Is being sexy for your homies?

Alternate hypotheses:

* Women are annoyed by compliments from men because they get a ton of them (and mostly they do end up being attempts to manipulate), and men are overjoyed by compliments from women because they get very few of them. (This does leave open, why do men compliment women so much more than the other way around?)

* In general, gender norms are mostly enforced within-gender - it's mostly men telling their sons to "man up" and men telling other men what's effeminate, and mostly women telling their daughters to "act like a lady" and policing fashion faux pas

* Several points here may be at least as well explained if you drop the genderedness - losing friends due to a primary relationship is bad regardless of the genders involved, being well-liked and high-status is attractive regardless of your gender and the genders of the people liking you, 

* The bonobos apparently use sex to strengthen bonds, but your argument is about strengthening bonds through non-sex with your non-sexually-compatible friends, so idk how those are related

* The "postmodern feminist push for equality of the sexes" has been damaging to the status quo, but I don't think that should necessarily be thought of as "damaging to the social fabric" - like, yeah it was in the short term but maybe that was necessary to get out of a local maximum

* If the kitchen staff were one sex, the serving staff were another, and this were explicit, we should expect this to result in many kitchen-gender folks who would strongly prefer to be serving staff and vice versa, because there is almost always more variance within the sexes than between them
 

> And if maybe this is key to why (...) feeling sexually safe at a job has been such a royal pain these last many years

...reads like a mistake a feminist would not have made.

(Implicit assumption: "postmodernism" was coined in 1980 and "postmodern feminism" the mid-90s, and most people who talk about gender ideology date it to the last 10-20 years, so I'm assuming that's the time period you're referring to by "last many years".)

Men feel a little less sexually safe at work than they did sixty years ago, and women feel vastly more sexually safe. My grandmother, and the other women her age I've been close with, have stories about their bosses making explicit crude comments about them, groping them at work, and the like. In the story I remember most clearly, the boss didn't try to hide his behavior, because everyone agreed this was a normal liberty to take with your female employee. If she had complained, she would have been not only punished and likely fired, but also criticized by her coworkers for being precious about the situation.

I think separating the sexes into distinct classes ("kitchen staff are one sex and serving staff are another") wouldn't output a separate-but-equal situation; it would instead output a society that subjugates women overtly (again).

Didn't like the post then, still don't like it in 2024. I think there are defensible points interwoven with assumptions and stereotypes. 

First: generalizes from personal experiences that are not universal. I think a lot of people don't have this or don't struggle with this or find it worth it, and the piece assumes everyone feels the way the author feels.  

Second: the thing it describes is a bias, and I don't think the essay realizes this.

Okay, part of the thing is that this doesn't make a case or acknowledge this romantic factor as being different from, like, friendship. Like, in the people-at-work case, you might also do someone a favor at work because you like them as a buddy, which is not necessarily the same as whether they're a good worker or it's a strategic thing for you to do, or whatever - you're inclined to give your friends special treatment. Even in straight same-gender groups, people will end up being friends and having outgroups.

Anyway, you have to be careful reasoning out of "what your in-built stereotypes say". This is sometimes relevant information, totally. But A) your in-built stereotypes are not everyone else's in-built stereotypes, even within your culture, and B) this is reasoning from the territory, not the map. Are they true? In some of the cases given in this piece, it matters if they're true.

Like, the thing being described here is a bias, a flaw in the lens. "Having to navigate around possible sexual dynamics with other people makes it harder to do regular communication with them" is a thing that'll make you less able to reason and less effective. (Especially if it still fires strongly in cases like "this woman is at this event about an unrelated topic, with a partner, and so is probably not available for dating.") I don't begrudge the author for having it. I think it's really common. God knows my own best judgment has failed me before in the face of very pretty people.

But I like this community for usually not giving up on matters of self-improvement and epistemics. Even if you don't prioritize it, you're at least recognizing it and not throwing it out. It's very disconcerting to read "I notice my brain does extra work when I talk with women... wouldn't it be easier if society were radically altered so that I didn't have to talk with women?" Like, what? And there's no way you or anyone else can become more rational about this? This barrier to ideal communication with 50% of people is insurmountable? It's worth giving up on this one? Hello?

I get that the author views this as sort of a series of tenuous hypotheticals and doesn't necessarily stand by these stances and was just putting it out there, which is respectable. I think it's wrong and so tenuous as to be unhelpful.

Overall: bad takes, did have a solid 20 seconds of mixed fun and horror imagining this totally-unsexist society where straight men and women are kept in polite segregated groups, and 10% of people are in fringe situations - stable lesbian gay-male duos who must rely on each other, the bisexuals and the nonbinary people wandering the earth alone, the asexuals reigning supreme; incorruptible, masters of all domains.

I was mostly nodding along the first part of the post, but I think that in the secod part you are making a crucial mistake by uncritically assuming that traditional culture around gender is a direct result of our evolutional history and not a goodharted reaction to it with all kind of indirection, misgeneralisation and lost purposes in between.

I'm reminded of a story I heard long ago about bonobos. Supposedly if you toss a big pile of food into the middle of a bonobo tribe, they start fucking each other before getting to the food. The issue being that if there's any possibility of there not being enough food for everyone, that could result in the bonobo tribe fracturing in fights, and they don't want that. So they start by affirming their bonds with each other.

If you have a group of men who rely on one another for survival, and then they encounter a Helen of Troy… this could spell disaster for all of them.

Men and women were not historically two separate groups whose survival depends only on relying on the other members of the gender ingroup. If anything, it's the opposite. Men need women to pass on their genes and vice versa. In natural conditions men and women were part of the same tribe, contributing their labor to the survival of the whole. 

We can justify "Bros before hoes" on evolutionary grounds only if "bros" is not a gendered term, representing your whole tribe. Tribe before foreigners. And then we can see how this principle is misgeneralized towards gender groups.

But… I mean, think of a bakery of all (straight) men.

Then think of the same bakery, but it's all (straight) women.

Then imagine the same bakery, but it's mixed sex.

Can you see what happens?

Even if there's no attraction going on in the last case, the fact that there could be dramatically changes the unspoken dynamics. It's just not as stable as the other two.

The opposite, in my experience - the dynamics of mixed collectives at work is much better. Single gendered groups often downfalls into unrelated to work hierarchical struggles, toxic behaviours and forced attempts to correspond to gender stereotypes. But a more diverse environment leads to some kind of checks and balances situation, where everyone tries to be nice to each other and the worst offences of both male-only and female-only dynamics do not happen.

In general, I think the story makes much more sense if we start from obvious intended equilibrium "men try to appeal to women, women try to appeal to men" and then try to explain how traditional culture around gender failed in this regard, arriving us to an obviously weird equilibrium, instead of trying to rationalyze it. 
 

Guys give zero fucks about manicures or whether your purse matches your dress, but boy oh boy do other women notice!

This choice is a little odd. In close to every context I've listened to, I hear women say that some muscle tone on a guy is nice and abs are a plus, but big muscles are gross — and all of that is utterly overwhelmed by other factors anyway.

Appealing to other gender is a complicated multidimentional optimization target. Feedback is very muddy. You have to just look at successful people and try to do what they did, or if you want to be ahead of the curve, try to do what they did but even more so. Additionaly, there is a factor of competition. If you are bad at hitting the intended target but others are even worse, your behavioral patterms are reinforced. And it's not that many people will not be able to find a pair at all.

This all leads us to a situation where the clearest metrics is your approximate success inside your gender group. And then goodharting happens and men/women start to compete with other men/women just for the sake of competition and not for the sake of appealing to the opposite sex. And then, of course, it's not surprising if a woman cares more about the opinion of other women in the question of beauty. After all, men are not experts and can't properly appreciate all the nuances and effort that were put into it. But other women, - they are experts of the craft, so their compliments count more. And vice versa.

So traditional gender culture was constructed around the notion that people should succeed in their gender group, achieve their rightful place in its hierarchy which can be used as a simple one dimensional score. And then get matched with people from the other gender group with similar score. And so, of course, men who try to directly appeal to women by looking more like K-pop stars or having non-abysmal emotional intelligence and agreeing to do their fair share of housework are looked down upon as defectors by other men, and society as a whole. They are framed as non masculine, gays, soyboys, simps, too desperate and so on. Likewise, women who try to appeal directly to men are framed as sluts and pick-me's.

Another missing piece is the fact that humans have two different attraction patterns. We both want to be with people who are like us, but also are attracted to novelty and difference. Different people may have these patterns expressed in diferent proportions. Traditional gender culture goes in the direction of sexual and romantic attraction being about the attraction of the opposites - that's why masculinity is framed as opposing femeninity - and friendship about the attraction of similarities.

There is some convinience in not having to figure out what exactly you want from the partner and just strive for the top of the hierarchy of the opposite gender group. But It leads to "Are straights okay?" meme, where people do not have any common interests with their spouses and low key hate them. Because they didn't even think that their preferences may be different from what society claims they are supposed to want.

With that in mind, modern (post-modern?) advances of gender equality and the destruction of rigid gender roles are very advantageous. An opportunity to return to a simpler equilibrium, that wasn't goodharted, where everyone is trying to find specific qualities they want in the partner, instead of just trying for the top of hierarchy that you may not even like. It also allows for more satisfaction of preferences in principle. Everyone can't possibly be with the top 10% of the opposite gender hierarchy. But it may be possible for everyone to find someone fitting the top 10% in qualities they in particular value.

I feel like, for certain coed social spaces, the cultural expectation of universal monogamy actually does (did?) a lot of work. If I (married man) am hanging out with some other married woman, we have Common Knowledge of each other's unavailability. In my subjective experience, it breaks the attraction->desire link. And it's desire that seems to add all the social tension, not attraction per se.

I agree that strictly non-sexual social places are more efficient at... whatever their goal is... simply because people are not distracted by sexual games. One way to achieve that is to have groups of the same sex... assuming heterosexuality, or at least assuming that homosexuality is sufficiently repressed. But another way is to explicitly make sex taboo... that is, repressing sexuality in general. (Not everywhere, just at that one place.)

Something like that effectively happens at the modern workplace; we are supposed to behave asexually. But there is nothing intrinsically modern about this; people were also supposed to behave asexually in a medieval church. The main difference was, church was only on Sunday morning, work is 40 hours a week. You had plenty opportunity to meet people outside the church. The opportunities to meet people outside a 9-5 job are more limited.

Another example: when you are in a group therapy, you are expected to behave asexually there. (Otherwise, it might turn into an orgy. Or a massacre. Or both.) Sometimes the rules say that you should not try to approach sexually the participants even a few weeks or months later, although there is obviously no way to enforce such rules. But the idea is that you shouldn't even be planning future sexual activities during the therapy.

(A more sensitive example: Should people make sexual proposals during rationalist or effective altruist meetups? There are strong opinions in both directions, but the underlying idea is that there is a tension between personal sexual satisfaction and the social fabric working as originally intended.)

tl;dr -- abolishing sex games at coed scenes is possible, but you will also meet some strong resistance

There's a lot in this post, so thoughts on just one part of it.

For men, their primary gendered psychology need seems to be something vaguely like respect. For women, their primary gendered psychology need seems to be something like commitment. This plays out in lots of interesting ways when you look at how men interact with each other, how women interact with each other, and how men and women interact in mixed company.

This simply story explains many things:

• Men like to do things that make them feel powerful and worthy of respect, even if it's simulated.
• Men try to cling to respect and many male pathologies are the result of trying to game respect.
• Women like to be part of committed relationships, and form strong bonds with other women to mutually get that, even though they also want commitment from one or more men.
• Women have analogous pathologies that result from trying to game commitment.
• Mismatches in the dating marking happen due to misalignments:
  • Men want women to respect them, and do things to try to earn the respect of women,
    • but the things men do to try to earn respect aren't always things women will actually respect, and this results in frustration and resentment when men feel like they should be respected but aren't.
  • Women want commitment from men, and do things to try to get men to commit,
    • but men have incentives to avoid commitment so they are free to consider other partners, and women get frustrated with men who won't commit, even though they may not be doing things that give their male partner any good reasons to commit to them.

Obvious caveats: both men and women want respect and commitment, but respect is way more important to men and commitment is way more important to women. There are nearby things to both respect and commitment that are subtly different and that both sexes want, like prestige and loyalty. And yes this leaves out people who fall far from the male and female clusters.

It seems like you are assuming historic gender segregation, eg men go out and go hunting together, women stay nearby gathering, etc.

There has been a lot of recent evidence that this isn't so cut and dry, but rather that we were applying our own modern lens while interpreting the past.

Specifically, newer evidence is showing gender parity or near-parity in participation in large game hunting. For example I recall that there were many graves that were assumed male because they were warrior or hunter graves, containing weapons and the like. But when they went back and tested them, something like 30% of them were female.

A handful of sources:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/science/anthropology-women-hunting.html#:~:text=In cultures where hunting was,to hunting as they aged.

I wonder whether women have basically always been the main tenders of the social fabric.

This doesn't sound right. The social fabric of male friendships used to very much exist. It disappeared very recently, lots of people still remember it.

And I don't think integrated workspaces are to blame. The USSR had integrated workspaces, but still much more friendship than exists now.

My best guess is that the economy got too good at meeting people's needs, allowing people to opt out of doing "social fabric" kinds of things. Which is maybe what each individual person wanted all along, but they didn't expect everyone else to opt out too.

As a bisexual woman who strongly favors male peer groups and friendships, I'm unsure if I can help at all in moving towards truth without taking it personally.

A lot of the argumentation in this post is plausible, but also, like, not very compelling?
Mostly the "frictionless" model of sexual/gender norms, and the examples associated: I can see why these situations are plausible (if at least because they're very present in my local culture) but I wouldn't be surprised if they are a bunch of social myth either, in which case the whole post is invalidated.

I appreciate the effort though; it's food for thought even if it doesn't tell me much about how to update based on the conclusion.

As I started reading, my first hypothesis was that women often rely on the opinions of others. As a man, if I am trying to attract a woman, she will probably check with her best friend, whether the friend approves of me. If the friend thinks that I am unworthy, too bad. Thus, to increase my chances, I should impress the friend first. But there is a chance of misunderstanding; either of them may conclude that I am actually interested in the friend, and that may ruin my chances with the first woman. So the safest approach is to impress the men nearby. If I succeed, they will provide the evidence that I am worthy, and the woman I am interested in may act on that evidence. Even if she asks her best friend, the friend may be influenced by the attitude of the other men.

(But this doesn't work with the genders reversed. Men typically want beautiful women, and they evaluate it by looking at them; they don't care what other women think about who is hot. So why would women care whether other women see them as hot?)

The second hypothesis is that dating is an inherently risky business, especially for men. If I start talking to a woman some other guy also wants, he may react by punching me. So the first step is to figure out whether I am safe. This is partially about physical strength, but mostly about who would join whose side if a fight started. If I am respected by other guys, I am free to approach women; even if someone decides to punch me, it is unlikely that I would be killed by a group of guys attacking me at the same time. Also, if I am physically strong, the other guys are less eager to choose the opposing side.

This second hypothesis seems not too different from your conclusion. Having a hierarchy is a part of maintaining the social fabric. The socially optimal outcome is some compromise between tyranny and equality. Something like "each man can have one woman (or at most four women), but the strong guys choose first".

With genders reversed, women are less likely to kill each other on the spot, but they will remember, and will kill each other (or each other's children) when a good opportunity arrives later. So, ultimately, similar concerns.

This article made me realize a truth that should've been obvious to me a long time ago: the main benefit I get from polyamory is close female friends (where I don't have to worry about attraction ruining the friendship), sex and romance are secondary.

I feel like just "gender" would be better than "physical sex" here. For instance, I'd expect trans women to fall in the female cluster (although being trans intersects with that in ways that strain this model but it still rounds to what I said so)

Interesting speculation!

But… I mean, think of a bakery of all (straight) men.

Then think of the same bakery, but it's all (straight) women.

Then imagine the same bakery, but it's mixed sex.

Can you see what happens?

Even if there's no attraction going on in the last case, the fact that there could be dramatically changes the unspoken dynamics. It's just not as stable as the other two.

I feel like you have some implicit additional assumptions WRT what you mean by "stable", here.

Like, are we talking about an ordinary bakery where someone is the owner and they hire staff to work there? In that case, if "stable" means something like "rate of staff turnover", I wouldn't expect the gender mix to significantly affect the stability. I'd expect it to be much more driven by things like ordinary working conditions, how well the staff were paid, etc..

(I also have the intuition that a single-gender environment would be less stable in the sense of being somehow "more stale" and "less alive" than a mixed-gender one, and thus less stable in the long-term, though that may very well just be my personal discomfort with single-gender environments.)

There's a theory that one thing that women find sexually attractive in men is having a high position in the (male) status hierarchy. Consider Christian Grey, powerful billionaire, and also the many older (and old-fashioned) stories in which the heroine's desirable love interest is a Prince. As Henry Kissinger supposedly said, "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac"...

I spent a long time figuring out the same thing about women's beauty, and came to roughly similar conclusions: https://putanumonit.com/2022/12/13/why-are-women-hot/

We already established that men will happily have sex with women who aren’t optimizing for sexiness, and date women who aren’t the most sexually desirable, and persist in long-term relationships independent of the woman’s looks, and will care about their woman’s beauty in large part to the extent that they care about its effects their status in the hierarchy of men. And so my answer to the original question is:

Women are hot to see themselves, through the internalized standards of society’s judgment, as worthy of their relationships and their happiness.

This was fun to look back on a year later.

I like how thoroughly I owned it. How it's clearly wild speculation that tries to weave together some questionable observations. I also like the questions it raises. I remember how the basic hypothesis — that sexual signaling maybe evolved largely to aim at one's own sex in the human social context — helped me to notice some interesting questions I hadn't picked up on before. (E.g., why does slut-shaming seem to more target women who doll up for the male gaze instead of women who are actually pretty openly DTF when there's a difference? Is my perception off, or is this really a trend, and if so then why?)

I notice that a year later I'm simply unconvinced of the basic idea. I don't know why. It might be that there's something true that (some part of me thinks) works best if it goes unrecognized, so I need to blind myself to it. Or, maybe it's just malarky. I don't know!

The main thing, I think, is that on the whole the framework doesn't feel wholesome. It's not totally icky to me. Just… off? Like, sure, respecting people and accounting for sexual dynamics is important. There are probably built-in tendencies along these lines. Those tendencies seem interesting to examine and explore. But despite my attempt to be descriptive rather than normative in this post, there's a kind of implication that trying to be attractive to the opposite sex is defecting on culture. That implication seems kind of weird to me now.

To the extent that there's a glitchiness in trying to be attractive to others, I now suspect it's more to do with Goodhart drift [LW · GW]. A guy who's just living his life and thus ends up attractive is less likely to be creating a hollow illusion than some other guy who chooses what to do based on what he thinks will get him a girl. As just one example type! It's a very general point about trying to affect how people see you, instead of just doing stuff and letting people see the truth: the former tends to invoke Goodhart, and thus people are often distrustful of it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't work sometimes anyway! Or even that it's bad.

The bonobo analogy was unfortunate. It was a good illustration, except that it was confusing. I mention the problem in one of the comments. The fact that bonobos specifically use sex is irrelevant to why I named them. The point was that when there's a potentially scarce resource introduced, the tribe starts by affirming their within-tribe bonds instead of leaping into competition for the resource. (Or at least so I'm told!) The fact that they do so with sex wasn't relevant to the analogy. Since the rest of the post was about sexual dynamics, I think that particular choice of analogy was unnecessarily confusing.

All that said: I like the kind of wild-yet-owned speculation this post is made of. It's fun and thought-provoking. I find it stimulating just to reread!

I'd love to see something that massages the various observations here into a better explanation. In particular, there's nothing meaty here that really tackles why there's an asymmetry between men and women in terms of intrasex popularity. (Women swoon over men who are (a) beloved and trusted by other men and/or (b) highly desired by other women. Men don't seem to care whether a woman has lots of girlfriends who love her and are all over the place when it comes to lots of other men wanting her.) The loose model doesn't predict it and can't even neatly explain it. Or at least I don't see how!

I honestly don't know how much, if any, further thinking or insight or experimentation arose from this post. It might have just amounted to a passing entertainment. It affected some of my thinking and actions in the first half of this year, but I don't think the ideas have meaningfully come to mind since roughly the summer.

Personally I just simply like the idea of being an attractive person more so than the societal implications of it. It’s just an axis that I want to do well in (in addition to money, sociability, etc). A lot of that’s reinforced by what other men think, but I also (maybe even primarily) take into account what women think.

Male K pop stars are an example of men typically considered "unmasculine" by other men but who tend to be attractive to women. I think the women are just right here, and K pop stars are more ideally hetero-masculine than the muscly guys who are actually less attractive to women. It's more conceptually appropriate to define ideal hetero-masculinity in terms of appeal to women and vice versa. (The men could in theory be correct if they admitted to latent homosexuality, but they won't!)

It's natural and basically eugenic (in the literal sense, not the political sense) for straight men to compete with each other for women and vice versa, with the competition between straight men being more intense than for straight women. The patriarchal pattern of men coordinating with each other to split the women more evenly may be "culture" but that doesn't make it good.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

For instance, on the "gay" topic: if communal stability arises in part from subgroups that can implicitly trust there's no sexual attraction within those subgroups, then homosexuality really throws a basic wrench into the system. The only context where you can stick a gay person and know there isn't sexual attraction involved is with exactly one other gay person of the opposite sex.

The traditional solution is the Monastery or Abbey, paired with harsh repression inside of them. You may or may not be able to do it without the repression these days, but I don't have any data on that cuz I'm straight as fuck.

Unironically the Catholics had a lot of stuff right, besides that whole Jesus thing. It turns out that holding together a common culture over more than a thousand years through great social upheavals selects for a solid set of social technologies. It's a shame about the Jesus thing.

[deleted due to going below zero, in order to disengage myself from a conversation that was pushing me into a bad mental state. Please do not reply further to my comments here; I wish lesswrong had "mute replies". I am now rate limited to one post per day because of mass downvoting on four comments.]

Edit to restore for posterity: I originally said something like "I was nodding along until you said trans women don't count as the woman cluster" or something like that. There's no edit history I can see, so I can't restore what I said exactly.