LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny

It's more socially acceptable for a woman to suggest a man should be castrated, emasculated ...

This is true in my social circle, but I'm not at all confident that it is true in most.

It is more socially acceptable for a woman to sexually assault a man.

This is not true in my social circle. Again, not sure about others.

These things happen regularly without comment or outrage in our society.

Again speaking for my own social circle only: Things like this are generally said in jest. My guess is that it is more acceptable to joke about this because it is less of a serious problem than male-on-female assault/rape.

But, I'm not convinced at all that this is typical.

It's more socially acceptable for a woman to suggest a man should be castrated, emasculated (a word which refers to the wholesale removal of a man's genitals, incidentally, as opposed to castration, which refers only to removal of the testicles), anally raped, or than any analogous reversal.

What on Earth makes you think that I find that dynamic acceptable? Non-consent is non-consent.

It is significantly more socially acceptable for a woman to hit a man than the reverse.

There's a perfectly good (IMO) non-cultural reason for that, namely that the average man is physically bigger than the average woman and therefore he's more likely to seriously harm her by hitting her than the other way round.

It's more socially acceptable for a woman to suggest a man should be castrated, emasculated (a word which refers to the wholesale removal of a man's genitals, incidentally, as opposed to castration, which refers only to removal of the testicles), anally raped, or than any analogous reversal.

Wait... what? I hear men saying such things about women once in a while, but I can't recall any women saying such things about men (except when talking about convicted criminals, in which case even other men will suggest such things). But then again, I'd guess the situation is worse on the other side of the pond.

From the "How to Change Your Mind" sequence: Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit. (In other words, "leaving the pack" vs. "joining the rebellion")

What is this "social acceptance" you speak of?

The first rule of human club is you don't explicitly discuss the rules of human club.

Is it defined by some authority?

There is no authority with the power to define, despite the best efforts of Dear Abby and others.

How is it measured?

With great difficulty and much controversy.

In terms of HGW, the concept is too complex for an intrinsic definition, but there is this thing that exists in the social dynamic that can be pointed out and named as "social acceptance".

Call it SA(behaviour). ~SA(b) predicts Ostracized(Perpetrator(b)) and related phenomenon with higher probability than SA(b), which in turn predicts Encouraged(Perpetrator(b)).

True enough.

Another thing I can do if I want to reduce the uncritical acceptance of the second version is to consistently use the first version myself, including when I interpret others (principle of charity, as you suggested), and make this explicit when it seems appropriate.

The set of situations in which I consider modeling my preferred use of language appropriate is much greater than the set of situations in which I consider it appropriate or useful to insist that other people change their language use to conform to it. But on reflection, I'm not sure where that judgment of appropriateness comes from or whether I endorse it.

That aside, I certainly agree that "all men are abusers (when given a chance)" is false for any interpretation of "abuser" and "chance" that doesn't also make "all humans are abusers (when given a chance)" equally true.

Sure, you want to avoid ahead of time getting involved with an abuser.

But virtually all abuse stories I hear involve the woman ignoring early red flags, ignoring early pre- or mildly abusive behavior.

So a tremendous amount of abuse could be avoided without needing to predict the future. STOP relationships with people who are starting to abuse you, starting down that path.

I am not saying this to justify the abuser or abusive behavior. Rather to point out that in the puzzle of understanding abuse, understanding the abused's staying in the relationship is part of that puzzle.

Because anybody speaking out against discrimination against themselves is automatically demanding it take the top priority, and men should just shut up and put up until it's their turn.

Gandhi might not be the best example of non-misogyny.

Your hope has been realized! Hooray!

That said, I also recommend that if you are going to spend very much time around women who have been severely traumatized by their experiences with abusive men, you prepare yourself to be appalled.

Sure, I agree with all of that.

To be absolutely clear here - you're saying actual, overt sexism is acceptable, as long as it's women doing it to men?

I'm not sure if I'm saying that, since I'm never quite sure what people mean by "sexism", let alone "actual, overt sexism".

But I am saying that in a system that differentially benefits group X over group Y, I consider it much more acceptable for an individual to treat X and Y differently in a way that differentially benefits Y than in a way that further differentially benefits X. If that's actual, overt sexism in case where (X,Y)=(men, women), then yes, I'm saying actual, overt sexism is sometimes acceptable as long as it's being done to men. (The gender of the person doing it is irrelevant.)

If that's itself pretty damn sexist, I'm OK with that. My purpose here is not to avoid nasty sounding labels, but to reduce the (net) differential in distribution of social benefits (among other purposes). So if I have a choice between "being sexist" while reducing that differential and "not being sexist" while increasing it (all else being equal), I choose to reduce that differential. Labels don't matter as much as the properties of the system itself.

All that said, I do agree that treating women who abuse their family members as though they lack agency and merely express the patriarchy, while treating men who abuse their family members as though they do possess agency, is unjustified.

My objection was not to that, nor to the other statements in the OP that I didn't quote, but rather to the sentences I quoted and the "personal yardstick" they suggested using, which I don't endorse.

Biology doesn't dictate your values. Avoid the naturalistic fallacy.

For instance, even if the descriptive claims that PUAs make about women's desires were true, this would not make it right to demean women.

It is surely the case that women and men have morally significant biological differences. Perhaps the biggest of these is pregnancy and childbirth — the vastly greater cost that women bear in childbearing. However, it would be the naturalistic fallacy to claim that women should bear this cost (e.g. that the creation of artificial wombs would not be a moral improvement); and it would be rationalization of misogyny to claim that women should be treated as baby-makers.

(Tim Wise makes a related argument about why it's silly for progressives to worry too much about race-IQ research: we don't believe that smart people have more political rights than average people, so even if it were shown that one racial group were on average smarter than another, this wouldn't change anyone's commitments to political equality.)

What if that system of inequality is biology? Is is still absurd to treat them equal?

Sometimes, sure. For example, if there's some task to be performed, and because of their biology X is capable of performing it and Y is not, it's frequently absurd to behave as though X and Y were equally capable of performing it. Having a long "conversation" with a deaf person who is not looking at me can be absurd, for example, as can giving a pregnancy test to a man.

I detest the term "mansplaining" because it conflates gender issues and errors. It's better to point out actual problems with what's being said.

As a side issue, though, when I was trying to find out whether mansplaining might refer to something real, I did notice on NPR shows that the people who called in and took up more time by using obvious statements to lay groundwork for their questions were typically men.

But I think it's really absurd to suggest it is something only men do-- to the point of referring to it as "mansplaining".

Sure. Similarly, I think it's absurd to suggest that complaining loudly and aggressively is something only women do, to the point of referring to it as "bitching."

And yet, terms like this are common in our linguistic environment.

Of course, that's not in and of itself a good reason to accept them. My culture no longer uses "Jew someone down" as a way of describing sharp negotiation practices, for example, because it's seen as expressing and encouraging a view of Jews that we collectively no longer endorse. (Though we still use "gyp"in similar ways.) Many communities reject "bitching" for similar reasons as applied to women. And we could certainly reject "mansplaining" as harmful to men.

But it's also worth asking where our energies are most usefully spent.

But I don't see any good reason to make the phenomenon about the relationship between genders.

I sense a fallacy of gray coming.

I'm male. My male friends "mansplain" to me all the time. I "mansplain" to them. But most of my friends are highly intelligent, opinionated women-- and all of them "mansplain" to me too.

The reason for distinguish this genre of discourse (which one might merely call "being an ass") from mansplaining and its related categories (e.g., the other day I overheard in a Starbucks a guy solicit two Asian students, ask them their "ethnic origin", and then reassure them in all seriousness that "We'll send that Dennis Rodman guy back to patch things up.") is that the explanation revolves around the minority party's everyday life. Therefore, e.g., your male friends don't mansplain to you (provided you're not a woman) because you all live in the context of being male.

Calling it all merely "being an ass" conceals the political and social mechanisms lurking under the surface of the exchange.

It's a bad epistemic habit and often disrespectful.

The latter -- sometimes. The former? Carving reality at the joints is a good epistemic habit, and I think this does the trick.

But I think it's really absurd to suggest it is something only men do-- to the point of referring to it as "mansplaining".

Of course "being an ass" isn't something only men do but because of the power differential, it's socially acceptable for men to call women out on being wrong, and not the reverse. If you refuse to see the politics, then of course it all looks the same.

At least some feminists today prefer the term "splaining", precisely because the behavior isn't unique to men.

"Mansplaining" is sexist. It's kind of like the term "hysterical."

Well... I'd guess that many of the people who use the word "hysterical" aren't aware of its etymology, or at least aren't thinking about it. (Is the word "bad" *ist because it originally meant "hermaphrodite"?)

Cognitive dissonance is encountering somebody who regularly uses the term "mansplaining" complaining about the sexist origins of the word "hysterical."

Yes.

I feel I've responded to most of this in the sibling thread (tl;dr: fallacy of gray, ignores social/political contexts, not useful to generalize as "being an ass"), except:

Illegitimate arguments exist. Point out why they're illegitimate. If you can't, you have no business responding to the argument.

A wrong argument is still wrong, even if the social/political cost of responding to it is too high. A correct counterargument is still correct, even if the social/political cost of stating it is too high.

Cognitive dissonance is encountering somebody who regularly uses the term "mansplaining" complaining about the sexist origins of the word "hysterical."

It's cognitive dissonance provided you ignore the political, social, and historical context of each utterance.

See here.

Above-average attractiveness,

Above-average or above-median? The latter doesn't imply the former, as the distribution of male attractiveness is skewed to the right. (I'm asking mostly because of your last paragraph.)

There is some secret courting dance the male must do at that point, and I don't know it.

Me neither. :-( Well, I might have figured it out recently, but I haven't met anyone who obviously wanted to hook up with me since.

(Fun fact: a couple of times when I was in Ireland, I would approach nearly every single woman in the club and the only one who wouldn't turn me down within minutes and I would end up making out with was the one who had approached me first. Then she would tell me that she had a boyfriend, or give me a fake number, and leave.)

At least it makes a good story.

Anyhow, I suspect the secret courting dance involves desperation and lots of awkwardness your first time. Pretty much everything unspoken does.

except me and my co-host

I'm assuming the two of you weren't attracted to each other (possibly due to being heterosexual people of the same gender), right? :-)

There is some secret courting dance the male must do at that point, and I don't know it.

Ok, obviously there are some men ("non-neurotypical") which find this part difficult. But my point is that the "secret courting dance" is not some mind manipulation dark ritual.

I once threw a party and invited only random strangers, where every single person who attended hooked up with another stranger, except me and my co-host. We left 2 dozen strangers silently locking jaws in pairs in our apartment and went to another party.

Maybe you should have considered inviting more women than men :D

Among the kind of people who read Less Wrong, that's bigger “if” than you might realize.

That's why included the clause, "provided you don't do something terribly stupid or awkward", and I should add that "awkward" includes failing to send or to respond to non-verbal cues, or generally failing to adhere to normally innate courtship patterns.

I don't deny that there are people which have difficulties with that, but my point is that these courtship patterns are not ridiculously effective mind control techniques, as both PUA advocates and critics often claim.

Now I don't know what exactly typical readers of PUA material are like, but few of the people in the audience of the RSD seminars I've watched looked like your average jock either.

As I said my knowledge of the matter is superficial, but every time I visited some PUA website, including this RSD thing I've just googled, they all looked quite scammy: they are all about some self-proclaimed seduction guru who keeps bragging about his seemingly super-human seductive prowess (completely unfalsifiable, of course) and would happily share his dark secrets with you, for a price.
They all want to sell you their books, DVDs, live courses, etc. Seriously, this RSD group you mentioned offers three-day bootcamps for $2,000 - $2,500. That's one-tenth of the annual tuition for a private US college, and they charge it for three days!
Compare to the amount of high-quality, reliable, valuable information you can find for free online on any kind of technical topic, and you'll see why I think PUA smells fishy.

I'm inclined to think that if there is anything dishonest about the PUA movement, it's not the sexual hypnosis of innocent women, it's rather the scamming of gullible, sexually deprived men.

I feel like I'm being read rather uncharitably.

I didn't downvote. Sexual assault certainly is a spectrum. But your two examples are roughly like saying:

There are two likely possibilities. First, DARE is right about everything. Second, drug abuse is not a serious problem in this country.

Suppose I have a strong prior that one doesn't think the second prong is true. Then I should adjust my estimate that one is very confused about drug abuse significantly upward (because DARE is nonsense).

The interventions likely to reduce stranger rape are unlikely to effect skeevy rape. Since skeevy rape is overwhelmingly more common (the linked research says that no one described using force on a stranger), that's where we should focus the discussion.

Where's the consent issue? She made a decision when she was sober and had capacity to make decisions.

If you point a gun into a crowd and fire, it's no defense to say to you didn't intend to kill whoever was unlucky enough to get hit.

Care to explain why [the Steubenville perpetrators should be convicted criminals]?

Their actions weren't consensual among all the participants. The places in law or morality where non-consensual acts between private citizens are allowed are few and far between.

I'm aware of your hypothetical about high caste people wanting a huge physical space from lower caste people. That's not about consent - that's about what acts society requires consent to perform. Physical contact is a pretty clear line.

Whether it was "rape" depends on vagaries in the definitions in Ohio's criminal code. That's why I'm talking about the category of sexual assault.

The study also shows that most of the recidive rapists also commit other forms of abuse, which is consistent with a sociopathic personality.

It's also possible for the same person (e.g. a child or teenager) to receive abuse from more than one person (e.g. both parents). This may counterbalance the above somewhat.

(On the other hand, it seems rather certain that the proportion of rape victims is higher than the proportion of rapists, since IIRC almost all rapists are repeat offenders.)

That isn't logically valid. It's possible for a single person to abuse more than one woman. Therefore, the percentage of abusers in the population is likely lower than the percentage of abused. I don't know how much lower that is, but "less than 10%" is entirely plausible.

There's also a potential confounding effect if a higher percentage of abusers and abused remain in the same set of relationships, e.g. an abused person moves from one abuser to the next. It looks like sociopathy/psychopathy has a higher prevalence in the abuser population, about 15% to 30% for "batterers", from Domestic violence and psychopathic traits: distinguishing the antisocial batterer from other antisocial offenders., with a non-paywall version here. Most of the studies those results are based on seem to be relatively small (N < 100) and essentially self-selected, but I couldn't find anything better.

On the other hand, I can't hold it against people that they care about their group reputation.

It makes a fair point, although I think it's also an illustration of how privilege is a terrible term for the phenomenon it's used to describe.

Do you see what happened there? I gave my reading of the original submission. You blithely assumed the submission said something else (almost the opposite). Either that, or you decided to reply with a non sequitur.

This is more evidence of badly corrupted hardware and software.

I have no disagreement; if I intended to say the authors involved were being dishonest, I would make that point, rather than implying it (my apologies if this comes across as defensive, but I find the idea highly... distasteful, to put it mildly). I simply object to Qiaochu_Yuan's unqualified statement; I don't think it is necessarily good advice in the general case when unqualified by caution about the motivations of those presenting the evidence.

Agreed. While memory can be unreliable, people don't normally go all hermeneutic with this kind of thing. Plus it's recognizable and nobody is doing it here.

In the present case, we are dealing with people's reports of their own experiences; even if we do not agree with the sociopolitical conclusions they draw from their experiences, this is not reason for us to become denialists about their experiences themselves.

Descriptions of their own experience are still filtered since it's impossible to describe everything one experiences. Furthermore, whose experiences get presented has definitely been filtered.

Also compare the current thread with this one: both threads involve someone presenting his/her personal experience about how bad things are and generalizing to similar cases, but one has several threads suggesting the presenter is lying, the other has several threads talking about how bad it is to question someone's personal experience.

I suggest the username "WhenTwoBecomeOne".

I believe the the original 1 in 6 statistic comes from a national survey conducted in 1996 (not by the Colorado Coalition against Sexual Violence, pace ESR), in which 17.6 % of the surveyed women said they had been victims of completed or attempted rape in their lifetimes. In the survey questions, rape was explicitly defined as vaginal, oral or anal penetration under force or the threat of force.

The statistical analysis is interesting, but the author's implicit assertion that non-forcible rape is somehow less rape-y than forcible is extremely offputting.

Sure, but there's experiencing discrimination for any of 1,000 reasons, and there's experiencing discrimination because of your gender.

I'm a male and I had an emotionally abusive father. The abuse I received was rarely, if ever, related to me being a boy, while my older sister was regularly insulted as a girl. For example, getting called gendered insults aka dad screaming repeatedly "you fucking whore!" to his 12 year old daughter in the middle of a crowded street. I didn't have an gendered equivalent.

Were we both abused? Sure. Was my sister's abuse worse? Eh, I don't see that as a worthwhile question. Did her abuse negatively affect her view of herself as a woman more that mine negatively affected my view of myself as a man? Absolutely.

If I used the same metrics that are used to get the "XX% of women are domestically abused!!!!!" talking points, I myself would be a victim of domestic violence, but I am not.

I think that is an overly subjective judgement. I have met people who have experienced what I would consider abuse if it happened to me, but who don't consider it abuse.

Reasonable estimates of what percent of women who have been victims of what is normally thought of when the phrase "Domestic Violence" is used, stuff worth doing something about --not being pushed out the way once in your life--, is very small and not more than a few percentage points.

I just use the "modern" definition which includes physical, emotional, sexual, verbal, and economic abuse. There are extreme forms of all of these types of violence, as well as occasional and mild forms. All of them have negative utility, but I agree there is a significant difference between patriarchal terrorism and a single instance of mild abuse in a lifetime. I also don't think the survey results for rape and attempted rape are related to the CTS surveys in the article you referenced.

I think that's part of it too, yeah. B trying to keep all female friends as potential partners, but not actively pursuing any of them, just kind of randomly "going for it".

I totally know this feeling. Not sure what to do about it except developing the skill of friendly flirting... which I realize is hardly easy. If you do the flirting part right and you're otherwise presentable, then you probably won't appear "creepy" unless you persist far too long.

That's probably part of it. Also, the women don't even have a chance to give B negative feedback, because he never gets to the "like you, like you" stage. Like they're fine being friends with him just awkward about the other stuff, but it's never explicit enough to actually address.

He didn't assert it, he presupposed it.

"I hope that one day you learn that p" doesn't mean "I hope that p is the case and one day you learn it". It presupposes p and asserts "I hope that one day you learn it".

It's not clear why a relevant contribution is more likely to be a criticism than further corroboration. There is a point in your comment where you seem to be a conflating two spectrums...agreement/disagreement and thoughtfulness/ simplicity.

Just like there is simple dissent (a comment with only the words, "I disagree") and thoughtful criticism (like the linked comment) and there is both "mere voicing of agreement" ("Good post") and thoughtful agreement ( "I agree with this, these are some particularly strong points you make, here's some more supporting evidence"). I find the latter to be very useful.

It's unfortunate that thoughtful agreement is not more valued than it is.

That's very interesting. Did you turn up anything else that surprised you? After you found that "skin crawling" was unwanted sexual arousal, did that affect your ideas and/or behavior?

In general a PUA should always make a woman feel good, otherwise why should she choose to stay with him?

Human mating interests are not aligned perfectly with the happiness goals of the gene carriers in question. (It so happens that creating mostly positive affect in interactions is usually optimal, but this isn't entirely consistent and certainly isn't an inevitable first principle.)

Thanks for a reply. I did take a look at your post but I don't think it really engages with the points that I make (it engages with arguments that are perhaps superficially similar but importantly distinct)

In general a PUA should always make a woman feel good, otherwise why should she choose to stay with him? Probably women suffer much more through awkward interactions, stalkers, etc...

I have no problems with certain things that one might describe as pick up artistry. My comments are reserved for the things that don't involve respect for a woman's welfare (demeaning her, for example). And yes, I'm sure people suffer more through stalkers but that doesn't set the bar very high.

Making a woman feel insecure might work, so does a movie that makes people feel scared(ever enjoyed a good horror movie?). Should we blame a PUA if that works for him?

If you think that people should care about the welfare of others then yes. I think here we have identified the ultimate source of our disagreement. The fact that you think this is even a question worth asking shows that we have substantially different background assumptions (and this perhaps explains why you find attacks on PU confusing).

ETA: I realise now that it was unclear whether you were asking whether we should blame a PUA for the movie thing or for deliberately making a woman feel insecure. If the first, no (except perhaps in unusual circumstances) as going to a movie doesn't go against the woman's welfare presuming she, like many people, finds the fear of a horror movie desirable or finds it to be made up for by other aspects of the movie. If the second, then as per above: yes, I think a person should care about the welfare of the person that they're picking up.

That's the issue. Some people have an ideology that some women's tastes are distasteful.

It's a clever line but doesn't really interact with what I said (which may perhaps have been because I was unclear: I don't intend to suggest this fact is your fault).

We can think of it another way: what do we think constitutes the welfare of a woman? Presumably we don't think that it is just that she is attracted to the person she is currently conversing with.

However, if this is the case and if we care about how our interaction with people effect their welfare then the fact that a person's interaction with a woman makes the woman attracted to them doesn't entail that the interaction was desirable (because we care about their welfare which is more than just their extent of current attraction).

Note that this need not be a condescending attempt to institute an objective conception of welfare on an unwilling recipient. For example, we might think that a person's welfare is determined by their own subjective, personally decided upon preferences. Now perhaps a woman has preferences to be attracted to the person they're talking to (or perhaps not) but presumably they also have preferences to feel good about themselves and a number of other things. Again, then, even taking their self-identified welfare, we can't presume that an interaction is benefiting a woman's welfare just because they are attracted to their current conversation partner.

To put it another other way: just because a woman finds herself attracted to a person following an interaction, it doesn't mean she doesn't wish that the interaction had been different. So the conversation may fulfill the man's interests in being attractive but it doesn't follow from the fact that the woman is attracted to him that it fulfulls the woman's interests.

Of course, if you think a woman's welfare is her own problem and an interested man's only responsibility is to be attractive to the woman then you won't find this compelling but that attitude is precisely what the problem is (many people think that one should be concerned about the effects of one's interactions on others' welfare).

ETA: So to clarify: the claim was not that some women's tastes are distasteful but rather that a woman's tastes don't entirely determine her welfare so we can't move from a claim that something is in accordance with her tastes to a claim that something is in accordance with her welfare (or, for that matter, her desires, because her tastes in men don't fully define her desires either)

If you are a guy and have a button you can legally press that makes the woman you're trying to woo fall in love with you, pressing that button would be ... bad?

The "good - bad" scale is not the same as "legal - illegal" scale, although in nice societies they correlate positively.

Pressing people's buttons to make them act against their long-term interests is bad and legal.

(Where "bad" means approximately: "I wouldn't trust given person to cooperate with me in Prisonners' Dilemma, so I would consider it rational to defect".)

If you are a car salesman and have a button you can legally press which makes your customer buy a car, you'd press it. Instrumental rationality, no?

If you are a researcher who has a button he can legally press to make that reviewer look upon his submission more favorably, you'd probably press it.

No and no. And I think less of those who answer in the affirmative.

If you are a car salesman and have a button you can legally press which makes your customer buy a car, you'd press it. Instrumental rationality, no?

It depends on why the customer wouldn't buy the car unless I pressed the button.

If you are a car salesman and have a button you can legally press which makes your costumer buy a car, you'd press it. Instrumental rationality, no?

Instrumental rationality doesn't get you this far. It gets you this far only if you assume that you care only about selling cars and legality. If you also care about the welfare of others then instrumental rationality will not necessarily tell you to push the button (instrumental rationality isn't the same thing as not caring about others).

Of course, I don't expect anyone who doesn't care about the welfare of others to find any of what I'm saying here compelling. A certain level of common ground is required to have a useful discussion. However, I think most people do care about the welfare of others.

I find it extremely condescending to say you're responsible with how a woman you just met feels, it's treating them like a child, not like an adult who can darn well be expected to make her own choices, and turn away from you if she so desires.

There is, of course, a line between compassion and condescension and I agree that it is bad to cross that line. However, I think it's unreasonable to think that showing the level of concern that I'm talking about here for someone's welfare is crossing this line. To choose a silly example, it would be undesirable for me to shoot someone for no reason but a selfish desire (I, of course, do not actually have this desire). However, if I didn't shoot someone for some reason, this would be taking some responsibility for the welfare of others. However, this hardly amounts to treating them like a child. Similarly, not deliberately making a woman feel bad about herself is simply showing compassion and being respectful toward others. There's no reason to think this amounts to treating someone like a child.

Externally imposing unwritten rules (other than a legal framework) is infantizing adult agents.

I'm not "imposing" rules, unwritten or otherwise. What I am doing is suggesting that insofar as you care about the welfare of others, it is undesirable that you deliberately make people feel bad about themselves. Having a concern for the welfare of others is hardly infantising adults (consider the gun example again: it is not treating someone as an infant to decide not to kill them on the grounds of their welfare).

As an aside, this is really illustrative of the extent to which deciding to purposefully do something helps you accomplish goals.

And assuming that those "assorted techniques" don't contain anything terrible (many of them do, unfortunately), this all seems fine to me.

Both genders like confidence equally. Both genders like some amount of social dominance, although both genders seem to value it more in men. I don't know how much of that is just culture. If we're talking sexual dominance/submissiveness, I'd estimate 20% of women prefer submissive men, 50% prefer dominant, and 30% don't care - I'm sure we could get that data if we wanted.

That's not the part which is the problem. It's the entailing conclusions about behavior...

even if it means being an asshole and playing on people's insecurities sometimes.

which I don't like. Also, attempts at artificially puffing up ones social dominance are almost never good.

Do you consider accuracy relevant here?

To the fact that people are offended? No. They would be offended simply because the words are negative, regardless of accuracy.

As for myself, I'm not personally offended ... I think it's a half truth. Yes, dominance might be attractive in some contexts, no, that doesn't mean that being a jerk is generally an effective mating strategy.

The racism example is a half-truth too. Blacks do perform worse on cognitive tasks...but there is no evidence that this difference is genetic, and quite a bit of evidence that it's due to socioeconomic and health related factors. If I didn't tell you the second half of it, you might have just implicitly assumed the differences were genetic.

Yeah, I got that part. I'm not convinced.

Ok, I get it, somehow I've never heard this particular term before, but I am aware of the M.O.

The more interesting question is whether what they did was wrong, and there it's very hard to make a utilitarian case for it being so.

The harm caused to her was the embarrassment from being told what happened.

Steady on, what metric are you measuring harm on? She presumably had a very strongly held preference to not have sex-acts performed on her without consent - a preference utilitarian would count the violation of that preference a very great harm.

I think it's hard to make a utilitarian case that those boys DIDN'T act wrongly.

There is some dispute of the facts, but the most commonly believed story is that the girl got really drunk, and was partying with the boys who were also super drunk. She passed out, and the boys digitally penetrated her vagina, and slapped their dicks on her thigh. The next morning she woke up naked, not remembering what had happened, and continued in that ignorant bliss for a couple of days. However, the events had been captured in social media and she soon found out. After she found out, she complained, and the boys were charged, and ultimately convicted.

Oh thank God. I've been seriously worried at how my model was failing to predict accurately in this case, even after updating on what I thought had happened (the victim was conscious and physically restrained while the boys had sex with her, and people responded to video evidence with death threats and slut-shaming.) I noticed that I was confused, but couldn't seem to find the flaw - thank you for providing the explanation!

That said, I think it's fairly obvious that most people don't want their bodies to be used sexually while they're unconscious, and enforcing this norm seems like a pretty slam-dunk good idea. I suppose if you're not a preference utilitarian, but instead some sort of hedonic maximizer, simply suppressing it might make sense? Kinda? I'm drawing a blank here.

Unfortunately, you will never explain yourself, because it costs karma to reply to this. Mumblemumblemuble...

Heh. I went with that word choice because it's a funny little idiom. I like English idioms; my language is not as entertaining in this aspect. But you're right, it isn't optimized for upvotes.

Well, your question reads like a straightforward declaration of sides.

That was... unexpected. It never crossed my mind that people could infer anything about my position on gender issues from that question -- and if you asked me now, I couldn't say which is the side that it supposedly belongs on. (Just to hazard a guess, the answer might be "the enemy side", whichever side you're on, but I can't arrive to that answer without assuming bias on the part of downvoters, and I very much hope that LW isn't the crowd to do that to; besides, it would be uncharitable of me. So, I'll wait for the others to inform me.)

Oh. I asked the question immediately after seeing that the parent comment had gotten -2 within minutes of being posted, so I was expecting the trend to continue. It didn't.

Um, no. The reason it seems this way to you is that when you attempt to think of what the "things you can't say" are, your search space is limited to things you've actually heard.

Actually, it seems to have been moved to Main without showing up on the list of Main posts. I've checked promoted and new on the "text of articles" part of the page, and "recent posts" on the side bar.

Similarly, women don't necessarily want to be abused. But some quality that women want very much correlates strongly with being abusive. They have to figure out what it is, and give it up. Or keep it, and stop complaining.

To paraphrase a discussion that went on in a different thread a few months ago... Nerds in school don't necessarily want to be bullied. But they do want to study physics and watch anime, which correlates strongly with being bullied. They have to give it up. Or keep it, and stop complaining.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that if a woman finds that sexy non-abusive men are rare and usually already taken, then the best thing she could do is whine about it; but I can see where she's coming from, and I wouldn't blame her if she doesn't unreluctantly opt to pursue a non-abusive man even if he's not sexy, even though it may be the least of three evils. (The women I personally know typically opt to stay single until the right man comes along, but they might not be representative of the population in general.)

I bet that some female enjoyment of abuse goes way back in mammalian evolution. It's common in mammals for "courtship" of a female to consist of a strange new male beating up and driving off the female's mate, then killing her children, then immediately mating with her. Evolution must have programmed females to be sexually receptive to this.

Downvoted for this alone. What people want and why they evolved to want that are separate questions.

Several studies have shown that it's common for women to fantasize about being raped. I think it's rare for men to do so ... This is relevant though not conclusive information.

It's not as relevant as you assume, because the description of these as "rape fantasies" is much too simplistic. Most often, such fantasies clearly reject many and perhaps most relevant features of actual sexual violence. (The wiki article has references for this info.) Women are most likely sensible enough to know this and take this into account, so the fact that they indulge in such fantasies does not tell us much about what kinds of men they want.