view to be more accurate than the old stereotype?

Here is a study about emotional changes in transgendered individuals as they go through hormone therapy .

I think it's more accurate to say that women are more likely to display distress, whereas men are more likely to display aggression, than to say one that women are more "emotional". But there is almost certainly something which is more biological than social in origin going on here.

I thought the present-day standard position among people who have actually thought about the issue rather than just repeating stereotypes is that men don't actually feel less emotions than women -- they just show less emotions, for fear of being seen as feminine.

There is also a difference in which emotions are felt by (statistical) males vs females and even difference in which felt emotions the statistical males will show when felt.

How else would they estimate how much emotion people feel but by how much they can observe?

Do they have measurements? I don't care much who has thought about the issue - I'll go with those who have measured it, and the prima facie evidence supports the original claim in my eyes.

This, right here, is my problem with feminism. This person isn't allowed to exist.

What evidence do you have for this claim and what do you mean by "this person isn't allowed to exist"? It may help to keep in mind also that "feminism" is not a single monolith but a wide variety of different movements. So what form of feminism are you talking about? For example, most forms of Third Wave Feminism wouldn't have a problem with someone choosing this. The primary objection that this sort of thing comes up is thinking that a) all women want this or b) that this is inherent rather than potentially highly cultural c) that there's something wrong with women who don't want this.

The rest of your statement is similarly extremely overgeneralized. It sounds like your idea of feminism is an extreme version of some of the more problematic bits of 2nd Wave feminism which hasn't been prominent for some time.

If you mostly date within the BDSM community you might get an odd view of how many women prefer to submit.

[Actually, more BDSMers, male and female, prefer to submit than to top IME, but men who prefer to submit are more likely to learn to top as well. Also, I think female tops may well be more picky than male tops.]

But I also despise the position that women aren't -allowed- to be like this

Nobody actively believes this, mind. They just haven't thought about it.

It does seem to have some effect on the performers' private life however. Here is a question from Matt Williams, answered by Courtney Taylor:

"You find it hard now, having sex with civilians¹?"

"Oh yeah, absolutely."

[1] From the rest of the interview, I gathered that "civilian" was a bit derogatory.

Just to say that doing porn may tend to raise one's expectations. Sure, they optimise for the viewer, but I'd be surprised if they didn't try and have fun along the way, just like actors in mainstream films. I'd be surprised to learn their knowledge and experience doesn't make them very good partners, should they optimize for that.

... Not sure if you need to be particularly good looking, just > -0.5 sigma.

I think "complicated person" here means "A person who has many conflicting motives". If we follow the MBTI's notions (which we probably shouldn't) an INTJ would be less in touch with what they want, but once they figure it out they are able to work out which actions would lead to logical consequences that further the desire. Because of this they are good at explaining the reason for the actions that they take.

In contrast, an INFJ would be extremely in touch with what they want, but would act directly on what the feelings said. They would often be at a loss to explain the reasons behind the actions that they took, beyond "My feelings told me to".

Thus, from an INFJ perspective, it would appear that one who can explain the reasons for nearly everything they do in a few simple sentences must therefore have simple motivations, when in fact what is actually happening is that in the INTJ the more subtle motivations simply remain unexpressed.

coughharrypotterhousescough

Furthermore, I hope that the women of LessWrong do not perceive any downvotes or negative comments as a general dislike for them. I feel that most downvotes and comments are aimed at the content and the execution of the idea not at women as a whole or even the women behind the posts.

I find Myers Briggs usefully predictive. Similar to what Haidt is doing with emotion. Is it something to snicker at around here?

So what your trying to argue is that the effect of privilege is not as strong as critical theorists claim, and that this is a problem because in causes people to believe that the effect of privilege is not as strong as critical theorists claim.

But some people are just good at fitting in, even without the similarity of background. Such people are likely to underestimate the general influence of privilege.

Do you have proof of this assertion? Maybe, say, a stronger statistical correlation between minority success and social ability and non-minority success and social ability?

That's part of why I often think that it would be better to provide diverse spaces rather than slay heroes.

Falsifying most or all simple hypotheses is extremely useful.

They can still point at certain regions in hypothesis-space that certain people may have never thought of before.

Was there something in particular you were hoping to learn from them? I don't think the point of the exercise was to get an accurate profile of the female demographic on LessWrong, but to give people who wanted to speak up, a chance/incentive to do so. The submitters would probably not have posted the submissions on their own without the prompt, but they did submit these when they saw were prompted.

The anecdotes may be more useful when you consider that someone felt like she should say it. If nothing else, the contradiction in the anecdotes hints that there is no universal element among women that drives them away from LW.

I think they're all useful. People rarely really share their full opinions on social matters, and seeing them and discussing them together has been instructive, IMO. We discussed generally taboo subjects, and I found it useful.

There was a prompt.

The post does seem to imply that she finds understanding men easier.

I'm trying to unpack this sentence, I think it means something like this: "I signal sexual availability so that males will offer me favours in exchange, but I have enough plausible deniability so that I don't have to follow through" plus "whenever a male accepts such an exchange, I get a self-esteem boost". I don't know if such an interpretation is generally what other people have in their minds.

Just a bit of personal experience / observation / commentary:

Your interpretation is the Evo side of the Evo-Cog boundary. The cognition (adaptation-executer) side of it is that when a young appealing-to-the-target woman "girl-games", it triggers conditions where the targeted man (or men) executes adaptations that survived in human genetics that make him act more friendly and helpful towards the woman, or make him feel valued (which for other reasons explained in a previous post on Dark Arts that I can't find, incites reciprocation by doing things of value to the other person) and therefore already situated in a different type of social interaction where it appears more advantageous (to the subconscious) to cooperate.

Basically, yes to your interpretation in terms of why the process exists, but that is not at all what is going on in the minds of the participants - the young men genuinely feel nervous and valued and uncertain about the girl flirting or charming them and the motivations behind it or whether indeed there are any at all, and they also in most cases genuinely feel the urge to be helpful or friendly 'simply because' the girl was friendly / flirty, and subconsciously there's all this stuff about getting into closer relationships with people that seem attractive because overall that gives more opportunities later for actually getting into serious romantic relationships or, y'know, getting some good casual sex.

I don't know if such an interpretation is generally what other people have in their minds.

Well, I am imagining it's something along the line of "I'll give you a kiss if you get me a soda from the fridge."

Guy: You mean I just have to walk over to the fridge and I get a kiss? Score!

Girl: You mean I just have to give out a kiss while sitting and I don't have to get up and get my soda? Score!

I mean, if my wife said "I girl-game my way into getting what I want (Charming you is fun!)" That's what I would assume she meant.

Of course, you CAN girl-game your way to a favor with Sex, but I would imagine you usually don't need to go anywhere near that far for much smaller favors.

That being said, I'm thinking of already being in a relationship. I'm not entirely sure how this would work on a flirting with an unattached person level, since I don't recall ever receiving much flirting before I was in a relationship.

generally girl-game my way into getting what I want. (Charming guys is fun!)

I interpreted the sentence as saying, "a certain class of Dark Arts are easily available to me, and I use them to get what I want".

Regarding PUA jargon...

I'm female and submissive and I've always been attracted to guys about eight years older than me. (When I say "always", I mean since my first serious crush at age 13.) My parents are feminists, they're the same age as each other, and they strongly believe in power equality in relationships. Thus, growing up, I always thought there was something terribly wrong with me.

In college, I learned about PUA and alpha males an all of that. Suddenly, here was an ideological system that treated my desires as natural instead of perverted. I was immediately entranced, and began to read PUA blogs very seriously. I saw a lot of truth in the PUAs' discussions of male-female interactions. From what I could tell, feminism was just another optimistic belief system built on a very common but very rotten foundation: the idea that humans are rational creatures, that our rationality elevates us high above our brutal and bestial forebears. I saw that while we may have intelligence and cunning far exceeding that of our ancestors, we often use that intelligence to serve animal aims - for instance, procreation. I had many supposedly just-friends relationships with guys, but I saw that sexual desire often lay coiled beneath our calm and innocent intellectual discussions.

So to me, PUA seemed much more honest than the rest of the world of ideas, and much more correct about the facts of human nature (at least as it exists in this society). This gave me a pretty high prior for PUA being right about things, and so I believed their essentialist and evo-psych explanations. These days, I'm less certain about PUA claims that women are inherently submissive, or more at the mercy of their emotions than men - but I still see why these ideas seem plausible and appealing. They fit the data pretty well, and give a nice generative model for it and everything. =P

...I'm not really sure why I'm telling this story. When I read this post, I thought "oh, interesting, submitter E seems to have a lot in common with me - and she also felt drawn to PUA ideas". So I guess I wanted to give some perspective on why that might be. I do agree with you, Multiheaded, that it's dangerous to equate one's own sexual preferences with gender essentialism, evo-psych arguments, etc.

There are actually quite a few female authors in the PUA arena, including wives advocating men adopt some of these techniques on the basis that it improved their own relationship. I don't find it surprising here.

It seems to me that you're objecting to people comfortable with liking what they like.

She likes what she likes. The teenage boy likes what he likes. Where's your empathy for them?

(fixed)

Also, it's a bit disturbing and creepy to see a woman conflating her private sexual and lifestyle preferences with internet quasi-ev-psych and PUA jargon.

Why? Aren't sexual and lifestyle preferences the prototypical application of ev-psych, and I'd say PUA as well?

I've read quite a few good blog posts by women who talk of combining feminist views on society and gender roles

Perhaps, but feminism is not really incompatible with reasonably sane forms of ev-psych or PUA. Also, this post is really about female privilege rather than feminism persay. The submitter has actually identified a very interesting source of female privilege (i.e. 'biased point of view'), namely the fact that being conventionally attractive allows her to easily relate to men and get positive attention from them. Most men will not have any comparable experience, and it's easy to see how this might unwittingly bias female points of view about such things as PUA, etc.; perhaps even about gender relations generally. Similar points could be raised about what she says re: her emotions and intuitions, since again, these will probably not be shared by most males.

Also, it's a bit disturbing and creepy to see a woman conflating her private sexual and lifestyle preferences with internet quasi-ev-psych and PUA jargon. I've read quite a few good blog posts by women who talk of combining feminist views on society and gender roles with a personal desire for performing traditional femininity and a submissive role in a relationship/BDSM.

I'm not sure I understand the first sentence, or where the second sentence is going. Do you mean by conflating ... preferences with jargon that you don't like her using the jargon to describe her experiences? And you prefer she use feminist language like you've read in some other posts?

(Or, in plain terms, imagine a man talking about enjoying competitive sports and violent videogames in the same sort of essentializing language that E used above. It'd probably sound like a teenager bragging about how cool and "wild" and edgy he is; even if the object-level description of personal preferences would be correct, the connotations would be similarly skewed into a misleading narrative.)

I didn't get that connotation from E's submission, possibly because I do like cooking and stuff and I'm male.

That's...damn... that's like the whole bloody point of why we hold empathy for genuinely different/strange/foreign people to be so rare and valuable!

And thus, the quoted piece is ... self-evidently true? One of us is misunderstanding the person the quoted.

wish fulfillment female

I'm a straight male. For what it's worth:

I act, dress and style feminine

I'm not sure what acting feminine means but I don't think it's anything I require in relationships. As far as feminine dress, I like it when a girlfriend does this at least occasionally but it's not super-important.

I am most fulfilled when I'm in a M-dom f-sub relationship.

I prefer an egalitarian relationship both in and out of the bedroom, and confess to being somewhat squicked by other preferences. (But I view this as a personal taste issue and don't hold other people's different preferences against them.)

My favourite activity is cooking and my honest-to-god favourite place in the house is the kitchen.

Having a girlfriend who can cook well is great! But I don't think of cooking as a female duty and would not think that a girlfriend who was a bad cook [edit: or didn't like to cook or whatever] was failing to fulfill her role in the relationship. Same with a wife or mother.

(Other demographic info: I'm an American thirtysomething nerdy SWPL.)

There's another reason that I come out on a different side to most women in feminism and gender discussions though, and this is the bit I'm only saying because it's anonymous. I'm not a typical woman. I act, dress and style feminine because I enjoy feeling like a princess. I am most fulfilled when I'm in a M-dom f-sub relationship. My favourite activity is cooking and my honest-to-god favourite place in the house is the kitchen. I take pride in making awesome sandwiches. I just can't alieve it's offensive when I hear "get in the kitchen", because I'd just be like "ok! :D". I love sex, and I value getting better at it. I want to be able to have sex like a porn star. Suppressing my gag reflex is one of the most useful things I learned all year. I love being hit on and seduced by men. When I dress sexy, it is because male attention turns me on. I love getting wolf whistles. Because of luminosity and self-awareness, I'm ever-conscious of the vagina tingle. I'm aware of when I'm turned on, and I don't rationalise it away. And the same testosterone that makes me good at a male-dominated subject, makes sure I'm really easily turned on.

Not to imply that the submitter isn't being honest, but yeah, she does come across as the kind of girl lonely geeks fantasize about. If this were a dating site profile, I'd strongly consider sending her a message...

I don't think anything dishonest is happening, but maybe that E was being a little self-indulgent about being that way.

Fixed. Thanks!

Strange that she knows so many INTJs.

She's in a STEM field, duh.

So... a woman who doesn't complain and is optimistic, and is not ashamed to say it online, is suspicious to be a troll? What a strange society do we live in!

By the way, I don't criticize you for writing that; I think you only said loudly what is already present in the atmosphere. If someone says: "Women, tell your opinions!" it is often a code for: "Women, tell your complaints about men!". As if complaining about men was the only legitimate female opinion.

I suspect this atmosphere harms women, because honestly, who would want to be stereotyped as the complaining one? (With all the consequences, such as... if you want a new person in your team, would you want a creative one, or a complaining one? If you have to choose a leader, would you want a responsible one, or a complaining one? Etc.)

That this exact person exists is totally normal. That this exact person would write this doesn't seem that way, because what they would write would probably be boring and this is not.

That's an... odd take on it. I don't think I'd expect gender-conformity to antipredict engaging writing very strongly, if at all, and the life experience the submitter alludes to would positively predict it if I'm reading between the lines at all correctly. And it's being posted on LW, of course, which totally buggers up most conventional demographic analysis.

The submitter is using a pretty assertive and analytical style, which I wouldn't have predicted from the paragraphs on emotionality; the bit about girl-game struck me as particularly unusual. And her ideas do tally well with the conventional wisdom among certain male-dominated metacontrarian subcultures. I might have considered a false flag option of some sort except that she seems to consider hers an exceptional opinion: most of those subcultures wouldn't be satisfied with an existence proof, they'd be trying to frame this as the norm.

I think it's most likely legit. Though I can't rule out a small probability of someone trying to tell LW what it wants to hear for some reason, or to confirm a theory about how such a stance might be received.

(Should the submitter be reading this, please excuse the lack of charity.)

That this exact person exists is totally normal. That this exact person would write this doesn't seem that way, because what they would write would probably be boring and this is not.

I suggest you review your prejudices. A person with the traits indicated (self awareness, well integrated preferences and desires, healthy boundaries, developed but not unbalanced rational thought) is not necessarily (or even usually) boring merely because they happen to like to cook, look pretty and be socially successful.