We’re two weeks into the new year and it seems to me like the perfect time to talk about an old topic: nerds and male privilege. Last week I talked about MIT Professor Scott Aaronson’s emotionally vulnerable comment about being terrified of women growing up. While this was an excellent example of the problematic Nice Guy attitude, there was another issue that Aaronson brings up that I wanted to touch on: the idea that nerds are an exception to privilege. Quoting from his post:
Alas, as much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my “male privilege”—my privilege!—is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience. […]But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes—is completely alien to your way of seeing things.
Shortly afterwards Scott Alexander wrote a long defense about how nerds were unfairly put-upon by the outside world (especially by feminists) and having “privilege” wielded against them like a bludgeoning weapon:
I live in a world where feminists throwing weaponized shame at nerds is an obvious and inescapable part of daily life. Whether we’re “mouth-breathers”, “pimpled”, “scrawny”, “blubbery”, “sperglord”, “neckbeard”, “virgins”, “living in our parents’ basements”, “man-children” or whatever the insult du jour is, it’s always, always, ALWAYS a self-identified feminist saying it.
[…]
Read any article from the appropriate subfield of feminism, and you may well run into the part with the girl walking into a comic book store only to be accosted by a mouth-breathing troglodyte (Dr.’s Note: Oh hey, guess who he’s referring to?) followed by a “lesson” on nerd male privilege.
This idea – that nerds and geeks are unfairly maligned, that we’re the low-man on the social totem pole and we’re misunderstood, slandered and persecuted(!) – is a common one. We’re the underdog! We’ve been bullied, picked-on and insulted, how can we have privilege?!
Don’t get me wrong: I’m beyond sympathetic to my geeky brethren. I’ve written before about growing up with the same fears, self-limiting beliefs and identity problems that come with being a pasty, awkward ball of anxieties. But the problem is that we’re not the underdog; we just keep telling ourselves that we are. The stories we tell ourselves shape how we see the world, and the idea that nerds and geeks are weak, powerless and socially undesirable ends up blinding us not only to our true position in the world, but the effects of our own behavior. When you tell yourself that you’re the hero for long enough, you tend to not see when you’re acting like the villain.
Now let’s be clear: I’m not calling geeks the bad guy. But by mythologizing the nerd as downtrodden and powerless, we end up not seeing how we treat others badly… acting, ironically enough, in much the same way that the jocks and bullies act towards us.
You Keep Using That Word. I Do No Think It Means What You Think It Means
Before we get deep into this, let’s talk a little about privilege and what it means. Privilege, quite simply, are the social and societal benefits that come from being part of a certain class within society. It’s about how society treats and accommodates you as a member of said class. Male privilege refers to the benefits and advantages that men have, especially in relationship to women. Privilege is about the way society is set up to give dominance to certain people over others – even of the people benefitting from it don’t immediately recognize it. All things being equal (and we’ll get to that in a minute), being a man in Western society means having distinct advantages over women.
To be male is to be the default in just about everything, from hygiene products to clothing to representation. Men (especially straight, white, cisgendered men) can expect to find themselves represented as the television, to movies and to video games. We get so used to it that we assume that it’s the natural order of things – and society responds accordingly. One example is that male voices are prioritized over female ones – literally and figuratively. Teachers call on boys far more in school, while girls are ignored. Women are perceived as talking more – the old urban legend of how women use 20,000 words a day while men use 7,000- when in reality, not only do they talk less, but are perceived as “dominating the conversation”, even if they contribute less than 1/3rd as men do. Men are taken more seriously than women as well – to give a personal example, I get far more credit and taken more seriously for writing on feminist topics than women do on the exact same subject.
To put it another way: it’s Hermione doing all the hard work and Harry Potter getting all the credit for it.
Y’know. If Harry were a random loudmouth asshole with a blog instead of a wizard.
The pay gap and the glass ceiling are other perennial examples. But let’s take some examples from nerd culture. One of the ongoing discussions in society right now is how women are under-represented in STEM1 fields and whether this is a systematic problem embedded within the culture or simply a “pipeline” problem – that not enough women want to enter into STEM. Of course, it doesn’t help when even products that are supposed to be encouraging women to get into, say, computer programing, carry the message of “step aside and let the men do the real work“…
“Silly females, just making more work for men…”
However, studies have now proven how men are prioritized over women in STEM jobs. In a randomized study, scientists were presented with resumes and applications from grad students seeking employment as a lab manager. The resumes were exactly the same, with half having a male name and half having a female one. Across the board, the resumes with female names were rated as being less competent and less hirable. Not only were the scientists less interested in mentoring the female applicants, but they also low-balled their potential starting salary by $4,000. And yet despite increasingly glaring evidence, men still don’t believe in their privilege.
One of these reasons is simple: we misunderstand what it means to be privileged.
“But I Don’t FEEL Privileged”
One of the most common responses men have to discussions about privilege – especially when being asked to acknowledge their privilege – is to deny it exists. “My life hasn’t been easy,” they may say. “Look at all the ways my life hasn’t been fair! Look at all the ways I’ve been screwed over!” And let’s be fair: they’re not wrong. Yes, men, even straight, white men, get dealt shitty hands in life. They may be poor. They may be sick or handicapped. Their entire life may well be one long series of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. The gods themselves may very well seem to have singled them out to be the eternal buttmonkey, doomed to suffer for other the amusement of the uncaring cosmos.
You know… basically how you treat your Sims.
“Sweet! Now let’s trap him in the pool and take away the ladder!”
But here’s where privilege kicks in: as bad as things may be, how much worse would they be if he were gay? If he were trans? If he he were an ethnic minority?
If he was a woman?
Very few people pay conscious attention to the advantages they have in life; because they’ve been there all along, we rarely even notice them unless they’re pointed out to us. Men don’t recognize their advantages because… well, it’s just the way it’s always been. If they’ve never lived without it, then why would they notice? People with money rarely tend to think about the challenges of living on a tight budget. A white man is rarely conscious of how he’s less likely to be randomly stopped and frisked by the police (or to be shot by them, for that matter.) Men rarely think about the risks that women live with every day just by virtue of existing.
But not being conscious of those advantages doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
Sci-fi author John Scalzi has an excellent metaphor for privilege for the geeky set: straight, white male is playing life on the easiest difficulty setting. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t still challenges, just that you get better starting stats2 and that the behaviors from others (NPCs) will be more likely to be to your benefit (or at least not actively hostile).
Nobody denies that there aren’t levels of privilege within groups, mind you. Privilege isn’t a single absolute axis; it’s multi-dimensional. Race, gender presentation, sexual orientation, being neurotypical, physical appearance, social class, nationality, education – all of these are forms of privilege and all of them affect how we’re treated by the world. This is referred to in feminist circles as intersectionality – how different areas combine to affect levels of social advantages and disadvantages. A straight, cisgendered male nerd may be taunted, teased and bullied in school, but he’s still afforded advantages that a gay, female or trans nerd is not. Nerd or geek isn’t a privilege trump card, no matter how much some nerds may feel it is.
And part of the reason for that is that we still buy into the myth of the nerd as underdog.
Vi Scholaris Absurdus Universum Vivus Vici (or: Nerd Invictus)
Both Scott Aaronson and Alexander place nerds at the bottom of the social heap – the “least privileged class” in Aaronson’s words. Ignoring the sheer number of ethnic and sexual minorities who might take issue with that, both Aaronson and Alexander are perpetuating the story that we geeks tell ourselves: that we’re the scrappy dark horse, the downtrodden victim, the rag-tag rebels fighting against an implacable enemy. And that’d be great… if that were true.
Except it’s not. Frankly, the nerds have won. Nerd culture is culture, period. Of the top 50 highest-grossing movies of all time only one of them – Titanic – isn’t a cartoon or geek property. Guardians of the Galaxy was the highest grossing movie of the year. The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Star Wars: The Force Awakens are 2015’s most anticipated blockbusters. TV Guide’s list of the most popular shows in America include Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, The Originals, Sleepy Hollow, Reign and Arrow. Every Barnes and Noble is stuffed to the gills with Doctor Who toys, calendars and plushies. Video games have gone from being the province of “basement dwelling man-children” to something everyone does – the jocks are playing as much Call of Duty, Destiny and NFL 2015 as the geeks and everybody and their goddamn dogs are playing Angry Birds, Bejewelled and Candy Crush Saga. Our entire lives – from work to friendships to romance – take place online now. Joss Whedon is in charge of one of the most ambitious and profitable movie franchises of all time; Elon Musk is positioning himself as a real life Tony Stark; Bill Gates dominated our computers; Steve Jobs redefined how we consume music, television and put the Internet in all of our pockets; Bill Nye the Science Guy is on Dancing With the Stars; Neil deGrasse Tyson is a goddamn rock star, and Mark Zuckerberg knows when you masturbate controls your social life.
Less “social network” and more “perpetual drama machine”, really.
San Francisco has gone from being synonymous for “commie pinko values” to becoming synonymous with “tech startups”, when it hasn’t been completely annexed by Google. Geeks and nerds are the engine that run the economy. We’re not the misunderstood outsiders we used to be, we’re the mainstream.
So why are we still laboring under the idea that nerds, geeks, gamers and the like are this oppressed minority? This isn’t hyperbole, mind you – Scott Alexander specifically conflates the two. Although outside of the Revenge of the Nerds movies, I seem to have forgotten when nerds were forced to live in ghettos separate from the bros, when geeks had to wear clothing signifying their geekdom, when science dorks were forbidden from voting, having bank accounts, denied lines of credit, faced hiring freezes or having been rounded up into internment camps for fear of being 5th columnists…
STARE INTO THE FACE OF MODERN BIGOTRY!!
(Incidentally, it ain’t feminists who’re creating those nerd-mocking memes. They aren’t coming from Jezebel or Feministe or Alas, A Blog. They’re coming from /b/, /rk9/, 9gag, eBaum’s World and Something Awful. You know… from nerds.)
We are still in the mindset of the unappreciated heroes, beset on all sides by a world that hates and fears them. We’ve defined ourselves in opposition to our supposed enemies – the jocks, the bros, the Queen Bees and Mean Girls – and we’ve never stopped to ask ourselves whether that’s even still true any more. We take being a nerd as proof of our virtue on faith.
It is a common but incorrect myth that Silicon Valley is bro culture. Silicon Valley is nerd culture, and we are the bro’s natural enemy.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) September 27, 2014
But this is an insidious form of willful blindness. I love my nerdy brothers, but we have a nasty tendency to disappear up our own asses at times. Just because bros act a certain way doesn’t mean that we’re incapable of acting the exact same way. Just because we’ve been bullied doesn’t mean that we’re incapable of being bullies ourselves. We’ve been rejecting what the world thought about us for so long that we’re unwilling to see that criticism isn’t necessarily an insult and that sometimes they’re right and we’re wrong. Aaronson may have been too terrified of women to ever think of harassing them, but that doesn’t mean that geeks are incapable of harassment. Alexander equates a call for greater representation in genre fiction as an insult to geeky men and complains about posts on Jezebel about harassment and boorish behavior on online dating sites as an attack on Nice Guys. But people on Tumblr saying mean things and think-pieces about the fact that geek culture still has shitty attitudes towards women doesn’t add up to persecution. Having been bullied doesn’t make us martyrs and saints. Being uncomfortable and awkward around women doesn’t make you a good guy by default. There’s nothing wrong with being a nerd or a geek and wearing that like a badge of honor, but let’s not pretend that it’s a magic shield of Protection From Douchebaggery or the Mark of Cain.
“But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”
(Incidentally, it’s telling that both Aaronson and Alexander equate “nerd” with “male”. As much as they decry how geeks are treated by women, they’re denying women the chance to even be part of the club…)
Deeds, Not Words
One of the privileges of being a man – even a nerdy man – is that we’re shielded by virtue of our gender from what so many geeky women go through… but that doesn’t mean we don’t try to claim the same level of injustice. In his article for Salon, Arthur Chu points out that Aaronson’s fears are about what people may think of him while Amy, the woman he’s responding to, is talking about what others have done to her – yet people are giving the two equal weight. Alexander equates “creep-shaming” and feminist blogs being mean about socially awkward guys with systematic oppression in a culture that has and continues to actively discriminate against women. And while Aaronson and Alexander are handy examples, this belief runs rampant in the geek community. NerdBros will insist that everyone gets harassed online3 but women get singled out because they’re women. Men get insulted while women get sexually harassed and even stalked.
In On Nerd Entitlement, Laurie Penny points out that female nerds have many of the same emotional issues as male nerds, but compounded by structural misogyny and oppression. Radical feminists4 insulting male sexuality frankly isn’t deserving the same level of consideration as women who are harassed, stalked, threatened, chased from their homes and even SWATted over opinions about video games. Nerds aren’t harmless by virtue of being nerds.
Yeah, it’s an absurd image, but it’s not an inaccurate metaphor…
It’s the famous Margaret Atwood quote all over again: men are afraid that women will laugh at them while women are afraid that men will murder them.
As I said earlier: being a man doesn’t negate you from all harm, nor does it mean that you’re not going to be threatened, harassed, doxxed or otherwise risk harm However, men, even nerdy men, simply don’t face the same issues as women do; the price of being a woman in our culture still means bearing a disproportionate amount of risk and harm.
And we need to recognize this.
What Does This Mean To Us?
Whenever I write on anything touching on feminist issues or critiquing geek culture, I get people demanding to know why I’m attacking men and/or nerds. And the reason is simple: I love nerds. I love geek culture. I want to see it grow, I want to see it thrive and I want to watch it become the amazing force of creativity and culture and community that I know it can be. And it’s because I love it that I tend to be so damn hard on it. We can be so much better than we are if we’re only willing to recognize and address our own shitty beliefs and behaviors.
Believe me, as harsh as I sound, I have nothing but sympathy for my fellow nerds. I’ve dealt with the same fears, doubts and anxieties. I know damn good and well what they’re going through. But at the same time, I also know it’s a problem we have to fix for ourselves. Yeah, it may bruise the ego to be told that we’re acting like entitled shits. It’d be nice if people would phrase it more delicately or be more considerate of our feelings. At the same time however, it still speaks to our level of privilege and entitlement to insist that women nurse us through these issues. With great power comes great responsibility. It’s time we started trying to measure up to our own role models and living up to our own potential.
Related Posts
- Science, Technology, Engineering and Math [↩]
- Alternately for my old-school nerds, it’s like starting Oregon Trail as the banker instead of the farmer [↩]
- Free hint: “Everyone’s an asshole!” is neither an excuse nor a particularly compelling argument [↩]
- who are the self-admitted fringe of the movement at that [↩]
I would argue that men in general have a much great amount of overall social mobility within our culture, but that mobility applies both upward and downward. There isn't as much to stop a man from getting to the top but there are fewer safety nets stopping him from crashing to rock bottom. That isn't to say there aren't many rich/powerful and poor/destitute women, they just don't occupy the extremes of the socio-economic spectrum the way men do.
That's not true. If a man climbs to the top and then falls down, he's virtually always going to have a "safety net" of connections – friends, family, business partners past and present, mentors, former co-workers – who can help him right himself and get back on his feet. It's why the Wall Street guys who screw up and end up serving time in jail (or even just get fired from their firms for incompetence) always seem to find their footing and keep on making a ton of money.
Women don't have that, or they don't have it as much. They have smaller networks of acquaintances the higher up they go, fewer mentors, and usually fewer opportunities. When they fall down, they fall harder and get blamed more heavily for it – that's why there's talk of a "glass cliff".
As for "poor/destitute women", there's a lot more of them at the bottom than destitute men – especially if they happen to be non-white and a single parent. Women represent about two-thirds of minimum wage workers, for example.
I think you're approaching poor/destitute from a higher level than unbentpaperclip is. While it's true that 2/3 of minimum wage workers are female, it's also true that around 60% of the homeless population is male, and I can believe that it's easier for homeless women to find a place to stay, whether in a shelter or elsewhere, because of a combination of social structures set up specifically to help women and a cultural sense that they need to be "protected". A higher percentage of homeless women are in family structures, which are also more likely to get assistance.
And to add, I'm not suggesting by this that men actually have it worse off as a group, just that when you are at the absolute rock bottom points, those safety nets for women must be absolutely maddening, since it could save your life, and you can't have it.
Damn it I ment to add to my post not delete it…
There is a lot of issues with homelessness. Mental illness and addiction are some of them. It is a failure of the government if the neediest parts of the population are not being taken care of. We need more shelters period.
Absolutely, 100%, agreed. And not just shelters, but homes, where people can stay for a while, and where they can get the help they need to get them back on their feet, whether that be medical, educational, or otherwise.
In another reply to myself… after posting this, I decided to actually research it, and I actually found that homelessness may actually be harder on younger women than younger men. I went looking for mortality rates among the homeless population, and found this:
"A second finding in this study is noteworthy. In the general population, mortality rates among younger women are much lower than among younger men, usually about one-third to one-half. This competitive advantage persists even among impoverished populations, where women continue to have a longer life expectancy than men. Cheung and Hwang found that the mortality rates among younger homeless women are similar to those of younger homeless men, and this was observed in all of the cities." (santabarbarastreetmedicine.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/PrematureMortalityFinal.pdf)
One of the major reasons for this is that while things like shelter services may be more accessible to women, the actual causes of death within the homeless population are primarily related to acute and chronic medical conditions, with substance abuse and mental issues a second place contender, and hypothermia/exposure "surprisingly infrequent".
And I know this is kind of a derail, so I apologize, but since I introduced probably incorrect data, I wanted to correct it.
I don't think it's a derailment.
unbentpaperclip's comment about extremes and destitution, and the implication that there are/might be more truly destitute (as in, among other definitions, "homeless") men left me specifically wondering to what degree that could be attributed to men being more likely to survive those conditions to be counted, in contrast to men falling further downward in greater numbers in the first place.
More data on this would be interesting to explore.
That Aaronson post just appalls me the more and more I hear about it, especially in the context where he had someone tell him she was harassed and even raped by a nerd before posting it. Does he just have no sympathy or understanding about the fact that this is something that doesn't happen to him? Or is he just so invested in the idea that he's "a victim" that he simply refuses to accept this or empathize with people who have it worse off than him?
It just really fucking irritates me. I grew up in a conservative area, with a conservative mother who was casually homophobic and anti-gay. Occasionally I'll have some homophobic reflex well up in response to some trigger, but you know what? I recognize that it's a problem, that it's coming from a bad source, and I consciously make the choice to go beyond that. Fuck Aaronson for being unwilling to make that step when it comes to women and other disadvantaged groups. Seriously.
In my experience when men like Aaronson equate women's harassment and rape with male insecurity and low self esteem, I am inclined to think it's NOT because they really think those things are equal or have no sympathy for victims, but because they simply don't believe it really happened to the women. They don't trust women to assess the situation accurately and assume we exaggerated (or even lied) just to "get attention". "Real" rape and harassment is rare in their minds, or only happens in the Middle East.
Aaronson actually followed up a couple times further explaining himself, and (on my reading) he is fairly compassionate – this comment soon afterward is a little clumsy, but he clearly isn't dismissing the commenter's experience:
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment…
He reiterates some of his views on feminism in a follow-up post
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2119
Not that I agree with everything he says, but he deserves some credit
edit: typo
Yeah…some, but I still have tons of problems with his followup. He mentions once that he could've worded some things better, but spends lots of time saying things like "Obviously I'm not a horrible person" and speaks of people "twisting my words" and so on. That gives the overall impression/tone, to me, that he's of the mind that all misunderstandings are the fault of the reader, and not him. That he has no responsibility in people's negative perceptions of him (even though its a direct result of things he wrote); that's all just 'teh feminists conspiracy out to get meh!' This attitude is all too common, and its fucking bullshit. If you want to be understood, you need to communicate clearly and with attention to nuance.
You can't expect people to read your mind instead of the actual words you wrote or said. And you certainly don't get to whine about how the other person is the bad guy every time they interpret your communications in a way that makes you look bad. Contrary to popular belief, people do NOT generally pull their opinions completely out of their asses – they base it on their lived experiences and observations. Acting like a person does otherwise, is deeply insulting, probably also can read as dismissal of the lived experiences they base their opinions on, and may even qualify as a kind of gas-lighting.
This all still assuming you made an honest mistake and mis-spoke. Its still entirely possible that a person's uncharitable view of yours is actually *right* – you are an asshole, because you have in fact said or done shitty things. Yet people aren't even necessarily asking you deeply self-reflect to correct this, necessarily. Most people would be happy with an "oops, I mis-spoke, *MY BAD THAT'S MY FAULT*, let me clarify". All you gotta do is claim an even share of responsibility for the confusion, and NOT shove most or all of it off on someone else. But apparently that's STILL too much to ask of some people, and that's just fucking ridiculous.
Totally. A lot of it feels like "I'm sorry you were offended".
You found the words I took 3+ paragraphs to find. The lack of responsibility and sincerity, that's EXACTLY the vibe I was trying to get at, and that phrase really sums it up.
Yes, I think he does better than most when it comes to addressing his critics, but of course could still do much better.
A correction regarding context:
Aaronson's now-infamous comment was #171 in that thread. Amy's personal revelation was in comment #174, in reply to Aaronson's assertions.
The whole thing reads in context much more like two people talking past each other and missing each other's points for mistaking each other's intentions. I have problems with lots of things Aaronson said, and even more things one can infer that he may or may not have meant to imply. However, dismissing Amy's specifically-disclosed personal experience was not a thing that happened in #171.
Up to that point, she had merely said that harassment and sexism were problems women struggle with in STEM, as both point and counterpoint to other commenters who disagreed — including Aaronson, who linked a post in which the systemic effects of bad teaching in general were examined in light of how they could disproportionately affect student made more vulnerable by personal disadvantages, so that some students — roughly speaking, "privileged" students — might have an easier time making up the deficit in publicly-available instruction, while less-advantaged / disadvantaged students have fewer additional resources.
That's interesting and worth looking at independently, as the linked piece was written to be considered; in the context of Aaronson's blog post, it was offered as mild support of other commenters objecting to the removal of Lewin's videos, meant to offer a perspective from which leaving the videos accessible was actively helpful to women in STEM. Unfortunately, since Amy had just been arguing both that leaving the videos up looked like tacit approval of Lewin's success (and thereby the behavior he leveraged that success to engage in) and that sexual harassment of women in STEM is a real, obstacle-presenting problem, Aaronson's reply with that link could easily read as a response to Amy that harassment was not as much a problem as silencing good teaching (which may well be what he intended to convey). There, he really does come across as insensitive, telling a woman trying to make a point about her own experience (without too much personal disclosure) what's "actually" best for women.
That, along with #171, was what prompted Amy to go as far as revealing her personal experience, stating that she had been raped in order to note that to her, personally, the rape was less traumatic than everyday sexism and sexual harassment building up over time. Had Aaronson's #171 come in response to that — and it is widely portrayed as having done so — his dismissal and overtalking of that point would have been inexcusable. And that's how a lot of people have been presented the sequence of events.
That sequence of events, however, is not true. Amy disclosed in an attempt to be taken seriously where she had not been taken seriously without that personal element before, and while that definitely can be seen to speak to how she interpreted #171, it's not fair to Aaronson to pretend his remarks were caused by a thing they actually preceded and caused.
Just started reading some of your articles, Dr. Nerdlove, and they are really interesting and well written. Some of the subjects I have never really given thought to but with your articles, have certainly given me a different perspective in life, what happens from different pair of eyes.
Don’t feel like tackling the gender issues side of this, but Alexander does come close to two points that really do shape these discussions.
First, the discussion of nerds as the most oppressed class ever does not happen in a vacuum. According to feminists, women are the most oppressed group of people ever. According to race activists, colored people are the most oppressed group of people ever. According to LGBT activists, trans folk are the most oppressed group of people ever. Hell, there are people out there who will tell you with a straight face that people who can afford to overeat are the most oppressed group of people out there. This race to the bottom, where you’re somehow more credible the worse off you are, is going to create exactly this sort of pointless pissing match.
Second, he’s not wrong that nerds are more likely that most other classes to identify with various social justice causes. This probably confounds the issues in nerd culture. Being able to talk the talk and be studied up on the academic points of social justice often allows people to feel like they’re doing their part, without doing anything to make real, substantiative change. And knowing the academic side takes pressure off the need to be conscious of one’s own behavior. I wonder how much this can explain the difference between self-perception and reality.
Citations needed
http://xkcd.com/285/
Those are bold claims, especially when you use such a broad brush. According to "feminists", "race activists", and "LGBT activists"? Uh… do you have anything more specific than that?
Because a lot of the discourse I'm familiar with within spheres of feminism, critical race theory, or other social justice spheres is intersectional, as the Doctor described in the article–meaning it recognizes there are multiple axes of oppression, and they aren't always comparable. Sure, there are some people out there who will argue until they're blue in the face that a white cis woman is more oppressed than a black trans man, but in my experience, they're the minority. Far more of the bloggers and thinkers I know are cognizant of the differing axes of oppression and reticent to play the "Oppression Olympics," instead preferring to talk holistically about the many forms of marginalization at play and their intersections.
" According to feminists, women are the most oppressed group of people ever. According to race activists, colored people are the most oppressed group of people ever. According to LGBT activists, trans folk are the most oppressed group of people ever. Hell, there are people out there who will tell you with a straight face that people who can afford to overeat are the most oppressed group of people out there."
So, just because someone decides to focus on one issue, that means they don't see other issues? That's like saying to a physicist "You're no scientist because you're not a biologist, too".
Incidentally, there's a group of people that talk about all those issues; they're being called "SJW's" and very often they're loathed.
Sorry, I just really dislike this argument. It's rarely anything more but an attempt at derailing discussion on any given subject.
Yeah, it doesn't happen in a vacuum–problem is, the days when nerds were even closed to oppressed were…what? Twenty years ago? A decade, at the least? And NOW it's in a vacuum. I'm a nerd and I get DAILY compliments on my nerd cred–a gaming vanity plate, a gaming jacket, a few nerd decals. My nerdiness actually scores me PRIVILEGE, where I'm more likely to be hired in a technology setting (I'm a programmer) because I casually make a Star Wars reference, or where I'm trying to pick up guys OR chicks. The N7 jacket is a fucking tail magnet, bro.
Regardless, I'll listen to your opinions on oppression the day my people–trans people–aren't killed for, you know, being trans. 1612 of us killed since 2008, that's 230 per year, that's a trans person murdered every other day. If you wanna play the Oppression Olympics you better get ready to go against fucking champions.
(Although the real winners of the OO are women, hands down.)
Context matters. If you like bodily autonomy, best to be male. If you'd rather not be murdered by a romantic partner, same. If you don't want to be murdered by cops, on the other hand, you should try to be white or Asian. Being rich helps. It's also good to be rich if you like having healthcare, but you'll benefit more from it if you're white, fluent in English, and/or male. It's almost as though different groups are affected by social problems in different ways! But somehow that idea is too hard for a lot of male nerds to comprehend, especially when it gets in the way of their self-pitying origin story about Having It The Worst.
Speaking as somebody who has a very good life for the most part; I find pointing out to people who have been dealt a losing hand that it could be worse to be at least incredibly poor taste. At worse, it demonstrates selective empathy. A person whose going through an incredibly difficult life, and I mean struggling with illness, poverty and the rest, does not deserve less empathy or help because they happen to be a white man.
This is the negative side about talking about privilege. It leads to some very selective empathy at times. Empathy and help should not be doled out to a chosen few. People who need help should get it even if they come from an otherwise privileged good.
So I can't empathize with your plight while saying "this is something you can fix"?
You can. My point was that for the more serious types of harm, like a disability, pointing out that other people have it worse is in bad taste. I’m not referring to relationship or sex problems but more difficult issues.
Well, I mean even when it comes to. . .let's say a temporary disability from an accident. . . its totally possible to empathize and still say "if you want to walk again, you have to do your physical therapy." I say all of that not because of anything explicit in what you wrote as because I know Doic and I have both been in the position of the target audience. I feel for them. I understand their pain. Its not going to get better if they don't do something about it.
"My point was that for the more serious types of harm, like a disability, pointing out that other people have it worse is in bad taste"
That's not really as relevant a statement as it seems. If someone was just talking specifically about their disability, just kvetching, then yes, it's rude and awful to point out that other people have it worse.
If someone starts talking about how their disability means that they have it the worst out of anyone, including people who very visibly have a worse (more dangerous) lot than they do in similar situations, and how perhaps those people should think about him and his disability and cater specifically to it because their disabilities don't seem as severe to him… yeah, no, it's not a dick move to point out that he's being a twit.
At the risk of "he started it" a large part of this conversation comes from the repeated assertion that male nerds (or as both the people DNL is referring to called them, "nerds"–but with inherent gender implication) are the "lowest social class," and that women trying to discuss boundaries and safety in a very non-accusatory, non-personal situation, made them feel awful and is a Bad Thing To Do.
"My point was that for the more serious types of harm, like a disability, pointing out that other people have it worse is in bad taste"
A common point of criticism of Aaronson is that for the more serious types of harm, like sexual harassment involving holding one's education and career advancement hostage (and thus future quality of life) to coerce compliance and/or silence, pointing out that other people have it bad and claiming it's worse is in bad taste.
You can, but they're probably not going to use your empathy to work on fixing it.
Your right it is really shitty to tell someone who's been dealt a bad hand in life that "At least it's not as bad as XYZ".
I'm going to assume you are talking about Alexander and Aaronson saying that yeah women have it bad sometimes, but at least it's not as bad as being a nerd, and not Dr. Nerdlove talking about how it being a nerd does not automatically make you part of "society’s least privileged classes."
On some level, I agree with you. I think so much of the response to Aaronson has missed a crucial point: that if you experience crippling anxiety at the thought of being seen as "creepy", the answer is not in critical theory. Activists are not therapists. It's important to recognize the social forces at work, but no amount of feminist literature is going to help you overcome your anxiety or depression by itself.
But that said, I think you're misrepresenting the argument.
Of course not. A white man who is struggling deserves empathy and help, as does everyone. Could you please show me where you see people suggesting otherwise?
Again, I agree entirely. Is this not happening? Are people arguing otherwise?
I don't agree that privilege necessarily leads to selective empathy, and I say this as a white cis dude surrounded by people–mostly women–who care deeply about social justice. I've had hard times in my life, and never once have the people around me given me the cold shoulder and said, "You're privileged; deal with it." Acknowledging that I benefit from a number of social institutions by virtue of largely inherited characteristics doesn't mean I'm less human. Being mindful of privilege is completely compatible with empathy.
In fact, I'd posit the opposite: being oblivious to one's own privilege is spectacularly non-empathetic. To return to the article, someone who conflates his fear of anxious feelings with women's fear of sexual assault, stalking, or violence committed against them shows an astounding lack of empathy. To refuse to acknowledge one's own privilege and say, "I'm the real victim here" is at least amazingly shortsighted, if not callous.
That doesn't mean that privileged folks don't get to talk about their difficulties or experiences, mind. Privileged folks can and do experience serious hard times, no doubt about it. But to try to flip the script and claim that oppressed folks are actually the oppressors, and that it's really white, cis, straight, nerdy men who are oppressed–that's remarkably self-centered and non-empathetic. It is possible to claim your painful experiences while simultaneously recognizing your privileged position.
A good example of empathetic response, by Miri at Brute Reason:
As somebody who actually does social justice work for a living, representing undocumented aliens, I find that I have exceedingly little patience with most social justice talk on the Internet for many reasons. One reason is that I agree with Freddie De Boer's argument that it leads to what he calls "magic words" theory. This means that people invoke words like privilege in an expectation that it will get other people to magically change their thinking. Conservatives have their own version of "magic words" theory that is rhetorically weak. In order to win arguments, you need to be able to debate and discuss with people who don't automatically agree with you and might be coming from entirely different set of presumptions about the world. I'll let Freddie explain the rest:
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/04/29/bingo-cards-g…
Social justice talk and its' conservative counterpart are not great ways to try to convince most people of your view point. You are either going to get people on the defensive at worse or have them roll your eyes at you at best if they don't start from the same ideological perspective. There are exceptions to the rule but not many. All the talk about privilege, etc. might have more negative effects than positive ones.
The other reason is that many, not all, but many social justice types talk a good game online but don't do any work in real life.
The reason there's "social justice talk" is probably the same as the reason there's jargon in any academic field: if you want to discuss the specifics of something, it needs to be codified in a way that you can talk about it such that people who have studied what you've studied will be able to understand you. Is there a somewhat culture-centric aspect of the way the jargon is put together? Probably. I'm not outside the culture, so it's hard for me to tell.
My point is, "I don't like how your wording that" can be a barrier, but it should really be the start of discussion. Otherwise it becomes "use the words and definitions I understand, not the ones you understand," and you'll end up dead-ending the conversation because you don't bother to look into what someone means when they use a word you don't understand.
*Note: Every use of the word "you" in this post is the general "you", not you specifically.
The problem is that it doesn't start the discussion. It just gets people on the defensive or. more likely, has them rolling their eyes. Nearly every political subculture is just talking to itself these days rather than outsiders. The piece comparing being a white man with the lowest possible difficulty setting in a video game was more likely read buy many more people that already agreed with it than who were coming from an opposite prospective. Most people aren't academics. Even in very well-educated countries, most people don't have the academic jargon even if they have a college degree. Online its easy to pretend that everybody knows what we are talking about but in reality, most Americans never heard of Gamergate and don't care. Nor do they know anything about the other things we talk about. You need to speak like nobody has any idea of what your talking about.
In order to effect change, you need numbers. That means besides people who already agree with you, you need just enough people who are neutral or even opposed to your point of view to come over to your side. Using jargon filled and potentially alienating methods of debate do not do that.
Well, I suppose that's where the Christian Right has it figured out. Raise your kids in the One Truth. Look for people who need meaning in their lives and offer them a hand up.
Most of the people I talk to about most anything use jargon I don't understand. If I care about communicating (and I do), I make a point of figuring out the relevant definitions before agreeing or disagreeing, or even just to make listening more productive. I'm not an academic in any field but mathematics, and I don't actually talk to anyone about that as a general rule, so for all intents and purposes I'd say I definitely qualify as "not an academic".
What I am is someone who cares about actually talking about things, and not just yelling my disagreement. If I mention privilege to someone and they leave the conversation without explanation, then as far as I can tell, they don't really care about communicating, and I probably won't change their mind even if I go the extra mile and figure out how to use only their terminology, which would be mighty difficult to do without also using my so as to compare and contrast.
Is it on me to be understanding? Sure. Is it on me to know ahead of time what words someone may find annoying and then scramble to fix imagined slights? Beyond slurs or actual triggers, no, not really. If someone wants to talk, they need to use their words, and also someone else's words, and figure out how words around them are being used. Language isn't quick and dirty.
But Aaronson does not struggle with poverty or other societal disadvantages. He's not an under-educated, homeless white man or something of that ilk, he's an MIT professor for science's sake!
I'd sympathize if he simply wrote about loneliness, depression, anxiety, low self-worth etc, because those can be very legitimate and painful things no matter where you are on the social totem pole, but when someone in his position starts speculating that he "belongs to one of society's least privileged groups" it *is* mockable.
EDIT: And yes, he should still be able to get help – and he's probably in a better position to get it than a lot of less privileged people would be.
Also, thinking about it, even being able to be a nerd – as I think we commonly understand the word – is probably in and of itself quite privileged. It means you've had the opportunity and the ressources to get all wrapped up in more or less obscure interests and hobbies. And in many cases, that you got to take it further into education.
Aaand ninja'ed by spencerdub, who said it a lot more eloquently.
“But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”
I always loved the line fron Social Network, because it just is so true…
I was dating a nerdy guy for a while whn in college and when we were together he acted like a complete asshole and then tried to tell me that girls didn't like him because he was geeky and was studying to design video games. and I told him that he was an asshole, and that is why he was not liked and proceeded to break up with him.
I think I actually stood up and applauded at that line in my living room.
Social Network is one of my all time favorite movies. I've tried to convince a lot of people to watch it, only to be told "Ugh why watch a movie about Facebook?" When really, it's a fascinating, nuanced character study about being a "nerd" and how a person can be both sympathetic, brilliant, and quite a big jerk.
Hm. I mostly liked the movie, but sympathetic is not an adjective I would think to append to the movie version of Zuckerberg.
I found him sympathetic. He's clearly insecure and awkward; the twin rowers were angling to take advantage of him by having him do the majority of their code while they got most of the profits. Again, that doesn't negate him being a giant jerk who lacks any kind of self-awareness, but the movie goes out of its way to suggest he's his own worst enemy.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted for just expressing an opinion about a movie (and it seems like I'm not), but I apologize/sympathize if it's bugging you.
This is interesting to me, though, because I'm pretty sure both of us have known our fair share of giant jerks who lack any kind of self-awareness in Real Life—but that has apparently not diminished your ability to feel sympathy for characters like that, or at least not to the extent that it has for me. I know it's not really answerable, but I kind of wonder why that is.
I think the movie would be a dull thing indeed if they'd just painted Zuckerberg as an all out villain. I think there are a lot of qualities about him that show him as scared and vulnerable, and then we see how he compensates for those qualities in a really gross destructive way. That's what makes it a compelling film. You can sympathise with him with his frustrations, and at the same time understand that the way he chooses to solve his problems is not exactly healthy.
So yeah, basically, I agree with you is what I'm saying.
I love the movie, but am kind of disappointed that they were so determined to make a point that they glossed over a major point in Mark's life. They wanted to make a story about how the guy who connects billions with a web app is fundamentally unable to relate to other people, and show him fumbling with women evens as he becomes a billionaire…except the actual Mark Zuckerberg was in a steady relationship the whole time, with a med student (later graduate) who he'd met before he even launched Facebook.
Not that Zuckerberg doesn't have some…noticeable issues dealing with people, and I *do* really love the story, but I'm just annoyed that they wrote his future wife out of the script because she muddied their desired point.
I tend to think of movies portraying real events as merely inspired by the events, but not as historical works. They're more enjoyable that way.
I have a limit. If you're going to make a person's inability to have meaningful relationships the centerpiece of your story, it's kind of invalidated by them having a long stable relationship. So maybe you should try for a different theme in the biography, or make a work of outright fiction.
" inspired by the events"
That's actually the quote in the opening credits.
/"Social Network" nerdgirl
Nitpicking:
eBaum's World and 9gag have almost zero original content(substitute Reddit and Fark for those), and doxing is with a single x.
The gist I get from this whole debate so far: both Scotts suffer(guessed based on their word usage(?) in the posts under neurotypicalism and mild ableism, plus of course the ever-present toxic masculinity(enforced by both genders, with some feminist criticism verging towards "man up", failing at intersectionality or the straight up psychologically abusive). We can attribute this to Hanlon's Razor(some dudes need to hear this harshness, but the ones who will listen mostly do not fall into that category) and with people acting in the only way they can in hierarchical structures(use the oppressor's tactics against him), so we need to get sharper at identifying when it goes too far, while also knowing when self-care takes precedence over defending yourself, and when to step out when the debate is not about you.
" doxing is with a single x. "
I don't think so. Especially not in the gerund form (e.g., "doxxing").
I've seen both, and I doubt it's in a proper dictionary already (caveat: I haven't looked), but I would argue that, given the short "o" it would require two x's in gerund. Also, that's what I see most often anyway.
On the other side, the idea that some nerds have that nerds are a persecuted group was something that I never got. Maybe it’s because a grew up during the 1980s and 1990s, but I never had any social problems because of playing video games or reading comics or fantasy novels. There weren’t a particularly large number of nerds at my high school, there weren’t many jocks or cheerleader types either, and my kid and teen years were fine.
I grew up during the same time period and I remember getting my faced kicked in on the school yard by the popular kids, being told by the girls in my 6th grade class how fat and ugly I was, being called a nerd as an insult, being actively ignored and shunned by most kids.
Yeah, I don't see how just because being nerdy is a Thing now, how that's supposed to erase all the damage that I now carry. If I were to meet my childhood bullies today, I still wouldn't forgive them.
Consider yourself lucky, LeeEsq
I'm missing something from the privilege discussion and I think it is important. Perhaps it can bridge the gap for some of those who refuse intersectionality still. This is:
When it comes to individual slights, and the blame is put rightly, all bets are off and your responsibility to be the bigger man is zero.
"Their entire life may well be one long series of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown."
– CB isn't allowed to stereotype other women from the template that is Lucy
– CB isn't allowed to consider himself generally oppressed by womankind.
– He isn't allowed to consider society owes him something in return for his bad experiences
So far we all agree
He is however allowed to hate Lucy, as an individual, for taking his ball. Indefinately if he so desires, although that may not be recommended as it isn't very healthy for him. In this particular instance, Charlie Brown isn't called upon to give an iota of consideration about Lucys pain of growing up a girl in relation to the situation of her stealing the ball. He forgives or doesn't forgive purely on his own terms.
This goes in other situations aswell. If I am reached by the news that my schoolyard tormentor OD'd or went to jail and I smirk contentedly, that's entirely my business. The fact that I swim in class and culture privilege of which he never could've obtained matters fuck all. I may not be right in judging all people like him too harshly, people I don't have personal beef with that is. Then I might look like a borgouis asshole true and should rightly check my privilege. But his individual ass is mine to hate. I earned it.
I write this because I think a reason nerds get hostile in intersectionality debates is that they think it means they must forgive and forget all individual offences commited to them because White Male Cis-privilege but no. Nerdrage the hell out of those who have wronged you for as long as it feels meaningful (but don't go after the group next).
The sum total of internationality is individualism.
So, then, why do we need these theories of power and 'privilege' in the first place?
Spoken like someone who hasn't been on the receiving end.
Spoken like someone who prefers the ad-hominem to a real argument.
The thing is, an individualist philosophy has the moral high ground when it comes to instances of prejudice. It's far more fair and just to say "prejudice in space X due to factor Y is wrong because it unfairly hurts people who have Y trait" than it is to go through all of the social justice reasoning about what group has suffered more oppression at who's hands and how we might assess collective guilt.
I prefer real argument when something is worth arguing about. The aggregate of individual choices can still be slanted in such a way as to unfairly disadvantage people by class. Every slave owner made an individual choice. If you want to argue that their choices were unfairly restricted, go for it.
And is there any useful ethical conclusion to be drawn from that? Every slave owner is responsible for their own actions. No one else is. Which is why any talk of 'reparations' from people who weren't slave owners is ethically unsound.
Except that many people who descended from slave owners inherited quite a lot of money, status, etc. that their ancestors didn't exactly labor to get, and people who descended from owned slaves didn't inherit the money that their ancestors worked for and didn't get. So to some extent, non-slave-owning descendants of slave owners do still owe some reparations to descendants of slaves.
But, they are in no way responsible for the decision to enslave people, or the decision to own slaves. They couldn't have been, since they weren't even alive. How does it make sense to punish someone, to take away their property when they personally have done nothing wrong?
It isn't a punishment, it's a reparation. In the specific case of asking the descendants of slave owners to pay some financial and social costs on behalf of the descendants of slaves, it makes perfect sense because they literally owe their current property—including ongoing income, quality of life, etc.—to capital which their ancestors handed down to them but which was gained by exploiting the labor of slaves.
Are we seriously having this argument? I am still having trouble believing that this is an argument you want to have.
I've had a minor epiphany as to where my secular tithing is going. Thank you for that! 😀
The NAACP has a donate page! Hooray! https://donate.naacp.org/page/contribute/basicdon…
Secular tithing. . .I like this concept.
As is every contemporary who didn't own slaves but was in a position to stop the system and did nothing.
The conclusion is that it is possible to both create unjust systems and to oppose them based on aggregate individual choices. The conclusion is that there can be such a thing as "systematic oppression" based on "individual choice", which it should be noted is incentivized or disincentivized by society as a whole. The conclusion is that a given instance of sexual hrassment is an individual choice made in a larger system that incentivies it, so the dichotomy between individual and societal is really a false one in the first place.
I would like it if someone who was a mod put a stop to this before it really gets going.
I understand if they don't — but what I also see here is some people already getting way out of their depth on a topic to the point where they aren't even aware how badly they might be insulting and hurting people.
So I just wanted to … register that with someone who is in a position to do something about it.
It looked pretty much over to me (and thank you, Nearly Takuan for a clear, succinct way to explain reparation), but yeah, [mod] these sorts of analogies about slavery really were not a good idea in the last thread, and they're still not a good idea in this thread, and I'd suggest that everyone steer clear of them, since they're not likely to turn out to be any better an idea in the next thread. [/mod]
That seems reasonable.
My own problem with "privilege" as a term for discussion of these topics is that "privilege" is already a word with meaning, and in a social justice context it is being used to mean something slightly different. Hence the knee-jerk reaction, "I'm not privileged! My life sucks!" But since there isn't really a better word right now, I'll stick with "privilege" to mean "not oppressed in this particular category."
You clearly understand that while Charlie Brown is absolutely entitled to hate Lucy for her behavior toward him, he's not entitled to stereotype or blame women as a group for Lucy's behavior. If everyone else understood that, I don't think we'd need articles like this one. Scott Aaronson not only doesn't understand this, he's taking it a step further and blaming women as a group for a problem that was entirely in his own head (seriously, nobody goes to jail for having an unreciprocated crush).
Yeah, it's infuriating that he doesn't get it. Where is his anecdotal evidence that you actually get maced and labeled a creep in case you ask a woman to go out and do something together… Oh right! He never did.
I agree that the problem with "privilege" as a term is that it usually was only about rich/poor.
And like so many frustrated nerds with self-serving narratives, he just assumes that the men who are successful with women are "sexist Neanderthals." An amazing change happened in my life when I started asking women out and going on dates with them. All of a sudden, their male friends who were waiting to be noticed despite never having made any sort of romantic overture decided that I was a sexist Neanderthal. I'm the same person I've always been, and I'm still very nice to women (still on good terms with all my exes, even friends with a couple)… but as soon as I started taking initiative, guys who didn't take initiative decided that I was an asshole.
We really need a word other than "privilege" to differentiate Social Justice privilege from regular old privilege. But I don't have any ideas. You have any?
I'm confused at the difference between Social Justice privilege and regular privilege.
Regular privilege is the presence of something that makes your life easier. Social justice privilege is the absence of something that makes your life harder. I realize that this is a glib answer, but I think it's mostly correct.
And it boils down to why people can have a certain privilege (white, male, straight, etc) and not feel "privileged" per se. The advantage those things provide is invisible – like not getting shot while minding your own business. A common argument is that this kind of advantage isn't privilege, because everyone should have it. That argument is incorrect, but it underlines the perceived difference.
While a random white guy might not even notice all of his opportunities to not get shot while minding his own business, a Kennedy knows they have more money and political power than everyone else. And when you say "privilege," your average person thinks of the Kennedys, not a random dude who doesn't get benefits or overtime at his job.
Oh, OH!
As in filthy rich heiress privilege vs male privilege. I still don't think there's really a distinction except in which ones get paid attention to where.
The amount of attention different categories get isn't a coincidence, though. Some forms of privilege are visible (like money), others are invisible (like not getting shot while minding your own business).
In psychology, researchers differentiate between positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is the commonly understood form, giving a pleasant thing to reward to the desired behavior. Negative reinforcement is taking away an unpleasant thing to reward the desired behavior. They both reinforce the desired behavior, but they don't work in exactly the same way.
Ultimately it's a matter of semantics, and I don't really expect someone who is determined to not listen will listen either way. But I know from my own experience that I would have listened sooner if someone had said, "You're white and therefore you can benefit from others' racism without knowing it, even if you don't do anything racist yourself" rather than "You're white and therefore have Privilege and there's nothing you can do about it."
Yes! So I'm not the only one who thinks this. I've always found the term "privilege" to have something of an ivory-tower disconnect between the way it's commonly used and the way it's used in academic/theoretical circles. It took me a while to understand that the concept was really getting at something more along the lines of "The system works for you the way it was promised/supposed to work" or "While nothing in this life is guaranteed, there is far less likelihood of Horrible Shit Thing X happening to you." Most privileged people don't think of this as "privilege" because THAT'S HOW THINGS ARE (theoretically) SUPPOSED TO BE, and since the system has worked for them, as far as they can tell, the system works, period.
Yes! And I think part of what people struggle with, when being asked to recognize their own privilege, is this feeling that maybe some of their successes were "helped along" by a lack of systematic oppression. We all want to feel like our accomplishments came from hard work and skill, so when we learn that that might always be the case, it can be hard. And some people reject this idea – and I think this is a big part of why a lot of conservatives want get rid of social safety nets – they want to believe that their successes weren't borne of any advantages. And if other people are in shitty life situations, it's because they are less skilled, not working hard, etc., not because the system is unfair.
My favorite thought experiment is to think about the fact that I never need to worry if I can access a bathroom when out and about. Cleanliness? Sure. Line length? You bet. But able to physically access the head? No. That is a given. This is privilege.
Not everyone has the privilege of not worrying about being able to get to the head. In fact, many have to organize their out of home time around whether or not the bathroom is accessible. It constrains their work, social, etc. spheres and experiences.
Yeah. I think there's also an implied sense of guilt for the listener in these discussions. Like, if you have a lot of money, you can use that money to benefit the community instead of buying another yacht. But you can't change your skin color or sexual orientation (not that people haven't tried, but it wasn't straight white people who tried).
Something else worth noting: the regular English word "privilege" is loaded with really intense negative connotations, and calling somebody "privileged" is a term of abuse in ordinary English– you're not just saying that somebody has a whole lot of active advantages, but that they're inherently spoiled/bad because of those advantages. SJ privilege is defined as something morally neutral, and really should be used in that way, but in practical usage some of the English word's connotations slip in.
I suggest that instead of telling people that they're privileged in discussions, we say that they're committing the Typical Mind Fallacy by assuming that everybody else's experiences are just like theirs– it gets the same analytical point across, but without the loaded connotations or the likelihood of causing reflexive hostility.
I suggest "socialege" as the new word or neologism for Social Justice privilege. It is it's own word and has no previous meaning as far as I can find ans can work to separate the two types of privilege.
I meant "its" not "it's", lol, sorry.
"and" not "ans" *face palm*
If you set up an Intensedebate account you can edit your posts that no one has replied to.
Agreed that there's a world of difference between "I hate my ex-girlfried" and "I hate women".
But a lot Lot LOT of guys leap straight from the first to the second with very little pause between, to the point that it's largely expected. So if you're gonna say the first, you probably want to make it clear you're not straying into the second.
In fairness women do this too. Their boyfriend cheating on then turns into "gosh men are such pigs!"
It sometimes happens that way, yeah. But embittered women who think the world is actively campaigning against their romantic success don't have a large presence on either the Internet or in popular culture.
Well, and I don't think anyone takes us very seriously if we try to argue that guys shouldn't like all those annoying women who aren't very much like us and that society should be shifted so that guys will naturally gravitate toward their true mates, who happen to have the same strengths (and unmentioned weaknesses) that we do. I mean, even campaigns for fat acceptance which mostly focus on fat women just not being publicly shamed and being able to buy things in their sizes tend to be mocked sometimes by men as attempts to force them to date fat women.
So, I think we're allowed to drift into "gosh men are such pigs!" territory, but attempting to make gross arguments to do anything about it besides either finding some less piggish ones or not dating get shut down pretty fast.
"So, I think we're allowed to drift into "gosh men are such pigs!" territory, but attempting to make gross arguments to do anything about it besides either finding some less piggish ones or not dating get shut down pretty fast."
And I wish that men got the same response. Which is why I trot out the much hated "your pain does not rate" line, because anything short of that does not shut these guys up. The (marginally) more sympathetic version is probably "your problems are personal, and I am not your therapist".
To me what's interesting about that – after thinking about it for awhile intermittently – is that women are expected to complain precisely because they – we – are systemically disempowered to be able to do anything really effective about the thing we are complaining about.
Men? Not so much.
Hmm. I noted this too. For fun I google'd around a bit to find women thinking they are owed attention and sex from men. They definately aren't as easy to find, but when you do, you kinda get the same gross out vibe as when you read the more common screed from bitter dudes. It's not different at all.
For the most part it seemed to me that women more often post "What do I do wrong?" "Why doesn't anybody want to go out with me?". Like they admit they have difficulty and accepts they need to learn something instead of telling the world how it should behave towards them.
Aaand, I did find a guy asking proper advice like that on a feminist-leaning swedish magazine for women, and I thought oh shi… here it comes! but instead there was a barrage of wellmeaning and helpful suggestions from the ladies who frequented the forum.
See if you just ask nicely…
Oh, to be clear, I'm not claiming that it never happens or that women are incapable of doing this. I just think that there's a lot less tolerance for it and that it's quicker to be recognized as ugly and selfish and ridiculous unless it's expressed in a pretty closed-off space, while when men do it people tend to be more willing to engage with it as a topic that's at least worthy of debate.
Exactly. A corollary to this is DNL's raison d'etre; the mere act of asking for help dating is an admission of weakness by a man, so there are very few resources for men who want to improve their, well, datability. And the primary example of it in our culture (Pick Up Artists) load up their advice with hypermasculine crap ("You're not just going to find romantic success and happiness…you're gonna bang ALL THE CHICKS YOU WANT!!!") as a pre-emptive defense against appearing weak for asking for help.
"the mere act of asking for help dating is an admission of weakness by a man"
I submit that's a cognitive error on a massive cultural scale.
I understand its basis, but I mean, really, rationally – and also in the ethos of "being successfully male" – it doesn't even make sense.
At work? What do men want? Generally (and I am generalizing all through this because to do otherwise would be inordinately impractical), you want to be the best. So you study, and you're mentored, and you group together & network, and you work for hours to be able to improve, and thereby, ultimately, to succeed.
At sports? (Or its general nerd equivalent, videogames? Not saving NerdFitness) The same.
The fact that, as a gender, you patently refuse to permit yourselves to apply the same rationale to dating & relationships never ceases to astound me.
Um, that's kind of why this site exists. I don't know why you feel the need to knock men for their cognitive errors at a site specifically devoted to correcting that error.
Is pointing out the existence of "a cognitive error on a massive cultural scale" the same as knocking men?
"The fact that, as a gender, you patently refuse…"
Generalizing about an entire gender and using the second person to tell people what they, personally, are doing is more than pointing out. Not a monolith, etc.
Put it this way: can you see any way someone on this site tells women what they, as a gender, are doing wrong, and doesn't (rightfully) get downvoted into oblivion?
I guess I can see how you would interpret it that way, but to me, "as a gender" is still specifying that cultural scale, and the "you" is the general-you, not the second person.
This is like talking about toxic masculinity. We need to point out beliefs that men are conditioned with that hurt them and others. If you can see Rooo's larger point, how would you have phrased it, so as to avoid specific men feeling insulted?
"The fact that men generally don't…"
Remove the "generally" if you are willing to concede it in the followup.
I agree with the larger idea, but making a point using combative language and then defending the phrasing is a technique usually employed by trolls more interested in creating drama than communicating ideas. I don't think that's what ORT was trying to do (given that she didn't even defend the phrasing), but in internet commenting as everything else you get judged by people's past experiences.
I'm assuming she hasn't responded because she hasn't been by to see your comment yet.
I suppose now I am defending myself from the accusation of trolling, but I just want to say that I commented here because I was really surprised at your reaction to her comment. I interpreted her last sentence to mean "The fact that men aren't kinder to themselves in the realm of dating & relationships never ceases to amaze me." I was genuinely curious to know what you were offended by.
But I will say that I'm often surprised by people's reactions to OtherRoooToo. She talks the way people do in South Texas (although I don't think she is from here, just that the way she talks is common here). She'll say something that reads to me as commiserating or supporting, and other people will react as if they've been viciously insulted. And not just one person. It's a puzzle to me.
And now I feel like I've been talking about her behind her back, so I'll say Rooo: You'd fit right in in San Antonio! If you ever visit, let me know and I'll drive into town. We can have margaritas on the riverwalk.
"She'll say something that reads to me as commiserating or supporting, and other people will react as if they've been viciously insulted. And not just one person. It's a puzzle to me."
My Google-fu fails me on this point, but I've seen it documented that people assume far worse intentions from written communications than spoken, especially on the internet. Personally I'm flashing to how Hearthstone limited people's social interaction to less than a dozen emotes (with "taunt" the only hostile one), and people would get *enraged* by their opponent saying "good game".
I never thought you or ORT were trying to troll, was hoping to say that it looked like an unintentional use of a troll technique. Just wanted to point out that phrasing will determine whether people engage your idea or your language (he said, after spending four posts engaging the language).
In a lot of ways, men have a bunch of de-facto non-competition agreements when it comes to romantic relationships, which are encoded in homophobia and concepts of masculinity and enforced through bullying.
Asking for help? Weak!
Actually caring about your clothes? Gay!
Emotionally sensitive and compassionate? Weak and gay!
It's probably not a coincidence that the jock and rich douchebag types who benefit most from this system (since it excludes muscle and wealth, their best assets for attracting partners) have traditionally been its most aggressive enforcers. A lot of guys who aren't like that go along with the agreement because they're afraid or because they stupidly think that putting in a lot of effort into aggressive macho posturing will earn them status. The only real winning move, though, is to defect from the agreement.
I've never had a problem here or on the forums with just asking nicely.
Absolutely. The difference in attitude leads to very different responses. If you come to me saying that you're frustrated with finding women, and can I help you figure out what you're doing wrong/could do differently, I'm happy to work with that. But when you complain to me about dating because everyone else is the problem, I can't really help you with that, and I'm going to find you annoying.
One of my guy friends did this once. He told me that there were three main qualities that were important in a girlfriend: attractiveness, intelligence, and kindness. Now, his complaint was that he couldn't seem to find a woman who wanted to date him who was all three of these things. Now, he himself was smart, okay-looking, and not terribly kind. I wish that I'd told him that he can get all three of those when he IS ALSO all three of those, but I was less sassy then. If he'd asked how he could become a kinder person, however…I'd have been much more willing to help.
I personally feel that you are allowed to have a few evenings of ice cream and "men are pigs!"/"women are bitches!" with your friends, if you've been hurt. You just shouldn't go screaming it all over the internet or turn it into your basic life philosophy going forward.
Absolutely!
It's the same thing that you are allowed to have a preference in people but to openly blurt out your dislike of women with character trait X or how you can't stand men who prefer Y entertainment, well it has potential to hurt alot of people who don't deserve it.
A lot of people on both sides of this make a category mistake by applying the concept of privilege to indiviual lives. Applying a sociological concept to describe individual's lives is like applying a biological concept to describe chemical interactions. Different levels of explanation.
If a straight white guy's life sucks, it doesn't really matter if the odds it would have sucked from his birth were lower, or that the odds certain future bad things will happen to him or lower.
All fine. It's when that white guy who's had a shitty life whines about how nobody has it harder than him, or thinks everyone should sympathize with him, that he crosses a line.
Agreed. The discussion should be kept above and not stray too far into the anecdotal and individual.
There are trends of course but every individual situation is a little different and a lot more complex than what fits in a sociopolitical theorem.
But privilege does make a difference, even when things suck. I've had some fairly bad, and for a long time undiagnosed, physical health problems, and the fact that I was privileged enough to get higher education meant I had a not physically demanding job which was easier for me to do, when I didn't qualify for any kind of help as I wasn't officially sick.
It also meant that I could get by for a while working part time. If I'd been making my living scrubbing floors, I would have been screwed. That I live in a place where I have the right to health care was also quite nice.
When depression got really bad and I had a hard time coping, it certainly helped that I have reasonably resourceful parents who were there for me. Severe clinical depression is still horrible and painful, and for a long time I mostly wanted to die, but when I started getting better, my life hadn't come apart completely; I still had a home and a job, and it's a lot easier to recover from that kind of position.
Then there are the less tangible things. Would a man complaining about stomach pains have been taken more seriously quicker than I was? Maybe, I've honestly no idea. Would someone less articulate, with minimal education and different class markers, perhaps an immigrant, have had a harder time in thehealth care system? Not unlikely.
Sure, but what I was more getting at is like it's a mistake to handicap your moral judgments of individuals who aren't middle class straight white men, or to dismiss a white man's problems without knowing the details, or to assume that every individual minority member has very personal experiences of oppression etc. Basically, seeing only the abstract category of the person and not the person themselves.
I'm fine with acknowledging privilege of individuals as a descriptive matter of their real experiences, though, but it's easily taken too far.
That's why I sometimes think that the privilege discussion should be left in academia, political seminars and the like, and that which goes into the media outlet should be a watered down short version without any big words.
Popularizing the debate seems to vulgarise it both with people who quickly take it as a personal insult and opportunists who twist it for their own ends.
I'm not sure I can give an example but I've seen several examples of fake social justice types who just found the perfect excuse for bullying when old standard trolling is too easily called out. In reality they don't give a shit except about causing a stir.
Then there's professional victims of course.
"You insensitive bastard, how DARE you suggest that I should get a job!? I'll have you know that I have a neurological disorder and we are a group belittled by society. Nothing, NOTHING is adapted to people like me, so I think others should pay my upkeep indefinately!!"
This is an oberblown example but that's the sort of thing that comes out of a person's mouth when they just want free stuff without being held accountable. Even if the person in question has been marginalised in the past, it doesn't make much difference.
Not the same thing as saying:
"You know, it's bad when popular entertainment and pundits equal neurological conditions to homicidal maniacs. We need to get a countering message out so we can move forward as a society.."
Even though I'm not of a marginalised group myself, I think I'm pretty good at separating the good from the bullshitters.
""You insensitive bastard, how DARE you suggest that I should get a job!? I'll have you know that I have a neurological disorder and we are a group belittled by society. Nothing, NOTHING is adapted to people like me, so I think others should pay my upkeep indefinately!!"
so are you suggesting that there a) aren't any people whose neurological (or indeed physical) disabilities from whom the system is ill-equipped to accommodate? and/or, are you suggesting that these people deserve to starve/freeze/live in filth. Because this parody of an 'overblown' complaint sounds an awful lot like the serious, actual living experiences of people I know.
A great many yeses to this.
I think its not so much those things that are the problem…its that the person in question isn't willing to meet society halfway on the matter, and there's evidence to suggest they can. For example, yeah as a woman I'm theoretically structurally disadvantaged, but that doesn't mean that I get to skate through school with low grades and no marketable job skills, then turn around and expect society to hand me a 6-figure salary job.
That's kind of what privilege is, though. If you're from one of the most privileged families in the country, you can skate through school with low grades and no marketable job skills and end up being a CEO or a Senator. If you're one of the least advantaged people in society, you'll probably end up spending a lot of time in and out of jail for minor offenses many people commit. If you're somewhere in the middle, you'll probably end up muddling into a job somewhere and making enough to support yourself.
Everyone makes mistakes and has times when they don't put in 100%. People with advantages get a lot more slack for it, while people who don't can be harshly punished. I don't think there's much to be done to help people who don't want to do anything to contribute to the process, but sometimes it is hard to assess who's at some magical halfway point given that people are being judged according to different rules.
Look, that kind of expectation is pretty improbable.
To use one of the aforementioned people as an example, I'm talking about a trans woman who has years of education and experience as a lawyer, but who was fired and has been unable to find employment since she came out as trans and began transitioning (in the sense of 'wearing clothing coded to her gender regularly', not 'having expensive surgery').
She's already "meeting society halfway", in that she has the experience, and the education and society is saying "well too bad, you don't look enough like a woman. Starve". Which, incidentally, was actually her living situation before her community stepped in to help provide her meals, because the income assistance she was able to get was not sufficient to cover all of her necessary expenses in a month. She had to choose between starving and having her future doubly endangered through economic and legal ramifications of not paying the bills she had to pay.
My problem with Karl (and your, incidentally) phrasing of these situations is that you're working off stereotypes. There may be one person out of a hundred who actually expects that, but mostly, people are individuals with valid needs. Criticizing the systems that fail to provide for those needs is adding insult to injury.
Edit: (by framing asking to /not starve/ on the assistance she/ needs/ through no fault of her own, as "how DARE you suggest that I should get a job!?" and "I think others should pay my upkeep indefinitely!!")
I certainly don't want people to starve. I should've mentioned my vantage point is more Sweden/Scandinavian centric. Things are as I understand it alot more harsh in the US, where the debate is more valid.
Here, we do alot of redistribution of wealth, so there really isn't much excuse.
You're either job hunting while collecting benefit, or if that doesn't sit right with you, you go into heavily subsidized education programs. Hell, if you're clinically depressed you can get a sort of paid time-out, even if you didn't have a job before, (but that's usually on a timer).
Anyway, I take my sampling from the groups I'm involved in, furry fandom, techies and renfair fans. I've met ALOT of people with atypical neurological dispositions (with the paper to prove it), and the majority lead ordinary lives, get jobs eventually, despite difficulties.
But then again there's a vocal minority who claims society is ultra mean to them, and their diagnosis is their carte blanche, but I see "grownups" who I believe just want to sit and play Sonic the Hedgehog all day long and suck on their free meds.
And that pisses me off.
Because I actually like our social welfare redistribution and anti-discrimination systems. However, if we waste too much money where it actually isn't due, alot of more deserving, more disenfranchised people will suffer as a result.
As it happens I'm not from the US. I'm from Canada, where we have a system much like the one you've described, though I'm not familiar with the particulars, so your system may indeed still provide more assistance. Nevertheless, please take note that this is not a Swedish site, and your experience is not universal. You're going to get blowback if you phrase it as such.
My point is that unless you are pretty darn close, socially, to those people, you probably don't know all the particulars of their situation, and sometimes the system really does fail people.
Moreover, whether they are "deserving" of social assistance or not, using parodic language like that hurts *everyone* who needs social assistance because of systemic discrimination and mental illness. And there are a hell of a lot more who are using it to get back on their feet than there are who are looking for a free ride.
A study in California showed that 99% of homeless people will choose to pay market price rent over living rent-free on charity. 99%. Is it really so important to call out the 1% at the cost of undermining the dignity and social safety of the 99%?
Fair enough. I apologise for the blanket statements.
It's a long and hairy discussion really about who's to blame and who is responsible for what that could drag on.
Just so you know, I'm certain I could be very wrong about those which I observed too. I know my government several years back stuck "difficult cases" with a meagre monthly check instead of proper treatment since that would have been costly in the short term… and they could hide unemployement and negative public health statistics all at the same time.
So there's that and a thousand other things to consider…
There are scandanavian ren faires? Do you have a troll hunter guild?
Yeah, there's a whole lot of "Let's romantisize the middle ages" people to go about.
A little less now since the hype died. It's heyday was in the 90's which was the same time when we did really cheesy folklorish music which everyone here knew were only imitations, but people in other parts of the world listened to and thought:
WOW, such culture
Much ancient
So. . .basically the same as in America only you guys have actual period buildings here and there across the country. Got it.
This may sound a bit weird but bear with me. . .
First off, if we had kept privilege to an academic setting, I never would have heard it. Granted, by and large I'm pretty good at treating all people like people but there are times I'm starting with a distinct advantage and don't realize it. The interesting (to me) unintended consequences of a few years of these sorts of conversation are that:
1. I'm aware that I have an advantage over others just by showing up.
2. That advantage is a weapon. Its something that can be wielded in service or defense of people and ideas that matter, not just to get the world to submit to my passing whims. Need to line up a venue? Send in the token guy, the owner is more likely to take him seriously. Guy won't leave my friend alone but isn't being quite rude enough to justify a scene? He'll back off if I start talking to her. Guy who runs a show full of women gets a good reception with other guys while sneaking an empowering, diverse show under their noses. Guys who try shady stuff by going around me through the cast drop it the moment they say "talk to the boss".
No, its not right that the world works that way. It does, though. So if I've got the platform to stand on, I might as well use it to say something important. I have the power. There's no shame in using it for good. That's something I never would have gotten in Women's Studies 101.
Privilege, its like a super power. You don't deserve it but you've got it anyway. Accept the great responsibility that comes with it. Peter Parker doesn't have an easy life or a nice apartment either but he still uses his power for good.
Do you get dismissed in person as a representative of a privileged group who is therefore not allowed to have problems? Because if you do I understand your frustration, that's a shit way to treat anyone.
Or are you reacting to these internet debates? Because those will tend to be about the about the more abstract, broad categories. Or, when it focuses more on an individual, like with Aaronson, that is the direction it takes because *he* used that context (or, rather, appropriated it).
People’s inability to take the specific from the general is only matched by their persistence to generalise from the specific. That girl is crazy = all girls are crazy, but not my sister, friends and mum are not crazy therefore only she was crazy
>>>
I write this because I think a reason nerds get hostile in intersectionality debates is that they think it means they must forgive and forget all individual offences commited to them because White Male Cis-privilege but no. Nerdrage the hell out of those who have wronged you for as long as it feels meaningful (but don't go after the group next).
<<<
I agree with this, generally.
Being bullied is like being held underwater…sometimes literally. It's terrifying, and your world feels really small, and the bull(ies) occupy a very large part of that. There is some very real PTSD here. Asking someone who was once bullied on the regular to subjugate themselves (even if it's something as simple as "hey, maybe don't manspread on the subway because that's kind of a dick move"; pun not intended) is like asking that person to hold their breath — it can be very triggering.
I know many nerds that do NOT have this nerdrage reaction when faced with stuff like this, so I do not think it is a class-wide trait — but this *is* the sort of reaction I find with high correlation to people who were bullied (myself included). PTSD is a motherfucker, and it's sneaky as heck, too. It taps right into our reptilian survival brains and makes for irrational and disproportionate responses to otherwise-innocuous stimuli.
Being told that you have privilege carries the implication "hey, your privilege makes you a good swimmer, can you hang on to the side of the boat while we row along?" — to a normal, well-adjusted person, the response would be "oh yeah, that's fine" — to a bullied person this patterns VERY CLOSELY with "fuck no, you'll push me underwater again and I've fought WAY TOO HARD to get back in this boat!!!!" It is EXTREMELY HARD to trust other people, especially strangers, to not push you underwater when you've been significantly bullied. REALLY, REALLY, REALLY HARD.
We need better communication language, here. What we're asking for ("check your privilege") is not the same thing as how it's being received ("lay down and stop being successful, you skag"). I would highly recommend modelling the approach after the cognitive behavioral therapy methods for working through PTSD with people.
The day people suddenly realize "Oh shit! We're appearance shaming dicks! Doesn't matter we didn't invent the meme, we gotta stop this right now!" would be a great day.
Coincidentally, dear Dr. Nerdlove. I hope you realize that's a real person on that poster you're so kind to share? Whose visage was probably used without his permission and will forever stay connected with undesirable?
Here's an interview with a victim so you can educate yourself what it does to people (AKA the fridge raider lady): http://www.salon.com/2013/10/02/my_embarrassing_p…
"Forever stay connected" is a pretty melodramatic way to phrase a single picture that really isn't particularly viral anyway.
Especially since the joke there has nothing to do with his physical appearance, and everything to do with that stupid hat. And no, mocking a hat isn't "appearance shaming."
Do you not think it's still rather cruel to use a picture of an actual person that way?
I know I wouldn't want to be the face of "Don't be That Guy".
I'll do it. Maybe I can wrangle a reality TV show out of the deal and go full on Kardashian.
The danger there is like with Homer Simpson: really bad examples of men get popular enough that people start emulating them.
This is neither here nor there in discussions of a hypothetical reality show. Dunno. It *seemed* relevant.
Well, I was hoping to play off the fact that I am being unfairly maligned as Who Not To Be. Then I can get TLC to make a show about how I really write poetry, mentor underprivileged orphans , and one time saved baby condors from an oil baron's rotisserie.
None of that's true, but it sounds like compelling TV and good PR, right?
That makes sense. I was misinterpreting. Now I want to see a version of Duck Dynasty where they all just volunteer at Planned Parenthoods and officiate gay marriages.
Kinda depends on the context of the picture itself, I guess. Like, if this was from a stock thing, or if he took it intending it to be the joke, sure, fine. If it was taken off of someone's personal profile that they put up because they thought it looked nice, eh, it's a little more of a dick move.
I still think it's melodramatic to call it "appearance shaming," especially when people claim that the term "fedora" is. I'll give them "neckbeard," and I've taken that one out of my vocab, as well as insults that are actually about a person's physical attributes, but choosing to wear a trendy hat that, by now, is well-known for its association with creepy jerks, isn't really the same as being mocked for the way you look.
I still think it's a little melodramatic to say he's linked to this "forever." There are very few meme people I would recognize outside of the context of the meme.
I know quite a lot of guys who happen to look like the guy in the picture. None of them wear the hat, but some of them have the facial hair pattern and general facial structure. I doubt it would please them to be associated with the qualities depicted in the image.
On an entirely unrelated note, I thought my Pokemon character looked pretty spiffy in the hat I bought him, until I learned that "fedora" means something now and I had to go hat-less.
My DCUO character has a fedora. Then again, he's a 20's vigilante detective and he's entirely done in grayscale because they didn't colorize the old issues when they got re-released.
"I doubt it would please them to be associated with the qualities depicted in the image"
But why should they be, when the joke is about the fedora, not the way he looks? (Although that is kind of a beard style that works on no one, but that's not really the point.)
I'm grumpy about the fedora thing myself, since I like 1920's vintage looks and was into the Swing Dance scene in college (and would still be if there were one in my area). Of course, it's almost always a trilby in the images that get called "fedoras," but still… it'll come back around again, but it'll take some time.
When it does I'm buying my baby nephew one. He has the perfect outfit to match and I need it to be so.
I think that's the thing, though–if you've got the outfit to wear a fedora (or even a trilby), it doesn't make people think "probably a douche." It's a classy hat. You can't throw it on a bowling button-up or a t-shirt with an open shirt over it and call that classed up.
The thing is, the appropriate outfit is like the white gloves or steampunk below. Its not something everyone can pull off and it screams pretentious if you're not one of those people.
For a fedora? Nah, just a nice suit. Maybe if you do it dapper enough, slacks and a waistcoat (and a shirt underneath). Fedoras were after the era of gloves on gentlemen.
Now a top hat…yeah, that takes gloves. Or goggles or something.
I meant more that a nice suit that goes with your fedora is really going to stand out anywhere that's not a swing dance class.
The porkpie can be quite flattering on larger guys and the gambler's hat gives you that cowboy edge without being an outright cowboy hat. Both ae vintage appropriate. Don't wear a top hat unless you've got a full steampunk outfit to back it up.
Re the top hat: It also works with a full-on white-tie ensemble – tails, waistcoat, white bow tie, the works. Gloves and cane optional.
Or just be Slash.Slash gets the top-hat pass no matter what he wears.<p style=”color:#000;”>
Or his evil(?) twin, Death from Six String Samurai.
And here I still had a tiny sliver of hope that you just didn't read this topic.
I'm truly disappointed that you keep the picture up doc.
You could, of course, replace it with this image from that blog you quote and still keep the same joke: http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/fedora_coll…
The linked image has that same image in it, though? Or am I misunderstanding
No, you're completely right. I tried copying the link of the uppermost cartoon (the one taken from http://eatthattoast.com/comic/m-lady/), but apparently that guy joined up all these images as one big image.
Could a mod please remove that link? I'm not very happy about accidentally linking to an image containing antisemitic cartoons, as you can probably understand. Can't edit it myself anymore.
Porkpie also works great on musicians, especially jazz and blues.
Because the cognitive structure of a stereotype is different from the logical structure of a joke. (Or so I assume, I am not certain that I understand either.)
Yeah, the reason that they used the picture of that guy and not, I don't know, David Beckham ( http://goodtoknow.media.ipcdigital.co.uk/111/0000… ) has nothing to do with his physical appearance whatsoever, it's just a joke about the hat. Right.
As enail said, it's unnecessarily cruel to use a picture of an actual person. They could've used a cartoon to convey their point.
…
Also, "Oh it's not that viral so it doesn't matter" is a pretty shitty argument to make about any picture that ends up on the net without the owners permission IMHO.
If you use a picture of someone famous, the joke becomes about the famous person specifically.
I didn't say it didn't matter. I said that you were being melodramatic by claiming this would tarnish his reputation forever.
Wow.
You keep defending bullying. I'd do some soul searching if I were you, whether you really want to be in that camp.
You keep claiming with a straight face that they just /randomly/ chose this dude, and they could've taken a conventionally attractive guy with a fedora (who wasn't famous) and made the same joke?
And, just for my information, would mocking people for piercings they have be okay? Maybe mocking them for the tattoos they have? Oh, this is a hat, that's totally different.
But of course, the icing on the cake is "Oh, you're being melodramatic to insist this will stay with him forever". It shouldn't matter how high the chance of that happening is! You shouldn't want to take that gamble with some other person's life!
Wow.
You keep not reading my statement. I'll admit, if this wasn't a stock photo or a joke the guy was in on (which I'd assumed it was, because it just looked like a photo deliberately taken for this, and not someone's profile pic), then yeah, it's mean.
A fedora isn't permanent, like a tattoo. It's a hat. It's a hat with a really bad connotation now, and I can't help but think poorly of most folks who choose to wear it these days, even knowing the message it sends. There are articles of clothing, and hell, yeah, even tattoos, that are deliberate choices and convey a specific message, and yes, I'll think poorly of someone who sticks by those things and keeps wearing them when they should know better.
I'm saying that you're being melodramatic. And I still stand by that. RUINED FOREVER is melodramatic.
The thing is it's not just the fedora in the photo; it's a man's face. For most people, a face is for all intents and purposes at least as permanent as a tattoo is.
David Beckham wearing a fedora, whether you know it's David Beckham or not, whether you know it's a fedora or not, is not going to be associated with the MRA internet troll stereotype. Because the meme in the image does not work without the entire set of characteristics present—including the pale skin, scrawny frame (a "pudgy" frame would work too but an "athletic" one would not), unpopular facial hair pattern, etc. That's part of what makes it a meme.
The other thing that makes it a meme is of course the fact that it continues to transmit the association of those traits with that appearance. So now even when a guy who looks like that wears a different hat or wears no hat, he still has a not-insignificant likelihood of being visually associated with the distasteful MRA qualities implied by the image.
Now consider that there are probably a lot of guys who look approximately like that dude, including that dude. With or without a hat of any kind. Consider that some of them are single and might not want to remain that way for the next five years. Consider that some of them have already had some pretty bad luck in multiple areas of their lives. Is it likely that this image makes it more likely people in general will judge them negatively before they've even had a chance to show what their character is actually like? Yes? Then it's harmful. It's punching down. It's bullying.
Agreed! I hate that meme.
It's like they are taking queues from 4chan and 9gag which are the LAST people to emulate if you want to retain any credibility as a social justice proponent.
I'll go on the record and say I know an absolutely delightful fedora'd neckbeard. He's gay and I haven't really heard him be bitter, negative or toxic about anything. No delusions of grandeur either. I know, it doesn't make any sense.
I am confused. How do we know that this is not a stock photo that is open to use by all? The link you posted is clearly an amateur photo, but the one you are objecting to looks professional. Does anyone know that this person's photo is being used without their permission?
Heh, I assumed it wasn't because it looked like an amateur photo to me! As a general principle, I'd steer away from using meme photos like these unless I have reason to think it is professional or otherwise with permission.
Or duplicate the meme using stock photos.
Now that I look on a bigger screen, you are right, it does look like an amateur photo that should not be used without permission
Teachers also grade boys more harshly, are more likely to classify boys as "learning disabled", are more likely to have boys put in special ed, are more likely to ask that boys be drugged into submission, and are more likely to give boys a disciplinary suspension. No wonder boys are more likely to drop out of high school, are less likely to attend college and are less likely to finish college if they do attend college.
Yeah it's almost like the doctor is citing his stats very selectively.
OMG Gize! You've discovered something that no one else has noticed EVAR! Now that we know men are powerless and oppressed, some should really stand up for their rights! A sort of Men's Rights Advocate, if you will.
Seriously, though, I'm not saying these things don't exist. By all means, get out there and do something about it. You know, like feminists try to do for situations where women are oppressed. I can't promise I'd actually help in a time and money sense but I'll be really supportive. This is, again, the lesson of this blogs as a whole. You can't expect anyone else to change except you. What have you done about these issues today?
Sarcasm aside , I'm not a guy with a lot of money/power or a large following , so I could probably donate some money/time to one of those mentorship programs for young men when I'm not a poor student any more.
I really value rational discussion s a way to change minds so if can convince someone to rethink their ideas on gender ,I wouldn't mind.
If you've got time, that's often all those programs need…just saying. However, I do get being overwhelmed as a student and not having the time to give.
What I'm doing? I will start off by telling you off for mocking the suffering of these very real boys. At the end of the day, you're talking about children in a classroom. Yeah, that's about as powerless as it gets in modern western society. I'm not sure what's funny or ironic about that.
The feminists are telling others to change their behavior. If that's 'doing something', than isn't telling teachers to change their behavior also 'doing something'? Or is it "expecting anyone else to change except you"? What happened to telling people who are hurting others to stop hurting them?
If you want my suggestions for state policy:
1) Break the teachers unions. Simply pass a state law forbidding primary school and secondary school teachers who are employed by the state from collectively organizing.
2) Aggressively and publicly investigate misconduct. Fire teachers who aren't doing their jobs.
3) Remove federal subsidies for special-ed. The money can create a perverse incentive to classify things that are within the normal realm of the human experience something to be 'corrected'.
3(b)) No school district employee should ever pressure a parent to drug their child. Decisions like that are between the family, the child and an independent psychiatric professional. Consent to treatment of this nature is important, even if the child isn't of age.
4) Consider gender-segregated schools. There is some research that boys do better in that environment.
5) Crack down on bullying, without engaging in zero-tolerance policies. Self defense should be recognized by school policy and school police. Teachers should be held responsible for what happens under their supervision. Using your clout as a teacher to defend your child's bad behavior should be a fire-able offense.
I'm not mocking them. I'm mocking you for derailing with issues that are not related. I'm not asking what the problem is. I'm asking what you are doing besides complaining about it on a dating advice blog. I don't want your policy suggestions, I want to know if it really matters to you to enough to put your time and money into getting those policies implemented or if you're just shooting off your mouth. I'm serious, if you want to do something, lay out a plan and I'll provide what assistance I can. You can talk about it here all you want but that's not going to solve it. If you think feminists are just talking, you've missed a lot in the last 30 years.
DNL brought up the plight of girls in primary education. How on earth is it derailing to mention boys' experiences there? Or is any disagreement with "men are the most privileged and that means they must sacrifice their wellbeing for women and girls" derailing?
Honestly, I don't have any idea how to fix these issues. On some level, isn't this a bit like asking an abuse survivor to solve the problem of domestic abuse in this country? Sure, it might be a noble act if they can improve the situation for others, but I doubt that you would be implying the same sense of obligation that you are implying here.
Well, it'd be like asking a feminist to do something about workplace harassment and sure as shit no one else was until they did. You survived. You went on to lead a rewarding life. You've got the time, the money, the privilege to give back. You certainly don't have to, that's an individual choice. You just don't get to expect anyone else to. Again, sure as shit, the same feminists you're bitching about aren't sitting around waiting for guys to become enlightened and fix the pay gap on their own. Now kindly drop it. I'm done with you and I'd feel like I was abusing my modly powers to boot two people in one week.
What can ANYONE do who's passionate about helping American school-aged kids?
1. Call your school district and ask about opportunities to volunteer.
2. Call your local Lions/Kiwanis/Elks/PTA/Rotary Club/local service organization and ask how they're supporting the schools and what you can do to help.
3. Call your local Boys and Girls Club or Scouts/Campfire organization and offer to volunteer as a leader/counselor/whatever they need.
It's not changing policy, but it's being there for the kids and helping the district stretch their probably paperthin resources. Don't underestimate what a difference one community volunteer can make to a kid's life.
As a side note from some one who was raised on the teacher side of the public school system, cutting funding for Special Ed is a Bad Idea. They're already underfunded and understaffed, especially in crowded districts with multiple schools, and stretched thin in sheer logistics. Just classifying a child as with a 'learning disability' does not automatically put them in Special Ed. It could mean extra classes like Speech or Reading development or tutoring. Most teachers won't label a kid ADD just because they make an unruly class. They're actually trained to recognize the more evident signs, and they put the decision what to do in the parents hands.
Granted most of my experience comes from a good (if under-funded) suburban school district. Inner city and extremely rural districts get even less funding, infrastructure, and support. There most SpEd programs are SOL while recurring class disruptions can only be remedied with a strong personality.
What really needs to change is the disciplinary pipeline of detention>suspension>Alternative school that feeds into the prison pipeline. Young (often black) children are passed off to people who give progressively less of a crap and are treated more harshly. Most of that is a matter of bureaucracy and draconian disciplinary edicts that most every teacher I knew criticized harshly.
Such a bad idea to defund Special Ed! Kids with ADHD are often not the main beneficiaries of Special Ed services, either – most take regular classes, either with the occasional resource pullout, or some sort of behavioral plan/modification.
Totally agree about your last point. I did my counseling internship in a poor black/Hispanic city school, and, my god, it was a mess! The political nonsense kept even minor changes from happening, and so few of the people in administration, and the counselors I was working with, gave two shits about those students. It was heartbreaking. And in such a tumultuous environment, it was even harder to tell which students had diagnosable problems and which kids just have behavioral issues. Sigh.
A lot of this is flat-out unhelpful, and some of it isn't entirely true, either. I was actually just reading a lot about this yesterday.
For one thing, when you start looking at middle to upper class school districts, the grade distribution and graduation rates between genders are roughly equal. The major difference is only visible in lower class urban and rural districts, who typically have high minority populations. Now, I didn't find much in the way of substantial research on why this is, but based on my own experience in the field, the experiences of my peers, and some ideas proposed by other researchers, I have a few theories:
– in some lower class communities, boys will be encouraged to drop out of school earlier to help earn money for the family. This happens less often to girls, because we don't tend to think they can earn much.
-lower class communities tend to adhere more strictly to gender roles. Now, once girls were allowed to be good students and go on to college, and then actually did those things, working hard and studying became coded as "female" (girls do, in fact, spend more time reading and studying than boys, so it's not as if all of the students are putting the same work in, so we should be examining why the boys aren't doing as much). When your community takes gender roles seriously, and the other boys tell you that studying is "girly", you're less likely to do it. I think this also contributes to overdiagnosis and behavioral issues in the classroom – boys wanting to impress other boys by doing "boy things".
Now, if we wanted to fix the problem in those districts, let's look at your suggestions:
1. Breaking up unions – okay, you're going to have to explain how this one helps this particular scenario, because right now I'm not seeing it
2. It's not that easy to fire a teacher. Theoretically, misconduct is being reported. I'm not sure exactly what you mean here by misconduct – if you mean grading students differently, this would be very difficult to prove, and even harder to get rid of. Humans are biased. Teachers grade on things besides tests scores, as they should, so some bias is going to enter into their grading, even if it's unintentional.
3. No. Trust me, schools want to diagnose as few children with disabilities as possible, because those children cost the school more money, because they require more services. Also, you would be doing a huge disservice to the many students who benefit from special education programs. And services are different for each child, and are meant to put each student into their least restrictive environments. Now, I think people could do a slightly better job with figuring out what's the least restrictive, and most helpful for each kid, but taking money away from special makes that harder, not easier.
3b. I've never heard of this happening. A teacher can't force a psychiatric evaluation on a child. Theoretically, until maybe high school level, you need parental permission to even let your child see a school counselor, let along a child psychologist or social worker (non of whom do diagnoses of physical or mental illnesses). What usually happens is that a teacher, counselor, administrator, or child study worker will recommend to a parent that a child be tested. The bigger problem is that they're often, instead of going to a psychiatrist, they just take their kid to a general practitioner and say, hey, my kid has ADHD, and the doctor just writes a prescription. This gets more difficult in low income districts, because real psychiatrists are expensive, so mis-diagnosis, over-diagnosis, and under-diagnosis are even bigger problems in those schools.
4. Actually studies have shown that this doesn't help. For one, it reinforces gender stereotypes, which means that if anything, more boys will feel pressured to be more "masculine".
5. This one I agree with, as a general policy, though how it affects gender, I don't know – though I think you're misunderstanding what zero-tolerance means. That's zero tolerance for the bully – the "stronger person" who is continuously picking on/beating up/intimidating/harrassing/etc. the other student. Fighting back is NOT a form of bulling. Granted, if your form of "fighting back" means you try to stab the other person, yeah, they're may be some consequences. Teachers are, essentially, held responsible for what happens in their classroom. Schools are responsible for bullying of their students…not even on school grounds. Teachers and schools are blamed for every problem a child has – while what really needs to happen is holding parents more responsible. A lot of kids who are bullies learned bullying from their parents.
That last part I don't really understand…you mean teachers who are also parents? That seems like an unusual situation – most teachers are actually more likely to sympathize with their child's school/teacher, rather than assume that their child's bad behavior was being exaggerated.
Both my parents have worked as teachers. My father is a career teacher in a low-income, minority-heavy area. My mother was a substitute teacher for an alternative ed program that served students who were dropped out or sent to Juvenile Hall. With that said, I say, and I think they'd say, +INFINITES to all of the prior post. Literally every single idea mentioned in it is spot-on with my experience, and with that of my parents.
That's basically a long list of all the ways we can make thing so much worse.
The countries with the best performing students do all the opposites.
Number one is the dumbest idea of all – the problem isn't overpaid teachers – it's the exact opposite. it's UNDERPAID teachers.
If you want the people who are most talented at teaching to teach children – then you need to make teaching pay well. Teaching OUGHT to be one of the BEST paid jobs in society. Because the better the teachers you have, the more people will get the OTHER good paying jobs.
Right now – in too many countries – teaching is what you go into if you're too untalented, lazy or idiotic to get into any decent degree course, but too privilege not to get into college at all.
If you want the really smart people, including some of the nerds, to teach – you have to pay them more to teach than they can earn working for some big bank.
I wonder what the racial stats are on those numbers. Because I guarantee that the harsher disciplining happens more to black boys than it does white boys. I've seen it. So it's not just male privilege you have to remember when observing data, but white privilege as well.
And it's a great thing there's intersectionality, and we can carry more than one soap box at a time! 😀
I've read some of the original stats on this, and yes, what he's talking about are primarily the problems of black and Hispanic boys. (With the exception of the learning disabilities thing – but there's a corresponding problem that many girls with learning disabilities don't get help. We don't actually know whether boys are being overdiagnosed or girls are being underdiagnosed. If I had to guess, it's both.) It's disingenuous to talk about this as though it's a problem of "boys" because erasing race will mean that white boys – who need it least – will get the lion's share of the attention and resources.
(Unfortunately, all girls get less teacher attention and less useful engagement – while black and Hispanic girls do face many challenges that other girls don't face, this isn't one of them.)
You know, I have some sympathy for our derailing troll by bringing up issues with school but mostly I'm just thinking about my three years in middle school as a girl when my science teacher never helped me, or called on me, or looked at me ONCE and my math teacher, literally, told me not to bother learning math because I was too stupid to learn it.
Graduated college four years ago as a honors student. So yea, fuck you, girls still get it worse for BEING girls. That's just me projecting my personal experiences though.
Right, I just posted a thing on the forums recently about how the diagnostic criteria for autism is skewed strongly towards the male presentation, which may explain why it's perceived as a primarily male condition, while girls have to fumble their way through without help.
http://www.autism.org.uk/about-autism/autism-and-…
"are more likely to classify boys as learning disabled"
Or if you look at it another way, teachers are more inclined to pay attention when a boy is struggling academically, and thus willing to consider the possibility that he may be learning-disabled (or, that he may benefit from the support of a special ed program). Having grown up with Asperger's Syndrome myself, I saw repeatedly how boys got way more sympathy and understanding for their disabilities than girls did. Aspie girls were usually dismissed as "just shy".
Honestly, I would have been a lot better off without the "help" I received. And when my parents finally grew the backbone to say 'no' to the "help", things got better.
Actually, that’s the result of ableism intersecting with sexism. Boys are more likely to be diagnosed because all medicine is actually geared towards men. What, do you think every single one of those boys didn’t have a legit diagnosis or something?
Girls are actually less likely to get diagnosed in the first place because professionals don’t pay attention to girl’s symptoms and they differ.
So I need to comment on something that Scott Alexander mentioned. Its mostly about privilege. Its usually implied taht its something held by men. But what about female privilege. You point out that teachers seem to call on boys less , but somehow girls are still outperforming boys in school. Women have had some trouble breaking into (certain subfields of) STEM , but in many fields they are thriving and out-earning men. Women get the safer jobs (96% of those who die in workplace accidents are men). Women get lower sentencing and conviction rates in the criminal justice system. And men are more likely to be victimised by violence.
And as to harassment online , I've been online and received many disparaging remarks about the size of my genitals , my sexuality or my perceived attractiveness. Would you consider that sexual harrasment? And men are harrassed, stalked and SWATted too. (See what 4chan did to this guy or Chris-chan or any other streamer they decided to raid) In fact most of the victims of SWATting were male streamers. And IRL men are the victims of violence more often.
I agree that men do experience some privileges , but people seem to imply that its a unilateral thing that means men are in some special position of power.
I can't believe I'm replying, but:
Girls outperforming boys: That's.. not a privilege. That's not something handed to them because of their gender.
Thriving and out-earning men in certain fields: Pulling numbers out of my ass because you didn't cite, but 10 women-driven fields out of 100 does not a privilege make.
Women getting safer jobs: Because they were, for the longest time and still TO THIS VERY DAY, are NOT WELCOME TO WORK IN HEAVY-LABOR JOBS. Please refer to North Country, great movie.
Men more likely to be victimized by violence: Please refer to DNL's many, many articles about toxic masculinity. Also, this does not negate the fact that women are more likely to EXPERIENCE violence.
I'm sorry you were harassed (no one deserves it unless they actually deserve it), but I will politely copy-paste a chunk of the EXACT article you are commenting on:
"As I said earlier: being a man doesn’t negate you from all harm, nor does it mean that you’re not going to be threatened, harassed, doxxed or otherwise risk harm However, men, even nerdy men, simply don’t face the same issues as women do; the price of being a woman in our culture still means bearing a disproportionate amount of risk and harm.
And we need to recognize this."
Men experiencing some privileges: Again, copy-pasting the EXACT article you are commenting on:
"Nobody denies that there aren’t levels of privilege within groups, mind you. Privilege isn’t a single absolute axis; it’s multi-dimensional. Race, gender presentation, sexual orientation, being neurotypical, physical appearance, social class, nationality, education – all of these are forms of privilege and all of them affect how we’re treated by the world. This is referred to in feminist circles as intersectionality – how different areas combine to affect levels of social advantages and disadvantages. A straight, cisgendered male nerd may be taunted, teased and bullied in school, but he’s still afforded advantages that a gay, female or trans nerd is not. Nerd or geek isn’t a privilege trump card, no matter how much some nerds may feel it is."
Except substitute male for nerd.
I agree with most of your post, but I think this: "Girls outperforming boys: That's.. not a privilege. That's not something handed to them because of their gender." is a bit questionable. We're very far from a stage where little boys and little girls are more or less equal in all ways when they start school, and I think there's a good chance that the ways we're socializing girls make them more likely to be successful in school (and less likely to be successful afterwards) and that the ways we're socializing boys make them less likely to be successful in school (and more likely to be successful afterwards).
Good point. Would that be a weird drip-down/side-effect of toxic masculinity?
Well, some of it, maybe. It seems that sometimes tween and teen boys have very ambitious career plans (professional athlete, rapper, rock star) and not have started to consider any hedges, while their female peers with similar talents are more likely to have thought about other things a person who's talented at soccer or singing might do. I can see that being toxic masculinity. Might also just be a sampling error of the particular kids I know.
But I also think it's possible that there's nothing particularly toxic about a lot of male-coded behaviors and that some aspects of education are set up to be more centered around female-coded ones for no particularly compelling reason. At the least, this is one of the areas where I think the MRA folks have a valid interest and where it's worth it for academics to explore what the causes are.
The first part makes sense – even though the opportunities for professional athlete, rocker, or rapper, are few and far between, they are even less realistic for girls (and also less visible – professional basketball is probably the most prominent of professional female sports, and their exposure pales next to what the men's teams get), so it's not surprising that they might not aspire to those fields.
I do think there are some options for education that would be more conducive to male-coded behaviors – for instance, more kinesthetic options, but I think they tend to be less practical (in terms of time, space, and money), or difficult to plan for.
I think you miss the point. I agree men are privileged in certain ways , but women are also privileged in certain ways.
All the victimization surveys show that more men are hurt by violence , are killed by violence and are victims of violent crime than women , so I would disagree that the risk of violence to women is disproportionate.
You can call this "toxic masiculinity" or whatever you want and there are reasons for it. My main point is you can't claim men are a more privileged group when female enjoy privileges in society's institutions too.
If men were a privileged group why isn't society giving women the dangerous jobs where they'd get killed , or giving women harsher prison sentences instead of lighter ones?
.
Hatirarchy hurts hipsters, too.
But to your one specific question, being denied a job you applied for isn't a privilege, no matter how dangerous it is.
Nice sidestep. If 96% percent of the people who died in the workplace were women, don't you think femisnist would be shouting that number from the rooftops and claiming it is another way women are being oppressed?
Also you didn't answer the question about the conviction and sentencing disparities.
I don't think there's a patriarchy in the way many feminists think there's a patriarchy. We see gendered division of labour and gendered roles in animal ethology (and indeed in our closest primate relatives). I don't think we need to appeal to a conscious effort/conspiracy on the part of men to create these roles like many feminist theories do.
Yup. And in fact, feminists DO say that 96% number is unfair. I'm one of them. More women and fewer men should be dying in the workplace, because women should be serving as front line soldiers, and women should be better represented in fire departments and police forces, and women should be able to work construction without being harassed, and women should be able to make a living as ranchers.
But the reality is that until November of this year, women in the US are still flatly barred from some areas in the military, regardless of qualifications. Most dangerous jobs are centered in areas and socioeconomic groups where gender roles are most strictly enforced. I would be legitimately afraid to go into construction or try to become a firefighter, not because of the danger of the job, but because I've seen other women deal with ostracization and abuse for daring to try to break into the "boys clubs".
So I'm THERE with you. It's unfair and it sucks that more men than women die in the workforce, and feminists — WOMEN — are fighting hard to stop it.
Are you? If not, then STFU about the "unfairness."
There should be fewer people dying in the workplace PERIOD.
As for women working dangerous jobs, at least for mining (my family has been miners for generations in US and Poland) women were not allowed to work in the most dangerous (and most lucrative) jobs up until the 1970s-1980s because OSHA forbid it. With the change in the regulations, women in mining have been struggling to be allowed to do the same jobs as men but have met great resistance and that resistance continues as can be seen by the Mach Mining case: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/sex-discrimination-the… My aunts and female cousins are miners and are fighting against the discrimination that locks them out of the high paying, dangerous jobs.
It is not privilege when you are forbidden to take the highest paying jobs.
Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that people should be dying more. 😉
Just that the "privilege of risk" should be available to women as well as men. I actually found a list of the most dangerous jobs, and almost every one of them gave me this horrified "wow, being a woman in that job would be really lonely" feeling. Logging, ranching, fishing, roofing, trash collection, trucking, mining…
And I really wanted to make the point that if women are fighting hard to change a thing and men are totally fine with it, maybe that should be a sign that it's more unfair to women than men.
I think I replied to the wrong post. I meant to reply to Mathieu.
Military women struggling to be allowed combat roles and women in construction ( http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp ) are two other examples of women wanting to do dangerous jobs but not being allowed to do so.
I wasn't talking about "unfairness".
My main response was about challenging the doctor's picture. Basically he's saying that men are the privileged group and women are the oppressed group. He then cited statistics like the wage gap to prove this point. I disagreed saying this was an incomplete picture. If you look at the big picture women have better health outcomes , live longer , are less often the victims of violent crime , receive lower sentences for the same crimes.
I agree that there are gender roles. I agree that these gender roles harm women and advantage men in certain ways. I think they also harm men and advantage women in certain ways. I don't think we can say one group is more privileged than the other.
I've heard this argument a number of times, and it never stops being stupid.
There are 3 types of lottery tickets. One costs $1 and pays $100. One costs $5 and pays $1000. One costs $50 and pays $1,000,000. Since we don't want men to waste their money and we don't trust them to make decisions, we bar them from buying the $50 ticket. Are they privileged, because they don't have the risk of wasting $50?
I don't see how this example compares to some of the female privileges I cited , like for example a women getting a lighter sentence for the same crime because she's a woman.
And of course this is completely non-analgous to the workplace situations. Many impoverished men are expected to be the primary breadwinners (by gender norms) and are forced to work in dangerous/labour intensive jobs or else they and the people they are expected to provide for might starve. A better analogy would be we force the men to play Russian Roulette for the payout.
And feminists fight against the gender norm that says men should be the primary breadwinners.
I agree that no one should have to risk their lives/health/mental wellbeing and work a risky job just because that's the only way they can support their family. However, welcome to capitalism! As long as the economic system endures, women should be allowed to risk themselves as much as men are.
Interestingly enough, gender roles prevent women from being in the position to be either victim or perpetrator of violent crimes because criminal enterprise is yet another dangerous field women are not allowed to advance in beyond entry level. The majority of violence in the US and Mexico is tied to the drug trade. Women are not allowed equal opportunity to participate in this business and thus do not get killed because of it as often.
And it's another case like mining, where the fact that they can't take the risk means they can't participate in the more lucrative lines of work available to them. They take the safer, lower-paying jobs even within crime.
Its not a sidestep. Women don't work in dangerous job because they're not hired for them, not because they don't apply for them. Thank you for playing. Please come again.
And no, I don't think there are Secret Masters Of Patriarchy who have meetings and decide how to oppress women. Its much more subtle and pervasive than that.
Also, if you try and bring evo-psych into this I will mock you mercilessly.
Man, it would be so much easier if they were, and we could just lock them all in together!
Do you know any nurses? Ask them how often they are hurt on the job, either because of routine tasks like lifting and turning patients or being attacked by patients. And ask how much time they were off work because of those incidents.
Same with cleaners and maids, who work in commercial operations like offices or hotels.
I chose these two because one it is profession requiring several years of post-scondary training and is highly unionized and the other just requires willingness to put in a solid day's work.
(My sister is a nurse and both my grandmothers plus an aunt worked as chars.)
If you ever do decided to get less dismissive of science , there's a tonne of great researchers exploring sexuality and gender from an evolutionary paradigm and you shouldn't dismiss science because it conflicts with your ideology.
Stanford has an open access course on Human behavioural biology (with a section of sexual behaviour) if you want to see what contemporary evopsych researchers are saying about sexuality and gender,
Oh sweet fancy Moses. For those reading along, this is your regular reminder the vast majority of so called evo-psych is junk science, based on studies that fail to exclude alternate explanations and in some cases flat out ignore disco forming data. I'll check out the Stanford course and see if they're citimg anyone credible, though.
I guess I'll say that evolutionary psychology is a major scientific field taught at many major universities with the support of many scientists . and the facts of science don't change depending on your ideology. The facts of climate change or evolution don't change whether you are right or left. The facts about human nature or the behaviours and social norms we evolved don't change depending on your views.
You know what else is offered at many universities? Sexual harassment training but I don't see you extolling the virtues of that. You want something that really hurts guys' chances of getting a date? Try this crap hypermasculine version ov evo-psych where every attempt to meet another human being has to account for the ratio of their wast and hips relative to your cheeks vs jaw, where you have to be ALPHAAAAAAA (said in an Eric Cartmann voice) or you have no chance, where people are told "well yeah, obviously don't rape people but the more aggressively you ignore boundaries, the more successful you'll be. Its just science". So you can kindly take your evo psych and your flawed assumptions of human biological determinism and go find a chimp to fuck. That stuff is more their style.
I didn't say sexual harrassment seminars were bad.
You should read some philosophy of science, man. Science is wrong all the time (eugenics, phlogiston, etc.). EvoPsych is a new field with lots of disagreement among it's practitioners. I'd be skeptical if I were you.
Check the archives sometime, I've read quite a bit of evo-psych. The scientifically rigorous stuff proves things that are. ..well, blindingly obvious. Things like cooperation and extended childhood being the result of evolutionary pressures. The studies that people quote to "prove" that there's one definition of attractiveness, or that Alpha dudebros get all the tail have sloppy methodology, small sample sizes and set out to prove a hypothesis rather than falsify it. So no, the facts don't change but not every peer reviewed study deserves to be taken as fact. That's kind of the point of peer review.
The fact is that many things that we assume are universal social norms are in fact peculiar to a greater or lesser number of cultures. We tend to assume their universality to the degree that they are ingrained in our own culture. On closer examination, though, many of them do not hold up since even one culture bucking the trend is enough to demonstrate a basis in nurture not nature.
Good lord, this is so uninspired. As if feminists haven’t written about that before? It’s called benevolent sexism, look up some articles.
Yea , I did. look it up , and it reads like post-hoc rationalization to make the facts fit the theory.
So, which of the original papers did you read? And where did you do your research training?
Says the guy talking up fucking evo-psych. Really, dude?
I made a comment on another post in which I described an experience I had. A woman crossed the street to get away from me even though I wasn't approaching her or attempting to interact with her in any way. I was mildly insulted, but it wasn't a big deal, and I felt more sorry for her than anything else.
If I'd been black, there was a non-zero chance that I could have gotten shot for that. And that if she or someone else had shot me, they wouldn't have been convicted as there are plenty of examples of juries being convinced that simply being black in the presence of a white person is threatening behavior.
Did I feel privileged when that woman crossed the street to get away from me? No, I felt insulted. But I was able to go about my business unharmed. That, unfortunately, is what racial privilege looks like.
The "difficulty setting" metaphor was never my favorite way of explaining privilege. Not because it's incorrect, but because when you open the conversation by telling someone that everything they accomplish means less than other people doing the same thing, they're probably not going to listen to you.
I always preferred "Privilege is the toothache you don't have". Depending on the situation, it can be blinding pain or just a nagging ache, but it's there and it's kind of hard to explain to people who will never have a toothache. It also avoids getting sidetracked into discussions about various kinds of privilege and how enough of one can cover up others. I have a hard time saying that a poor white guy in West Virginia has it easier than, say, Michael Jordan Jr., but most folks can wrap their heads around the idea of being MJ Jr. with a toothache, and how that is on a different axis than money and fame.
I don't know that I consider difficulty to effect the meaning of the outcome to anyone but me. A homeless shelter with a billionaire donor can provide its services more easily than one without. For the people who get somewhere to stay and something to eat, its as meaningful either way.
And that's you. Scalzi was presenting "difficulty level" as a way to explain privilege to geeky people who push back against the very idea, and those don't strike me as the kind of people who think higher difficulty levels don't matter.
More than that, by collapsing all intersectionality to a single axis (Easy, medium, hard, Nightmare, whatever) it lets people get distracted by things like the nontrivial number of poor white people and middle class minorities. People can generally understand physical discomfort as something that makes your life worse, regardless of other factors.
And I will admit that I like it because it frames "privileged" as what should be the default, and solving the problem as a matter of removing the impediments those without privilege face.
Fair enough. I'm not always a good sample.
"More than that, by collapsing all intersectionality to a single axis (Easy, medium, hard, Nightmare, whatever) it lets people get distracted by things like the nontrivial number of poor white people and middle class minorities. People can generally understand physical discomfort as something that makes your life worse, regardless of other factors. "
But that's not what Scalzi does. In fact your metaphor — while I like it and find it useful — is more prone to that flattening.
Scalzi's writing for an RPG-loving subset of his audience, in RPG terms. He specifically mentions concepts like reaction bonuses, dump stats, varying starting points to allocate, and variable gains per level, setting up game mechanics as a metaphor for systemic disadvantage and oppression whereby someone who starts with far fewer points and with "wealth" as a dump stat (poor) but plays on "straight white male" difficulty ends up with better NPC reactions, more help along the way, and needs fewer points to level, thus gaining experience points faster and leveling faster, earning level-gain benefits faster and raising their stats faster, so the game gets even easier as they go — while someone playing "queer woman of color" starting with higher stats and higher wealth still faces unhelpful or belligerent NPCs and has trouble advancing, while encountering more danger from hostile NPCs that the first player would find neutral or friendly. The first character may spend half the game with lower stats and fewer resources than the second, but will still find it easier to advance and be rewarded for their efforts while the second is basically held at a frustrating standstill.
It's a fairly sophisticated model of intersectionality, as analogies go, that demonstrates how someone can work hard, advance, and earn rewards strictly according to the rules, look around at the others he has passed along the way who started with more and accomplished less, and be correct about those facts, but still be wrong when he concludes their lack of advancement means they didn't work as hard.
That, specifically, is one of the harder things to explain to people sometimes — that just because they, or a parent or grandparent, are a glowing American Success Story who advanced within the rules doesn't mean the rules allow that for everyone — since one's own experience can seem incontrovertible proof that everyone else could be doing the same if they tried.
Scalzi specifically uses a familiar and friendly metaphor to demonstrate how equal efforts can produce unequal outcomes, while the toothache metaphor (again, while useful in its own scope) simply encourages people to say "But I haven't been happy the whole time I've worked; I've had my share of pain and misery and pushed through to succeed anyway!" and at best replaces the idea that others are just generally lazy with the idea that others' character defect lies in their response to hardship. (This is pretty much exemplified by criticisms that women in the workplace would advance further and succeed more if they'd "grow thicker skins" and simply not let things discourage/upset/anger them, or "lean in" and learn to negotiate and self-advocate, despite peer-reviewed evidence that women receive less encouragement and constructive criticism but more unconstructive criticism, are promoted less even when meeting the same metrics, are judged negatively for qualities seen positively in men, and so on, and that strategies like negotiation tactics and self-advocacy that are rewarded in men are performed less often by women because women are punished, not rewarded, for performing them, not because women are somehow defective in their understanding of what the system rewards.)
On a personal note, your metaphor is exceptionally useful to describe invisible illness. Two students with the same grades, taking the same classes and with the same talents and study habits, are not going to progress equally if one of them has a chronic toothache that prevents concentration, disturbs a healthy sleep pattern or prevents one from forming, &c. It's not always easy for people to imagine that their life would be harder if they'd had to struggle with a disruptive physical pain, but for people who have experienced toothaches, it's a nice shortcut to remind them how much better life got, even in little ways that add up quickly, when they finally got to a dentist (or how much they wish they could afford a dentist if they've had to push on without one.) But to offer an alternative to "superior morals/work-ethic" as an explanation for starting with less and ending with more, Scalzi's piece is exceptional if the reader knows enough about RPGs to follow it.
When you expand it to the character stats idea, it does get much more nuanced. I just don't think that somebody who pushes back at the concept of privilege will be listening after you open with "all your achievements are less impressive because of who you are."
As for my preferred metaphor, expand it to all kinds of persistent pain and I think it's pretty all-encompassing. You cover the idea of intersectionality with pain in different locations, and how someone with a toothache has a different issue than someone with a headache. And it lets people infer the results of privilege ("You know, accomplishing everything I have while dealing with constant joint pain *is* more impressive") rather than launching a direct assault on their ego.
The way my mother explained privilege to me is a race. She said imagine life as a race towards a house with prizes. Some people are racing there on an obstacle course and some people are racing on a normal track. Everyone is working hard, its just that some people just have additional obstacles.
One of my professors once demonstrated the idea by throwing a bunch of pennies on the floor, and having 4 students pick up as many they could in about a minute. One of the students was blindfolded, another had to wear boxing gloves, and the third wasn't allowed to start until 30 seconds in. The fourth had no handicaps.
I remember reading some story (maybe here?) about a teacher telling all the students to sit in their desks and throw paper balls into a trash can at the front. The kids in the front row all made it, but most of the ones in the back row didn't.
TBH, it's always seemed like such an obvious thing to me that I'm always a little frustrated that we need blatant metaphors like these to get the point across.
You're still not getting it, are you?
I am not a fan of those red pill people, but does anyone find it worrisome that Aaronson's narrative fits the red pill narrative of how interactions between men and women work almost perfectly? How much ammunition do those types need?
As far as everything else, I don't feel like i have anything of value to contribute. Aaronson is wrong about most of the things he says, and I agree with the fact that all of his problems were about fear rather than reality. But I'm no better. I'm horrified of women and feel most of the time like my presence is at best a nuisance and at worst offensive. I think the bitterness you see emerge in a lot of people is balanced between an extreme desire and a perceived inability to attain. Everyone wants what they can't have.
And the difference is whether you ask "what can I do" or demand "I am owed this". Aaronson *did* succeed thanks to personal growth, but he was *so committed* to being a dateless loser that he can't accept that his circumstances improved because he improved.
He doesn't seem to have undergone any meaningful change aside from having gotten a job, to be honest.
And on that note, I think he's been getting too much credit for being an "intelligent" person just because he's a professor and self-identifies as a geek/nerd. Based on what he's said so far, to me he seems like a simpleton.
you hit the same note that I was thinking…. There are many people you would think should be intelligent but sound really stupid when they open their mouths.
There's definitely a trope of the rocket scientist who can't tie his shoes.
that is not what I am talking about… people who are educated yet argue using logical fallacies for example is what I am talking about.
Intelligence is by no means linear. I'm sure he's excellent at programming and math and so on. That's consistent with him being rather simple-minded about social issues.
It's not "consistent", it's orthagonal.
Actually…there's a lot of research that notes most intelligence metrics are highly correlated. Which suggests that if its within his capacity to do quantum computing research, its probably in his capacity to understand social justice theories and nuances. The barriers he has probably are not intellectual in nature, but emotional. It's not a coincidence that the vast majority of highly intelligent people who express problems with any given social justice movement, are those that don't stand to benefit from it.
He is married to another MIT professor, so he clearly figured out how to talk to women
That's what I'm talking about when I mean he changed. He actually stuck his neck out and now has a relationship, which is worlds away from how he had lived his life up to that point. This is something he would deserve credit for, if he would acknowledge that it was him getting over himself rather than triumphing over the evil feminists and Neanderthals.
Exactly! He eventually figured out that he could talk to a woman, express interest, and the world would not end. I will not speculate on his dating history, but I am willing to bet that he managed to talk to and express interest in women other than his now wife.
He's married.
To another MIT professor, apparently.
"he was *so committed* to being a dateless loser that he can't accept that his circumstances improved because he improved."
Not true on the surface, at least; his conclusion was specifically that he never had an epiphany or life-changing moment that removed his fear, but just kept struggling despite it, got the girl, and wound up happily married in the end. He doesn't admit to having "improved" his fear, but he clearly intends to paint powering through despite it as a virtue.
Unfortunately, that's arguably a fairly insensitive point to make if it were intended as a response to the surrounding discussion about to what extent sexual harassment is responsible for keeping women from entering STEM or from the "leaky pipeline" problem of women dropping out of STEM because it's a scary and painful place to be female, since Aaronson's problem turned out — as his conclusion fairly-well supports — to be in his head, not in the actions of the environment around him; drawing that parallel explicitly would be stating that the problem of sexual harassment is in women's heads rather than grounded in reality, and I'd be far closer to the fire-breathing camp at that point.
However, I don't read him as intending to have drawn a parallel between overcoming his fear of approaching women and arguing against women's reactions to sexual harassment in that particular way; even though he was doing both, I don't think he was specifically trying to link them. I just read him as deciding to disclose a lot of pent-up emotion about a personal struggle in response to several stimuli in multiple discrete-but-intertwining conversations, one about whether sexual harassment in STEM is a problem (and as much a problem as women claim) and another about whether condemnation of sexual harassment is overly-harsh to perpetrators. Unfortunately, the two topics are linked in several ways the conversation didn't make explicit, and which he doesn't seem to have considered. Responding indiscriminately to both with the story of how anti-sexual-harassment education damaged him personally was at least as callous, and perhaps more, than if he'd actually intended "…so just get over it and move on" as the explicit moral of his anecdote.
He did respond to Amy's insistence that harassment is a real problem for women in STEM, and that stripping perpetrators of public approbation and official support is proportionate to the damage done to victims, with a lecture on how anti-harassment messaging combined with feminism from a generation or more ago was damaging to him personally, once again making the effects on men the center of the conversation, and then supported the idea that sexual harassment cannot be the/a problem with more just-so stories about how men in STEM are uniquely incapable of perpetrating it — despite the topic at hand being a man in STEM who has done just that. So… I guess I'm in the steam-from-ears-and-nostrils camp without actually breathing fire.
I still think it's important, though, to make sure when criticizing him that the criticisms are valid and as fair as possible to everyone involved.
My impression, context aside was that he was trying to say "here's this really unfair thing that happened" and wasn't so much intending to say "I grew up and learned to face my anxiety" as much as "I lucked out and escaped this evil evil trap". Now he does explicitly say that he learned to get over his fear but he doesn't present it as being a solution to the problem.
Ooh, cut and paste with alterations time!
"I realize Scott Aaronson’s article is not intended for women. Yet some of them are going to read it, and I hope they have enough self-worth to not allow this kind of vitriolic victim-shaming to make them think they are bad people because their interests or for talking about their negative experiences.
They are not."
I so rarely get to demonstrate the parallels between empathy and basic word processing skills.
Now I just wish I knew how to use strikethrough here.
Wait, I thought the < s > tag was supported? That tag is <s>not</s> supported? How about the < del > tag? <del>Foo</del>
Maybe this?EDIT: Yep, looks like the tag is [strike] and [/strike] (with the < and > instead of [ and ])
Wow. Before your IP gets banned, I am *dying* to know what your definiton of empathy is.
I'm very confused about something. What makes someone a nerd? Does it mean you're really intellegent or you like nerdy things? I was a varsity athlete in three sports all four years of high school and was a starting member of my boarding schools academic team, I took advance placement courses, I scored very well on my SAT's and in college I majored in quantitative economics with a minor in math. The sport I play in college, lacrosse, is dominated skill and talent wise by huge academic heavy weights. (Duke, Princeton, UVA, Johns Hopkins, Cornell etc.) I don't have any geeky/nerdy interests, but I'm certainly smart. I have teammates who love nerdy things, science, scifi and fantasy, who(whom?) are also division 1 athletes. So I'm curious as to what people mean when they identify as nerds or geeks?
Well, its largely self applied but the closest thing to a standard stereotype is:
academically gifted, anywhere from pretty smart up to Doogie Hauser.
not athletic or at least not interested in organized sports
interested in sic-fi/fantasy, comics, video games, RPGs or whatever other escapism involving alternate worlds that is looked down on by the mainstream.
Socially awkward
This raises a fascinating question (for me at least). What category does a socially awkward person who is not particularly bright and has no pop culture interests fall into?
Dork.
Really? Because that term I've only heard used kind of affectionately or without much bite towards anyone really who was being annoying. Dork doesn't feel like something that anyone would take on as a self descriptor either.
Maybe loner?
Loner doesn't work, because that suggests someone who is solitary by nature. Socially awkward doesn't necessarily mean someone wants to be alone, or even that someone is.
"Dork" is the one that tends to pop up on those Venn diagrams, but those are admittedly dated. If I'm actually thinking of my high school classmates who might qualify for that label, they were more likely to be called stoners or slackers or some other label that didn't fall into the nerd/geek spectrum and referred more to what they did do with their free time.
Nerd is usually used to mean someone who is academically minded, usually in various subjects, and generally enjoys learning and scholarly things. A geek is more about focusing (or obsessing, depending who you ask) on a particular interest, or a particular few interests (a computer geek, a band geek, etc.), and a dork is someone who is more of a social pariah, or lacks those skills. Most self-IDed nerds are probably more than one of these.
Hah, just realized that you already addressed the others below. Whoops!
Hm. Back in my (young) day, Dork was the last thing one wanted to be known as…
Well, what's Your Thing in this example if its not athletics, academics, geek stuff or socializing?
It's entirely possible the person will call themselves a nerd anyway due to the association with high intelligence. There's a reason why I don't think the word is much of a meaningful descriptor anymore.
This is the thing that I don't understand. Maybe it's a generational thing, I just turned 23. I just don't feel like those hobbies are exclusive to nerds. I feel like a lot of the interests that you described are pretty mainstream and shared by tons of people. I feel like a lot of these labels and persecution is self imposed or exists mostly in their heads. Again maybe it's a generational thing.
It's a generational thing.
Well, sonny, y'see back when I was yer age. . . *hikes up pants*. . .
Vidya games had 8 bit colors at best. Sure, everyone played a couple of quarters at Pizza Hut but if you had a vdiya system at home, everyone thought you was hidin' inside instead'a runnin' and chasin' a hoop down the street with a stick.
Computers had four colors at best an' wasn't taught in school. They was also expensive as hell. So if ya had the time an' money fer computers, yer dad musta been a scientist er worked for NASA er somethin'.
Sure everyone saw Star Wars but if you was over about 12 and readin' the books, that was time ya could be playin' football or readin'. . .I dunno, Sports Illustrated or somethin'.
We didn't have no Innernet. So the three other peoples in yer school was the only ones ya knew who liked the nerd stuff until you was old enough to go to the hobby shop on yer on on the weekend. Because'a that, if'n ya already liked that stuff a bit an' them poplar kids didn' wantcha, ya wound up with the outcasts. Some of 'em was bright. Some was. . .special but the things hat helds ya together was not bein' poplar an' nerd stuff. So it became yer shield from the bullies. They might make yer life hell but ya was part of this cool thing what had access to worlds way better than this one. Hackin' the local university or beatin' Ninja Gaiden gave ya an accomplishment ta feel good aboucher self but one that them dumb jocks would never recognize.
Now all these kids got their fancy Play Boxes an' their Batvengers an' ablets with the Facespace. They don' appreciate that it took us old nerds our entire lives to make the world that way fer 'em. No go bring me a beer and get offa my lawn! I still ain't beat GTA Five.
"So if ya had the time an' money fer computers, yer dad musta been a scientist er worked for NASA er somethin'."
er somethin = dad's middle management salary financed Commodore Vic 20 :-p
I had an IBM PC Jr because mom was very forward thinking. My best friend had a real, five thousand dollar IBM PC because his dad worked for IBM. 256 K of memory that thing had. Them's KILO bytes, you young'ns. Two floppy drives! Two I tell ya!
Oh man – getting The Orgeon Trail floppy was so exciting! Plus, how else was I going to learn about dysentery?
Ooh, I had that on floppy disk as well. My mother gave me a lecture when I named all the party members after my family members and then let us all get in such poor health that my sister died of cholera.
I also used to play this weird text adventure called Bureaucracy (that I later learned was written by Douglas Adams) that involved trying to buy ordinary items like hamburgers without letting my blood pressure rise too high from frustration. In retrospect, I don't think it was designed for 5-8-year-olds, but at the time the computer being its own choose your own adventure game seemed pretty cool.
I went back and played it more recently and its hilarious! I always loved the Infocom games because they came with STUFF. Like Hitchhiker's Guide came with peril sensitive sunglasses, a Don't Panic pin and a microscopic space fleet.
Oh, is it available somewhere? I poked around for it on the internet a couple years back thinking I might want to see it through an adult's eyes, but i couldn't find anything.
Activision rereleased them all on CD ROM once. Then they had all the Zorks and Enchanters online. Try Home Of The Underdogs if you can't find it anywhere else.
Thank you, I will check it out!
Any luck? I wouldn't mind taking a crack at a few of the harder ones again.
They have a bunch of themavailable online, but sadly, Bureaucracy is not among them. Looks like there are some downloads for it that claim to be converted to work on modern computers, which I'll probably play with over the weekend to see if they actually work.
I fiddled around with Hitchhiker's Guide a bit last night and remembered that I really miss text adventures. I'm not sure why they went so totally out of style.
There's a whole community that writes new ones, too. Some of them are quite good.
One actually relies on the fact that the character you're controlling is an unreliable narrator.
Well, now I know what my new gaming diversion will be now that I've played Dragon Age to death…
It's nice to see they're not totally extinct. One of the things that makes me hopeful about the app form of games is that I think it gives people an incentive to take an opportunity to look at platformers and puzzle games and basically anything that didn't get focused on as console and PC games got caught up in realistic graphics.
Found it http://www.myabandonware.com/game/bureaucracy-a9
Yup, I've got that one bookmarked!
Sadly, it will need to wait, as our IT guy might not share my enthusiasm.
I got this at some point…
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lost-treasures-of…
Oooooh, an app. I was thinking these games would be perfect for phones.
Ah, memories. Atari 800…with cassette drive. I had tapes scattered everywhere. I eventually had an acoustic modem to match (you literally put the phone handset on it). Good times.
*wipes one small tear from corner of eye*
I would argue that the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a nerd are…
– "Academically gifted, anywhere from pretty smart up to Doogie Hauser" with their intellect being a defining part of their personality
– "Not athletic or at least not interested in organized sports"
– …and I would add not fitting in what the larger immediate social organization would define as a "Popular Group."
The rest are interests and commonalities that you would tend to find among nerds, but aren't defining or exclusive in and of themselves.
I would consider a nerd to be someone who's academically talented and interested in academics. They may or may not be awkward, but they're not part of the popular crowd. They may or may not be interested in geeky things, but they're generally not interested in team sports, mainstream fashion, or anything of that sort.
I'd consider a geek to be someone who's passionate about either the standard geeky interests like comics and science fiction or someone who's similarly passionate about something else that's a bit out of the mainstream.
I'd probably classify you as a smart jock or maybe just a smart guy who's not any particular social stereotype, though some of your teammates might be geeks. I suspect you'd all by called Neanderthals under some of the definitions being used in the linked posts, though.
I can see your point. I guess I don't understand why people my age identify with the persecution. Not because I don' believe them. I just feel like things have changed. Again I guess it could be because of demographics. I went to an academically competitive boarding school and go to an academically competitive college. So maybe because everyone is interested in academics it wasn't much bully of nerds going on.
I think its true now, and to a certain extent then, that the persecution comes first. People ostracize and identify you as a nerd, which reinforces that internally.
You're right, I (as a young guy) didn't see much nerd persecution either in high school (I got a little in middle school, but that went away and it was pretty minor). I did attend a very academically-minded, top public school in my state, though, so it was probably a somewhat similar environment to your school.
I actually think people are getting the direction of causation backwards with the nerd persecution complexes. It's not that nerdy or geeky interests are looked down upon much in the younger generations, but rather that intelligent people who are really socially awkward, outside the mainstream in other ways, and be socially outcast, tend to be drawn into nerdy interests more strongly than others. That they are nerds is a side-effect, rather than the main issue. Of course, it seems like their nerdery is what they have in common, rather than the social awkwardness and rejection.
Some of it might be demographics. I'm pretty sure there are at least some schools where being academically talented isn't much of a social asset, even if it's not an outright liability.
I think some of it may also be that some kids end up being, if not persecuted, isolated and disliked by their classmates. Perhaps some of them reach out toward the nerd or the geek label as an effect of that, since there's a good bit of media there that's likely to be comforting to someone who already feels like an outsider.
I guess that the main reason that I assumed it was self imposed is because I see post's like the one linked in the article overwhelming written by men.I feel like my female friends who have the aforementioned hobbies don't identify as nerds or feel ostracized. Granted I can only name one female friend who has those hobbies so my sample is pretty small.
Well, back in my day (can't speak for sure to now)
its a feedback loop. The popular kids don't want anything to do with you so you find your people and assume that it will continue to be the same way when your venue changes. So even when you're getting signs of acceptance you're likely to brush it off as a joke or your misreading. So you come off as aloof and standoffish. So people start avoiding you. . .
This is hard for me to speak to, because your female friends are also a decade younger than me. I will say that when I was younger, I felt very ostracized, especially since the guys who identified as nerds weren't welcoming either. I mostly expressed my geekier interests to female friends who were in the same position, and tried (with limited success, more because of awkwardness than geekiness) to pass myself off as a non-geek in other situations.
Heh, getting good grades was one of the few social assets I had in school, actually. I was also a bit of a dork, and a shy one at that, so I tended to not be picked first for group projects. But enough people knew I was smart that I always had a group, even if my group just wanted to use me for my work ethic!
Demographics, social class, and geographic location probably account for at least some discrepancies. I'm only a year older than you are, but in the schools I went to, my parents were proud that I made it into "both" AP programs—which ended in Calc AB and AP English / Language Arts, and in both classes I generally had about eight classmates while in other classes I had close to thirty. So naturally, seeing the same eight people in class twice a day while the rest of the school was more or less a tedious blur couldn't help but lead to the formation of a sort of clique. (And of course, students not in those classes getting funny ideas about what made us so "special" provided additional external pressure.) My closest friends were fellow runners and in different years from me, but as far as most of the rest of the world was concerned I was definitely one of the "nerds".
And social segregation and bullying were definitely things that happened there. They almost certainly still are. I got off relatively easy—my parents were pretty well-connected, and it seems most people generally knew and liked my whole family, plus I was always hanging out in the library after school and more than willing to put down whatever I was reading if someone needed some homework help or something. But I still got some, and I definitely saw a lot more happen to friends and acquaintances.
I should note here that in this case being in a "clique" did not automatically make you friends; it just provided some common ground to start with. And being in different "cliques" did not automatically make you enemies. Plenty of football players were nice, and some of the nerds I remember as not so nice. The drama club cultivated a friendly and welcoming atmosphere for pretty much everyone. Everyone at least pretended to be nice to the GSA and the boys on the cheer team during school hours. But bullying is not always physical. And in fact my experience has generally been that physical intimidation and beatings are among the least common forms of bullying, despite what the media narratives seem to say.
Still, there were definitely self-hating attitudes forced on me and my peers in grade school that nobody I know of consciously chose to put there—they just happened, as a consequence of multiple middle and high school cliques stereotyping each other into oblivion.
I'd say that left each of us with a set of disadvantages we'd have been better off without. I'd say that whether anyone intended it that way or not, the final result looks a lot like some form of persecution. And I'd say The System is to blame. But I also think my understanding of the problem, and my set of ideas on how to solve it, probably looks pretty different from what my fellow "nerds" might imagine.
Then of course I got into college on what added up to an almost-full scholarship, and discovered the joys of interacting with other nerds who had chips on their shoulders from knowing way more about basically everything than the kid who came in with only a Calculus I credit on his sheet.
I'm older than you, but for me it was never about persecution. I wasn't picked on, I just didn't fit in or felt I had anything much in common with the other kids. It was when I got into rpgs I met others who liked the same things I liked, read books, got my jokes and had conversations that were actually interesting to me. And they identified as nerds, so I did too. It was actually never a negative label for me.
The lines get blurry pretty quickly, though. Nate Silver, for instance, is definitely a nerd in my book, but he also is very interested in sports.
That's fair. I think it's worth noting that this is the classic set of definitions! The nature of being a geek has changed considerably since they were established in that a lot of its sacred cows, like video games, are nearly universally liked. Sports fandom has changed in a different way – the ways in which Silver manifests his liking of them didn't even really exist when I was a teenager.
I think there's also a geeky way to be interested in sports – knowing the stats from the last 50+ about your team comes to mind.
Oh, that's fair, and you're right that's been around for a long time. I feel that guy was always the slightly intense one in a group of sports fans than someone who was identified as a geek, but that might be because I only knew one of those people well and he had a foot in both the geek and the jock camp even aside from that.
The fantasy thing is weird to me, because that seems to cross over to people who aren't necessarily all that into the sport in its own right.
And that didn't start this morning. Did anyone ever see the Bad News Bears "trilogy" with Walter Matthau? Remember Ogilvie, the team stats-keeper?
I'm a tennis fan like that, too. I can't even play well, LOL, but I've had photos published of some of the ATP guys and WTA ladies, and I talk w/a friend who works for IBM about the new ways they're integrating the data analytics. (AO begins on the 18th! :-))
I would have been a nerd by these qualifications. I was identified as academically gifted early on, and while I wasn't particularly lacking in social skills, I simply never identified much with the interests of my peers. That led me to be a loner or at least somewhat disengaged. My athletic skills were underdeveloped, and I thought team sports abstract and meaningless. So, yes, I wasn't that popular. The smarter, nerdier kids resented me for doing better in school without really trying, while the more athletic and conformist kids did not know what to make of me. I did have friends, and I was included in basic social activities, but I was also bullied (for about 3 years) by a group of of a dozen or so individuals who were extremely irked by my very existence.
Yet, I don't fit the narrative being put out there by these "nice-guy nerds." I had no geeky interests. I did not play video games or read science fiction. I was physically attractive during the time I was being bullied, a teenaged girl who stood 5'8", measured 38-24-38, who had exceptionally clear skin, and stereotypically feminine facial features. I wore stylish clothes. I had social skills. I was bullied seemingly entirely for being non-athletic and disinterested in fitting in. As for what bullying entailed, I was called crude names. My body was critiqued loudly in my hearing by male peers, and they described the sexual assaults they would commit on it. I was physically pushed and shoved. My ass was grabbed, touched, and pinched. I was shoved into boys who then rubbed up against me and laughed. I was called a whore and a slut before I had even had my first kiss. Boys speculated to me about how I should masturbate. One larger boy grabbed my hair in his fist and thrust my head around forcefully. He also slapped me. He propositioned me. He kicked me. He stole clothes from my locker. He would come up behind me and jerk me around by my backpack. Another boy exposed himself to me twice. I was told that I wanted to be touched by those boys. I was told I was ugly and undesirable. One boy hung out outside my ballet classes to watch me through the window, and then he would tell me about watching me the next day at school. And so on. About 90% of this bullying was witnessed by teachers. Not a single boy was ever reprimanded or told to stop. I lost all trust in adults at this time because they witnessed it and condoned it by their non-action. When I was later targeted by sexually predatory adults, I told no one since I had already "learned" that I was the catalyst for inappropriate behavior and that no one would do anything but blame me.
Despite all this, I have managed to have good self-esteem and productive relationships with men. I do not even know if the bullying I experienced was extreme. I do want to note that it was only boys that bullied me, often in a group. It is not only males that are bullied, not only nerds, and not only the socially awkward or unattractive. I am female. I was considered very attractive at the time of the bullying, which I only bring up because that is left out of the narrative too, when these men who want to go on wallowing pretend that beautiful women are treated as goddesses by men. Further, while some of the boys who bullied me were popular, some were also pimply, unattractive, and overweight, and there was overlap between these groups.
I don't know. It seems I have as much right to be disgruntled as any of these men who claim to be discriminated against because of their nerdy/geeky interests. But my narrative is invisible since I am female and apparently in a position of power due to my sex appeal. I have no right to be damaged by what happened to me because men still want to fuck me. And that's the way it goes with these guys. Female experiences do not matter.
I find it interesting that you talk of "smarter, nerdier kids" when the little bit of evidence shows that YOU were the smarter one (since you did clock better grades?). Methinks its the same old thing about feeling threatened about a woman who is "ahead" or "above" them in some way – they can't ever admit the truth that she's better in some way, they HAVE to convince themselves she's not that good. Which I think is just another piece of evidence these dudes are complete fucking assholes. Doubly so on the adults who ignored it and then later participated. I'm so sorry you had to endure such treatment, and I hope you're in a place you don't have to anymore, and that you're getting whatever support you need.
Thanks for your reply. To clarify, the kids who were doing well in school didn't actively bully me, though they may not have always had warm feelings toward me. The bullying primarily came from boys who were lackluster in academics. It is possible they were threatened by me in some way, but as we mostly interacted in settings like gym class, homeroom, or the cafeteria, it's doubtful. In the end, it doesn't really matter why I was bullied though. It happened, and while it caused me great anxiety that culminated in a strong flirtation with anorexia, I did mostly get past it. I became much more socially successful once my parents removed me from that particular environment, though I still prefer to be a bit of a loner.
I also don't want to give the impression that I continue to dwell on this period of bullying. I don't think about it often, and I don't relive it. However, I do feel angry when the online narrative is so one-sided, when men purport that females are never victims of this, and that attractive females are indeed the perpetrators.
I think these days at least it's more self-identification than anything else. When I was in high school, I was in marching band, took all advanced classes and didn't do any sports until my senior year, when I joined the track team. If joining track improved my social standing, it was invisible. I made maybe two more friends, which was nice, but it certainly didn't make me super-popular.
Things that actually got me picked on in high school: being shy and awkward, being "gay," being small (this strikes me as mostly an assurance that if a confrontation turned physical they would win)
Things that stereotypes dictate would get me picked on in high school, but DIDN'T: being in marching band, being in advanced classes, getting good grades, liking books, liking Star Trek, liking video games
Why is being in a marching band a thing to be made fun of? Have these people seen Ohio States marching band?
It's not, and it wasn't, but at the time at least it seemed to me like the stereotype was there…
I think that's even more of a vintage nerd stereotype than liking comics, or at least I was in marching band, and even in the 90s it was sort of a neutral thing rather than one you'd get teased for.
If you want a guess where the stereotype came from, it might have been from times when football, basketball, and cheerleading were a comparatively bigger deal than they are now. Band kids are by default not participating in those activities, so there might have been some negative associations?
Could be! At least when I was in school, it wasn't unheard of to do both. Those poor guys were exhausted in football season. No rest for them, come halftime they had to change uniforms, do the show, change back and get back on the field.
"Band geeks" have always been a thing, I think.
Then again, so have the drum corps.
Ho-ray for Drum Corp!
See, to my recollection band nerds, choir nerds and drama geeks (the terminology as I remember) rated higher than the scifi/video game/RPG nerds. It was usually more a term of endearment for them.
It depends, I guess. Band was held in moderately high regard at my high school too, but I was aware of the stereotype at the time. However, I also played Magic: The Gathering in one of the science classrooms at lunch. And had an encyclopedic knowledge of swords. And made chain maille in my spare time. And played D&D every Wednesday after school. My geek cred does not begin and end with band membership, but it didn't get me picked on.
Interestingly, the guy in my class who made chain mail was one of the cool-ish kids and also quite a successful entrepreneur who was getting $500 (in 90s dollars) per shirt.
Man, I wish I'd known a buyer back then! I did manage to sell a couple of bracelets, but at best I made the hobby pay for itself, I never turned a profit. It was still fun though.
Yeah, those were middle of the pack cliques. There was some overlap between people in band/choir/theater and the nerdier sorts, but there were also people who were in those activities who did the homecoming court thing.
Now if you were in orchestra instead of band…well, that was lower
But if you were good at your instrument, you could get your "status" – or at least find your people – elsewhere.
All-State Orchestra/Choir, anyone …?
Drama geek! *raises hand*
Also, AV club…
So, as a comparison, when I was in high school, I was picked on for being unattractive, for wearing the wrong clothes, for being terrible at sports, and for being socially awkward. That was mostly by people a bit higher on the social pyramid, but it decreased fairly dramatically as I got older and got tracked into honors and AP classes. I was also picked on for showing up at the informal Magic club, expressing interest in playing D&D, for talking about video games and fantasy novels, and for making math team (ugh, it's not like that one was on purpose). But the kicker was that the people who were doing the picking on were the guys who were already involved with those activities. I'm not actually sure to whether they were ostracized by others for their interests because I was an outsider to those interactions.
I was not picked on for being in marching band, being in advanced classes, getting good grades, or liking books as a general matter.
Interesting comparison! I'd hazard a guess that the reason the guys picked on you for Magic, D&D and the math team were picking on you because you were a girl in "their" space. That's certainly been my girlfriend's experience with Magic and D&D, but that's not something I've experienced myself.
Yeah, that was my general impression of it – a good bit of territoriality and a bit of an assumption that I was going to be incompetent compared to other newer members and would drag everyone else down.
I bet those same guys then complained that no girls ever shared their interests, never realizing how self-fulfilling their attitude was. =P
Oh possibly, though from their perspective I'm quite sure I never counted as the sort of girl-they'd-want-to-date who was contemplated in that statement.
Though perhaps it ends up being self-fulfilling down the line, when late bloomers get their acts together and the girls who weren't welcome at those clubs then tend to have grown into women who are into knitting and urban fantasy and Bioware games and cosplay but don't share as much geekery with their male counterparts as either might like.
Yeah, I definitely got picked on for being shy and fat far more than I ever was for my grades/APs/frequent sightings of me with books. I believe that's why I developed a sense of sarcasm defensively.
I agree it's self-identification mostly.
I got picked on for the same reasons as you did, but no cared I played videogames. No one cared I listened to weird music. It was all down to not fitting in on a personal and social level that got me picked on.
I don't really self-identify as a nerd though. I never really did back then. I dislike the term and the baggage it carries and would happily cut myself off from geek culture in general if I could. But, that's not particularly practical. So I label myself one depending on context, like I typically do here and the NerdLounge forums, to cut out the explanation and make everyone else's lives easier.
ESR wrote about this in detail just recently:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6617
To me, there are all different kinds of nerds. Nerd, to me, means that the person has some kind of niche interest that they focus a lot of energy into knowing about. That's the thing. Anyone can like the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but not all of them are nerds. The people who have expansive knowledge of the comics, the lore, etc, those are the nerds. But what you're nerdy about usually tends to be off putting as subject matter for conversation because most people either a) don't know enough about it to really be active in the conversation or b) Don't care whatsoever.
Like, I love Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, all other kinds of fantasy fiction. I'll talk about that with people but only to the extent that it is accessible to them, (ie I don't talk about Tolkien's expanded lore as much as I will shit that happened in the movies because everyone saw that). However, my other interests are history and political science. I have a BA in history and am completing my MA in political science with a focus on international relations. That stuff? I keep my fucking mouth shut about it. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear it. It's not interesting except to people who devote massive amount of time into reading classics in political science or tons of scholarly work about public opinion and voter volatility. I never, ever talk about those things even though they are things that I am passionate about unless someone solicits my opinion.
Even when that happens, it's usually disappointing because people want you to give a hard and fast opinion, but in general the more you know about subjects of that nature, the more likely what you say is to be tangled up in complexities which in the best case scenarios end up basically adding up to "It's complicated and we have to think about all these things in order to actually address the issue." Nobody likes that. People don't like complexity and nuance. I think it's because you can't really come off as very confident, and that's what people want. Blind confidence. "I think THIS because THIS." is powerful, and probably attractive. But academics don't give answers like that. Not the good ones. The more you understand about the complexity of something, the more unsure your answer should be. Knowledge shouldn't breed certainty. It should breed skepticism and caution. I'm ranting. But this is my experience.
Anyway, yeah, being a nerd means you give way more of a shit about a thing than most people do.
FWIW, I'd far rather hear what you have to say about history and international relations than about Guardians of the Galaxy. If we ever have coffee in person, I want to hear all the tangled complexities!
Nowadays it is mostly a marketing term to get people to buy frivolous things they don't need and go to mediocre movies.
The doc likes to say that nerds have 'won' just because nerd media, but that is not true, it is like saying American workers have 'won' just because American companies are doing well…. overseas. 'Nerd' has become popular because large corporation and Hollywood exploit these medias and more in an effort to sell us meaningless trinkets, like the iphones etc. and many executives have realized that Nerds are a good source of chumps to milk money from.
If you look at the popular portrayal of actual nerd characters, they are still viewed as outcasts and made fun of, like the 'Big Bang Theory' (ew)
Nerd has now become a meaningless marketing term to shilled to try to get you to spend money on inane things you don't need.
Its lost most of its meaning nowadays, it used to mean someone who is smarter than average,BUT below average in appearance- and it used to also connote someone who was/is a social outcast, or at least, not very popular.
It was an insult, and to me it still is as much as a backhanded compliment, I would never call anyone a nerd, and would welcome being called nerd as much as I would welcome being called a mothefucker.
I'd rather be called and call someone smart, passionate, skilled, driven etc. but not a nerd/geek/dork.
I'm surprised that nobody has hit on this here, but Aarsonson implicitly and Alexander explicitly define "nerd" as somebody who's both intelligent and bad at conventional socializing.* Where they really fuck up is only considering the experiences of male people who are like that.
*I think that this is actually a fairly reasonable definition for a lot of social purposes. I noticed that when I started wearing better clothes and learned better social skills, people generally stopped immediately regarding me as a nerd, even though I'm still a historian who also has a BA in pure mathematics and likes basically all stereotypically nerdy media and activities.
Romanticizing of the "bullied nerd" by the media also exacerbates the issue. That someday bullied nerds will magically wake up awesome, become overlords and have the opposite sex flocking around them.
But this will never happen (unless they change. And this willingness to grow up will be the reason for success.)
Unfortunately, most media portrayal brush over the struggle of changing for the better and jumped right to getting the ladies.
So, at least in my case, I connected it into some sort of payment/promise the world owed me for the virtue of being bullied in the past — without realizing that these great things come at a cost on my part (ex. exerting effort on looks, treating other people well, etc.)
So I believe it further feeds on that entitlement issue.
(By someone who's a nerd, was bullied and suicidal at 11.)
Ugh – glad you made it through all that!
I would be completely in favor of some movies about nerds who DO those things in between the "bullied " and "wins all the hotladies" stages (and maybe with hotladies that they actually share interests with.. I'm trying to imagine what sort of montage would be featured in one…
This is actually why I really like KNOCKED UP though evidently I'm supposed to find it sexist (I don't). A lot of people harp on the fact that once again you have the pudgy not that amazing stoner slacker dude landing a hot successful chick. Except that's not what happens! What happens is they have a sloppy ONS (which begins, btw, by him approaching, making clever jokes, and cutting a rug on the dance floor, so he actually has some attractive qualities that make her like him), she gets pregnant so they try to make a relationship work, and they discover stuff in common and a common sense of humour, but she eventually cannot handle how irresponsible he is and dumps him. We then see a sequence where Rogan becomes less of a slacker, he gets a real job, he gets a new place, he reads all the baby books, I think it's implied if he doesn't stop smoking pot he at least doesn't do it as much, and then he comes back to win the girl. And does. Because he's shown he understands he needs to grow up in order to be a father and be with her. And I've always thought that was a really awesome thing to see happen in a silly movie like that.
Totally agree, that's how I've always seen the movie. Which is why i was so surprised when Katherine Heigl blasted it for depicting the women as shrews and the dudes as fun loving bros. Not to dismiss her perspective in the matter, after all she was one of the stars, but to me it seemed clear that the women (particularly Heigl's and Leslie Mann's characters) while depicted as kind of uptight, were in fact very responsible, mature and ambitious (and crucially, just as funny as the dudes). The dudes, although fun and lovable, were boorish and extremely immature (as well as lacking in ambition). Why it worked for me, was that in the end Heigl's character learned to let go and have fun more often, while Seth Rogen's character learned to grow up and take responsibility. In short, they took on parts of each others' personalities and learned to balance each other out. If that ain't an awesome love story, then I don't know what is.
I’d prefer it if the movies just stopped “rewarding” the “nerds” with women in the first place.
Hey Doc? Pardon me for asking…but I would LOVE it if you were to dedicate a future column entirely to taking Scott "Douche nozzle" Alexander to task for his unchecked bullshittery. Trust me, you'll have PLENTY of material to work with. Also, I just wanna see my favorite blogger skin and gut Alexander's shoddy, straw manning pseudo-arguments. Of course this is just a simple request from a humble fan, so y'know…if you don't feel like it its totes cool bruh.
P.S. thanks for another great post!
If an entire contigent of longposting, cherry-picking neoreactionary PhDs can't do any better then "the data is inconclusive, but your explanation feeds the Cathedral", the Doc's not going to do anything that the SSC commenters are not already doing on their own(check for example veronica d for a poster who regularly gives solid criticism on Alexander's posts from a feminist angle).
And if he does, it will be in studies that already confirm to the message the Doc's sending(something Scott did in the Untitled post, which he got called out for), without looking at methodology or alternate explanations and drawing conclusions far further than the research results will allow simply because of the format. The Doc does not write TL;DR, so even if he would do this, it would not fit in the context of the regular column.
Alexander's response to it will be roughly the equivalent to when SSC slapped Clymer around for statistical stupidity(a useless bout of nitpickery as the starting point, but the end result was a solid post on the actual occurence of false rape statistics, which is a superweapon whenever you encounter an MRA on the net). The Doc will not have the time to properly respond to such a post without coming across as hopelessly tendentious.
Seriously, go read the comments on Untitled again, or some of the open threads on Thing of Things. The criticism you seek already exist, although you may find a disappointing lack of vitriol.
Not sure why the down votes, but I can take a hint lol. Request officially withdrawn.
Another thing to consider is "nerd" isn't even a biological trait. It's 100% these men's choice to self-identify as such and reject being anything else. It's sad because, if they wanted to, they could just as easily self-identify as a man who does well with women and also still identify as a nerd.
I'm not sure identity issues are necessarily "easy", even when they're not dictated by your physicality as such. Hard to identify as "person who does well with X" if it is your experience that you really do not do well with X at all.
Yes, and let's also remember that sometimes there are mental Illnesses factoring in too that are also difficult to change.
But if people would redefine what they were dealing with, they maybe could more accurately focus on what they need to do to get results as a unique individual. The Wisp you have social anxiety. It's not because you are a nerd that you have it. It might be genetic, it might be due to your upbringing, but focusing more on the anxiety part and less on the nerd part would likely be more helpful.
I think honestly self labels can make things worse and can often act as an excuse not to do anything: "Well I'm this kind of person and this kind of person does terrible with women therefore there's nothing I can do about it." That kind of thing. We are labeling ourselves so much these days, sub categories under sub categories, and to me it's not nearly as freeing as I think people would like to believe.
Yeah I get frustrated with overuse of labels too. On the other hand, I've found certain labels helpful in both being realistic about how far you can go how quickly. They also make it easier for me to have self compassion. I've found that in my case not labeling what was going on made my situation worse as I made foolish decisions that made my issues worse.
True, but what I was reacting to was the glib "just as easily self-identify as a man who does well with women" – that is incorrect.
I wasn't being glib so much as arbitrary. I spent over a decade of going around in pretty much a sad, scared, frustrated Eeyore state Dr. Aaronson describes due to my many epic failures in that area. Finally one day I realized I was just so tired of living/thinking like that and arbitrarily just decided right then and there to start thinking of myself as a guy who does well with women instead (whether or not myself, or some one else could argue the case that I actually wasn't). And things were instantly easier, and better, and still are. The only hard part was realizing that was an option I could actually choose to take.
The wording of that ("Think of yourself as a guy who…") is no accident by the way. It makes the issue less mysterious, daunting, and insurmountable and more realistic to overcome. Maybe that's why you thought I was being glib? Regardless, I recommend that way of thinking to anyone.
Seconded.
A similar strategy of "one day, I decided I was pretty" has worked for many a lady.
I still think it's glib. I'm all for changing your bad attitude and adopting more constructive mindsets and all that jazz, but A) it's not easy for everybody and B) just one day deciding something (arbitrary) does not bend reality to your will.
Like, I decided I was an adventurer (cause I'm going to be the awesome kind of spinster, goddammit!) and, well, it hasn't been what you'd call graceful. I keep at it, but I pretty much suck. And sometimes you have to get real. Example: I was planning a trip and getting a bit carried away with the idea that trekking across a jungle Island on my own would be cool – and then had to remind myself that I got lost in a city park the other week, and maybe I should plan something I had a reasonable chance of surviving.
Fair. I say this to guys on here: yes, you have to work at it. You may have to work at it a lot. You may have to work at it more than anyone you know. If it really matters to you, you'll do the work. If you don't believe you can succeed, though, you'll never start. Acknowledging its possible isn't the only step but its a necessary one.
So yeah, crossing the jungle alone, maybe not so bright but its an achievable goal if its worth the amount of effort it would take to make it an possible. It just so happens that in the case of dating, a lot of the work is trying to do dating and failing.
Well for one, I'm sure you would agree that thinking of yourself as an adventurer was far more conducive to actually becoming one as opposed to not thinking of yourself as such.
Second of all, thinking of yourself as "X" doesn't mean you'll never fail, but it does cause you to be more resilient to failure when it happens and to keep going, learning, trying, and improving. In the instance of getting rejected by a woman or things otherwise not going the way you wanted, it means saying "Huh. That's weird. Usually I am very good with women because that's the kind of guy I am." and then moving on to the next thing.
As far as the thought that arbitrarily choosing to adopt a different mindset does not bend reality goes, well I just plain disagree with that one. Your mindset causes you to do things you wouldn't have done in ways you wouldn't have done, which then changes your reality. Thinking as such also allows you to go from merely knowing what you know to actually being or personally identifying with what you know, which is essential I think to becoming better at performing any skill. If you do badly with women, you'll think you'll almost always do badly with women and the same is true in reverse (If you think you'll do badly with women, then you'll do badly with women). Both mindset and reality feed into each other and the most effective way to break that cycle is to start thinking of yourself as someone who does well with women and dating. And I had just gotten to the point that day where choosing to think that seemed easier than continuing to let life just drag me through the mud. If you think of yourself as bad with women, you'll be a lot less likely to interact with them and when you do it usually won't go very well. If you think of yourself as someone who does well with women, you'll be more likely to interact with them and for it to go well (because men who do well with women have little to no fear, resentment, or entitlement issues because they are men who do well with women). And that is how mindset changes reality.
Also, to go with what Johnny said, when it comes to doing what you need to do in order to achieve what you want to achieve/become who you want to become/create the life you want to live (my fucking mantra, no joke), it helps a lot if you already see yourself as that also. For example, if I want to be a good student, but I don't see myself as a good student, my efforts and consequently my grades will be severely handicapped and compromised because I'm subconsciously making it about the struggle, rather than the success. It's not a struggle if you make it not seem like a struggle and it becomes a lot easier to do the work it takes to succeed from there because it suddenly won't seem like work and a struggle.
That's where the confusion and disagreement come from – people say it as if the process is "mindset change -> reality change", when they really mean "mindset change -> some amount of work -> reality change".
Even if it's hyper-obvious to you, it may not be to those who are complaining/asking for advice, otherwise they might not be complaining in the first place.
There's another way to look at it: changing your mindset bends the part of reality which incorporates your actions/behaviour. That, in turn, can lead to other changes, which lead to further changes, etc. – a cascade effect. An (apparently) insurmountable task, once broken down into primitive steps, can seem quite manageable, if not ridiculously easy.
Yes. Changing your mindset is more than repeating the words "I am good with women/sports/dinosaur hunting" three times and clicking your magic bunny slippers together. Its more like "I want to be capable of dinosaur hunting and am willing to bust my ass to make it happenb\".
If you're going to make claims like this, I think you need to provide some instruction on how I can do this dinosaur hunting successfully. For instance, does it require time travel?
Depends on what definition will satisfy you. Technically a duck hunting license is sufficient by modern classifications. Big dinosaurs, yes, time travel required.
Ah, see, I interpreted it as dinosaur-FOSSIL-hunting, like an optimistic hobby-palentologist digging holes randomly in Wyoming.
Half the time I have no idea what I mean when I make up absurd examples so sure, go with that.
http://xkcd.com/1211/
That's delightful. I don't think I'd seen that one.
Isn't that like being unable to reach the top shelf without a ladder or stool and saying "huh, that's strange, because normally I am eleven feet tall."?
Seems to me it's more productive to start looking for stools, mechanical graspers, and people willing to give you a leg-up. And not unreasonable to occasionally wallow if that search also comes up empty.
I would argue that it's more like being unable to touch your toes and thinking, "Huh, that's strange, because normally I am more flexible."
And then you do what someone who is stiffer than usual would do, which is stretch to work out the stiffness, which will actually make you more flexible.
Whereas if you say, "I can't touch my toes," you stop trying and just treat yourself as someone for whom it's impossible, and it will always remain impossible.
I actually think a more helpful model is to adopt a learning mindset. "Normally I am good with women" seems wrong to me on two levels. First, it may not be true (except for the folks suffering from selective attention), so you are teaching yourself you cannot be trusted. Second, it's still trait based – what you "are" or are not.
I do agree that mindset is critically important, but the shift I'd suggest is to a growth mindset. "I'm someone who is willing to do hard things and learn from them." "I'm practicing my interpersonal skills." That sort of thing. Because those things? Not only will they make a difference, it is totally within your control whether they are true.
Oh yeah, having the "Guy Who Does Well With Women" mindset doesn't mean you've arrived and have nothing left to learn, rather it's what helps you keep going and keep learning. In order to get better, you need to take the training wheels off at some point and make it less mechanical and more fluid. And yeah, you'll fail, but you won't let it inhibit you or be completely devastated by it because you won't always think of that as who you are and push through and keep going until it becomes automatic. It's necessary, I think, to have that mindset in order to orchestrate all the thousands of facts, or rules, or calculations you have to keep in mind as you are practicing or performing. Hell, even practicing and learning is a skill, and if you don't see yourself as someone who is already good at that, you won't do that well either.
No because being tall enough isn't a skill or performance type trait. So no, you won't change the laws of nature if you change your mindset (this isn't Men Who Stare at Goats), but it will enable you to improve your skills, work, and performance* it takes to do well at something.
*Also, don't get the wrong idea over the word "performance." I don't mean something that is a contrived, cheesy, gimmick, but rather the way an athlete or student performs.
But remember that nerd=! has mental illness and plenty of people with social anxiety or who are not neurotypical or have other mental health concerns are not nerds. The identity as a nerd and the diagnosis need to be uncoupled.
Yes, that was my entire point. That nerd doesn't mean necessarily that a person has social anxiety, that The Wisp would do better to focus on his anxiety than to focus on the nerd thing. That's why I don't love labels, we so often focus on the wrong thing and it makes it harder to solve the problem.
I think I'd have an easier time engaging with this if Aaronson had made at least a little attempt to frame these problems as ones that may possibly affect people who aren't shy male nerds who are highly intelligent and will go on to get good jobs and will surely be good partners to women if only society weren't working against them. I understand that's his experience as he sees it, but his explicit framing as the shy male nerds (who are also intelligent and on the road to professional success and ethical) versus the Neanderthals makes it very difficult for anyone who doesn't exactly fit that description to find a place for themselves in his view of the world.
I will say that I'd still put the enabling people to obtain employment or education free of harassment on a higher priority list than enabling people to find romantic companionship and life partners, but I think I'd be able to read the complaints more charitably if there were some attempt to look critically at the intersection between identification as a nerd and the underlying social difficulties (well, and if he hadn't made a bunch of other objectionably sexist comments).
This really helped me condense my objections to #171 to a single cluster with a definable center.
[long numbered-points list about context and reasoning redacted], Aaronson seems to be dealing with a very specific group in mind — "shy, nerdy men" — and arguing that they are least likely to be harassers despite the main post being about a nerdy man harassing women. If we conclude from this that he's viewing STEM as "shy, nerdy men" and "Neanderthal nerdy men", with disproportionately fewer women, it helps to explain why he's otherwise arguing "X can't Y" on a post about an X who did just Y. But then, since his broader argument in that thread is about questioning whether STEM really has more of a harassment problem than other fields, he'd have to have some reason to believe that shy people are drawn to STEM in disproportionate numbers to skew the shy/"Neanderthal" ratio among STEM men.
Which poses the question why he doesn't also assume that means shy women are disproportionately drawn to STEM, and whether the quality he thinks makes the shy men incapable of harassment also makes the women more vulnerable targets for it or cause them more difficulties in handling it. If "shy" is a quality that (inferring from his description) makes one more prone to internalize criticism, less likely to seek positive reinforcement, less likely to engage in behaviors that could provoke even a verbal confrontation, more afraid of shame, and so on… then "shy" is also a quality that would make a target of sexual harassment more likely to lack healthy self-confidence, less likely to ask for help/encouragement/sympathy/advice, less likely to confront a sexual harasser directly and less likely to want to cause a stir by reporting harassment to someone else, more afraid of victim-blaming should they come forward, and so on. (And this would apply to both genders!)
And yet, instead of advocating for these shy victims because he understands from inside that mindset how it feels, he's focused on defending shy-men-in-STEM-in-general in the face of actual, individual female victims' experiences (those harassed by Lewin); worse, he appears to be talking at length about how messaging
* intended to protect and support one population (victims of sexual harassment, with an especially-vulnerable subgroup being our postulated shy women in STEM)
* harms another ("shy, nerdy men")
* by shifting blame away from actual perpetrators (classified as "Neanderthal" men by their very ability to harass)
…Which means he thinks either that Lewin is a Neanderthal who was blamed correctly, disproving the blame-shifting Aaronson so unfortunately phrased as "victim blaming", or that Lewin is a shy man who was blamed — and at this branching point, one hopes Aaronson believes blamed correctly — disproving the idea that shy men cannot commit harassment.
(If we follow the other path at that last branching point, we arrive at Aaronson's post being a covert defense of Lewin by way of inability-to-perpetrate, which is far too gross to assume without evidence.)
That leaves me concluding that Aaronson, despite his purported support for feminism and internalization of the 'howls of anguish' of victimized women, is more focused on defending men with certain vulnerable qualities from shame than he is on defending women with those same vulnerable qualities from coercive harm.
Or, possibly, he simply does not understand that women can also be "shy", all evidence of that being filtered out selectively by his perception of them as persecuters.
http://media.tumblr.com/123e1436b84ec6c6ff67de619…
Oh, that's brilliant. I'll admit I hadn't even thought of the angle that the STEM fields are, at least by Aaronson's assumptions, more likely to be populated by shy, nerdy women who will be among the most vulnerable victims. It certainly makes his already-obnoxious claim that details of harassment should be publicized to avoid any undue effect it may have on the overactive imaginations of shy, nerdy men, even though it will in turn risk identifying accusers to classmates and colleagues and deter them from reporting, to be particularly egregious.
He does at least claim to acknowledge that shy, nerdy women exist, though he isn't willing to think of them as potential victims at all. He talks about how shy, nerdy women should learn to receive sexual attention gracefully and shy, nerdy men should learn to give it gracefully, says he'd rather have the women's problem than the men's, and recommends they respond to the Matt Taylor incident by thinking “gosh, in this field there are some zany characters of questionable taste who get colorful tattoos and wear slightly-risqué shirts that their female friends designed for them—but I can clearly see by talking to them that they don’t mean any harm by it, so maybe the entire idea that such a shirt demeans women is a prejudice on my part, something I ought to re-evaluate."
I hadn't thought about how Aaronson might classify Lewin, either. He appears to excuse him to at least some extent, making a point of mentioning that he was a Holocaust survivor who was also oppressed under communism and talking about how all people's pain should be considered, but then also repeatedly labels his actions as gross. So, really, I have no idea.
I will say that I find the idea that shy, nerdy men can't commit sexual harassment or rape to be so ludicrous that it's difficult for me to believe someone who's been functioning in academic environments and who presumably has some information about both issues could sincerely believe that someone who doesn't have the courage to ask someone on a date could never capable of sending an obscene digital image, creating a hostile work environment by exposing women he wasn't romantically interested in to pornography or making sexually demeaning comments about them, trying to a manipulate a less powerful person who's perceived as being unable to refuse, groping someone while feeling more powerful due to being part of a group, or assaulting a sleeping or unconscious woman. Due to this, I suspect there's a good bit of at minimum self-delusion and at maximum severe hypocrisy at work in that claim.
Not to be all bashing on nerds for saying th darnest things, one facet of the problem of nerds claiming systematic oppression is that it prevents them to heal and grow past their own hurts. When you lose sight of where your problems actually originated, there's no way to work it through. Therefore it's sad when people get the idea, I'm <label>, therefore people will talk smack behind my back, always find me repulsive, constantly ignore and work against me.
It also means that people who may have actually wronged the nerd get away with it.
I don't necessarly believe in revenge but it is important to point out a culprit when there is one, at least for yourself. You start of with getting mad, then you get over it. Perhaps you learn something which lessens the risk of being put on the spot again.
I learned that alot of my own problems in dating came from parental failure, demanding to know what's bugging me and when I responded complain about my whining. Also a prudish mom who smack talked other men left to right, so I got the impression that women hate men unless they are perfect.
Well I settled the score with them by not confiding in them anymore. I just talk about superficial and worldly stuff and I never let them into my emotional interior again. It hurts them a bit but I think it's right. In general, it's not something that bother me much today.
The point is, I could very well see how I could've turned into an embittered MRA if I didn't trace the problem to it's roots. Then I'd still be hurting.
Agreed, I think viewing nerds as an oppressed class is not particularly apt or useful to them. However, on the structural issues I think a lot of socially isolated nerds can complain about what society does (or rather doesn't do) to social isolated people, particularly the younger ones. Outside of a therapist's office there is no real support for people who struggle socially. For some reason once you hit puberty people start viewing a person's social success or lack of it as their own problem to solve alone.
While your observation is certainly accurate, I'm not sure whether it actually makes sense to try to change it. I definitely agree that society should work to expand mental health services, because having large masses of untreated mentally ill people running around is not in society's interest. But "outside of a therapist's office", what do you expect other people to do? Thing is, social success is like sexual success in that it demands another person's time and attention. As such I think a system where people are compelled to be someone's friend is morally problematic for a lot of the same reasons a system that compels people to have sex is. Also, honestly? Can you think of someone who is socially isolated who isn't mentally ill/troubled, but also has no responsibility in their isolation? I'm sure such situations exist, but from everything I've heard, they're rare exceptions. So that being the case, if someone's socially isolated but not mentally ill, doesn't it make sense to view it as their own problem, and not society's?
Basically, if you want society at large to give specific support/services, I think one needs to demonstrate that 1. It's in society's interest to do so and 2a. It's something that you can't feasibly solve on your own 2b. Which also implies your actions aren't the root cause in the first place.
Those two requirements seem very harsh, and seemingly would eliminate almost all social service programs.
I'd be very much opposed to anything attempting to require people to befriend others and strongly object to arguments that workplaces should be made less safe to make dating easier for people who struggle with it, but I think there are things that might be done to help people who struggle socially (and I'm more comfortable if we set it up like that rather than concentrating on the self-identified group of "nerds") that don't require those things.
There could be a societal effort to eliminate social and sexual success as status markers.
Oh, that's something that I think could make society better for many, many people. It would presumably take a pretty sustained, long-term effort to change such a strong message, but I think it could be done if approached gradually.
Well, while those requirements may seem harsh, but I don't think it would eliminate almost all social service programs – most of the ones I can think of do in fact meet these requirements. For example, Police and Firefighting are not things an individual can do, but its definitely not good for society to have people taking each other's stuff nor having fires running around unchecked. Starving people tend to be desperate, and thus more likely to commit crimes, and Food Stamps help with that.
Though in all fairness, it might be more of an A OR B not A AND B. Also, I meant those to apply mostly to the problems of adults, since adults can be expected to be held accountable for their shit. But I do think it'd be reasonable to say "Hey could we at least provide better social interaction to the kids, since kids shouldn't be expected to learn all this on their own?" That's why I tend to advocate adding these kind of skills into the standard formal education curriculum.
So yeah, I wasn't entirely clear, and thus was probably making stronger statements then I really intended. But I do think the general idea stands – just because a person has some kind of problem, does not mean its necessarily one society can or even should be trying to solve. I do think society should not prop up unnecessary barriers that make it harder for individuals to solve their own problems. The stuff reboot talks about down-thread probably falls into this category.
Outside of a therapist's office there is no real support for people who struggle socially.
Not to be too flippant, Wisp but outside a doctor's office, there's no support for people with medical conditions because doctors are the ones qualified to help, just like therapists. Actually, I suppose that's not rue. There are all sorts of homeopathic, chiropractic, natural, Eastern, alternative healers peddling snake oil but people with social issues have plenty of those people trying to peddle something, too.
This seems like a good analogy on other levels too. If a medical condition is clearly putting a person in danger, then the right thing to do is give them whatever immediate help you can, and call a professional ASAP. It's also a given that you should not deliberately aggravate any medical conditions that you know another person to have – for example, shoving a flashing light in an epileptic person's face is beyond horrible.
Beyond that though, no one is obligated to provide treatment for another person's medical concerns. Likewise, with mental health conditions, I expect people to intervene if there's something life-threatening happening (ie a suicide attempt in progress), I expect people to not intentionally aggravate (ie directing at a PTSD person that you know are triggers). But we can't expect any more then that.
Granted, we do train people in basic first aid so they can take care of small bumps and bruises for themselves and others. Perhaps we should do similar for basic self-care and empathy techniques? ie find an instructor and a curriculum and offer free/cheap community classes?
I agree with Colleen Nelson. It's real problems, but it's nothing we can solve by imposing rules.
I've noted a shift somewhat. Back in the eighties you could talk about some level of general oppression maybe. Being interested in computers wasn't acceptable. I was a "computer faggot". Being disinterested or bad at sports entitled others to push you around. If you didn't dress exactly the same as was generally considered acceptable, you could expect taunts and being doused with water.
What's different now is that things are more diverse and individual. Even when looking at elementary schools, kids dress differently, have more diverse interests aso. I think bullying persists but it seems less targeted to specific arbitrary groups. A growing problem however is that kids are less automatically adopted into a social setting. They have to be much more proactive in creating their own circles of friends, at earlier ages. It's easy to fall between the chairs and social isolation on the whole is alot more common, I think.
You can't choose for people if they want to be more "communal" or individual without creating new repressive structures. However, I suppose you can teach youngings what social responsibility means, that it is enriching to intermingle and that it's a good mark of character.
Aside from that, I think educators must be aware of signs in boys depressive behavior which is often a bit different than from girls. We know to look out for the girl who cuts her arms (I hope). We must realise that the young hooligan's aggression is just a variation of the same, or the boy who always passes unnoticed and never opens his mouth in class.
"(Incidentally, it ain’t feminists who’re creating those nerd-mocking memes. They aren’t coming from Jezebel or Feministe or Alas, A Blog. They’re coming from /b/, /rk9/, 9gag, eBaum’s World and Something Awful. You know… from nerds.)"
Really? Most of the people I've seen recycling them are feminist/progressive types, which scarcely excuses you from it.
Also if you'd paid attention to Scott Alexander's post, you'd notice he said the following:
"When feminists say that the market failure for young women is caused by slut-shaming, I stop slut-shaming, and so do most other decent people.
When men say that the market failure for young men is caused by nerd-shaming, feminists write dozens of very popular articles called things like “On Nerd Entitlement”."
You did the same thing in part 1. You treated the bigoted Schrodinger's Rapist mindset as sacrosanct – because heaven forfend we criticise the prejudices of women – while mocking the notion that a guy who might have come across some of the more batshit end of feminism might possibly have been negatively affected by it.
As ever – when it's women with the problem, people like you give out sympathy. When men have the same issue, you mock.
I'd question your integrity, but you're a feminist. It'd be quicker for me to list the feminists I've encountered in my life that weren't hypocrites, frankly.
1. You don't get the point of Schrodinger's Rapist. What a shock!
2. To quote Gentleman Johnny–Everyone is a hypocrite to some degree. It amuses me that you expect feminists to be above such a very human tendency.
3. Shoo shoo now. You're just going to annoy everyone here, convince no one, and eventually become belligerent and offensive enough to get banned. I've seen this show before.
You know, I think today I would rather hang out with the beer dragon and plot world domination with the Feminist Borg Collective than feed the trolls. I must be getting old.
Give me your mangosteens!
Can you call the Feminists Who Control All Dating while you're at it? There's this mermaid on Plenty Of Fish. . .no really!. . . who hasn't gotten back to me.
Sure! I need to update our PNG list and our "menz who gets all the wimminz" files anyway so I can pass on your request.
For a mangosteen, of course, but I might just do it for a rambutan or two
forgive my ignorance….but what is a mangosteen???
Delicious!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_mangosteen
I can't believe I didn't know about these! I will investigate (re: buy and eat voraciously) ASAP
The" Market Failure "of Nerds isn't a male problem, it's a human problem. That is why it is called entitlement. For every nerdy young man who was made fun off for their interests, never played team sports and never learned to socialize, never learned to dress or groom, there is a young woman with similar problems. There are young women who never learned to do their hair or make up, walk in high heels, buy push up bra's or popular fashion, learned to flirt or be outgoing, etc. The difference is that the majority of women are told it's their fault and they decide to overcome. The issue that most people have(along with Aaronson's inappropriate response a young woman sharing her harassment experiences) is the framing of this nerd/outcast dating troubles as uniquely male. If he had written it as a stand alone post and wished he had the tools he needed to succeed he would have received sympathy. Did you only read Marcotte's response? Laurie Penny gave him some of that coveted women's only sympathy. She shared her experiences with dating failure and leveled with him. I remember when a Seattle writer wrote about a perfect date being ruined by the fact that he was a Magic the Gathering world champion. Everything was perfect except for the fact that he was proud of being a nerd. You know who his loudest defenders and her loudest critics were? Fellow (female)nerds. Rebecca Watson, every angry male nerds favorite punching bag, wrote her own piece defending the young man who had just been shamed for having a perfectly healthy hobby.
"The" Market Failure "of Nerds isn't a male problem, it's a human problem. That is why it is called entitlement."
Not commensurate with any definition of entitlement I'm familiar with.
I can get behind that logic though. But then by that logic, many of the issues asserted to be "women's issues" aren't in fact women's issues, they're human issues.
Which would in turn make a lot of women's issues activists rather….well, entitled.
"If he had written it as a stand alone post and wished he had the tools he needed to succeed he would have received sympathy. "
Not even remotely plausible, sorry ^_^
"Laurie Penny gave him some of that coveted women's only sympathy."
Yes, where she equated him to being akin to part of the Empire from Star Wars. Such sympathy!
I've read a large portion of the original comment threads, Penny's response, Marcotte's response. Today, O'Malley and Berlatsky's (can be found at Ravishly). I've also read a large portion of the comments under the same, as well as the comments under Scott Alexander's piece.
Sorry, but "feminists" and "sympathetic" wouldn't really go together in a sentence describing what I observed.
When nerds are complaining that they have trouble dating and then insist that it is because women like neanderthals it's entitlement. When they blame their dating troubles on the shallowness of women and not because they have the social i.q. and grace of a prehistoric cave dwelling mammal it's entitlement. The core of the argument is always it's them not me. You only get angry enough to blame someone else for your failure because you feel you're owed something. That is entitlement.
Being compared to a fictional character from a children's movie is not the end of the world. Grow some thicker skin boss. Sharing painful memories of being rejected, taunted, teased and as a result developing an eating disorder with a man who decided that an opportune time to share his dating mishaps was when a woman voiced her concerns about her bodily autonomy being threatened seems pretty sympathetic to me.
This isn't anything that hasn't been said before, just listen to the women in your life.
" When nerds are complaining that they have trouble dating and then insist that it is because women like neanderthals it's entitlement. When they blame their dating troubles on the shallowness of women and not because they have the social i.q. and grace of a prehistoric cave dwelling mammal it's entitlement. The core of the argument is always it's them not me. You only get angry enough to blame someone else for your failure because you feel you're owed something. That is entitlement. "
Your argument appears to disregard two things:
1. The possibility that it's entirely possible and indeed has happened on more than one occasion that the women in a guy's immediate experience might say one thing and do another.
2. That while by this metric, plenty of women feel "entitled" to the attentions of men, there isn't even remotely the same level of hostility sent their way in circles like this one.
"Being compared to a fictional character from a children's movie is not the end of the world. Grow some thicker skin boss."
The Empire was nonetheless oppressive, and there isn't really a nice way to be called oppressive. I don't know why people think they're being sympathetic and doing people a favour by going "no but don't you see, people like you are actually our oppressors!", particularly when such a claim is founded on buggerall.
"Sharing painful memories of being rejected, taunted, teased and as a result developing an eating disorder with a man who decided that an opportune time to share his dating mishaps was when a woman voiced her concerns about her bodily autonomy being threatened seems pretty sympathetic to me. "
Yeah, funny how Penny wasn't subject to the same claims of derailing and making it all about her, wasn't it? She brought up her experiences in order to defang a particular claim of being disprivileged in some way – i.e. exactly what Aaronson did.
Point to dating sites where women complain about being single where the advice isn't your being shallow, you need to settle, and/or it's all your fault. Men are getting a small dose of what women have been getting for years. Women who have unrealistic standards and/or entitlement issues are taken to task. Women are constantly told that they are single because they are doing something wrong, men need a bit of that advice. It's not hostility, it's criticism. Don't be so sensitive.
Penny didn't derail. Aaronson decided that the conversation should be about how apparently nerds deal with being rejected by all women. Penny decided to share her similar experiences and then use that to refocus the conversation on nerds and male privilege. She didn't didn't derail she related to Aaronson's experience and brought the conversation back to it's original point, how young women have to deal with danger in STEM fields.That is why she wasn't accused derailing or being selfish. Aaronson made a topic completely about himself even though the topic had absolutely nothing to do with dating. Penny related with Aaronson with the intent of refocusing the conversation on women in STEM fields.
If the worse thing you are called is a cartoon villain, I'd say you have lived a pretty blessed life.
Also "The possibility that it's entirely possible and indeed has happened on more than one occasion that the women in a guy's immediate experience might say one thing and do another. "
Are we really going with the whole women say they want a nice guy but date a dick. A couple of things are going on there. She may be dating someone who is attractive in spite of being a dick. A woman may be naive and inexperienced and may not know that the man is a dick. You might be biased and the guy may not be a dick, or you could be thinking with the wrong head and that particular girl may not be very nice.
Say, are nerds fungible in the market by the unit or the pound?
They're measured in hobbets only.
I'LL BE HERE ALL WEEK, FOLKS. 😉
"There are young women who never learned to do their hair or make up, walk in high heels, buy push up bra's or popular fashion, learned to flirt or be outgoing, etc."
I'd like to meet more of them, if I could, and not just the younger ones.
…missing the point…
Go hang out at your local community garden or farm to table co-op. There are good odds you will meet women who eschew the makeup, heels, popular fashion bits at least.
While that wasn't my point, just take a look around you. You'd be surprised who you'll meet when the first thing that crosses your mind isn't "would I bang her".
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/119/294168009_b25d…
Thanks. I feel like one of the cool kids now.
Anybody who told you you weren't was trying to put one over on you.
But if you're an Official Cool Kid now, I will have to check with the chairpeople to see if you can still sit with us.
😉
"It'd be quicker for me to list the feminists I've encountered in my life that weren't hypocrites, frankly. "
How have you met ANYbody who wasn't, on some level, a hypocrite? People are, by nature, contradictory.
Of course, for this conversation, you've still got a really skewed idea of "cuts both ways."
No, of course not. That said, most people don't just shrug it off by going "eh, who isn't", and those who do do tend to belong to one movement in particular.
*cough*
" 1. You don't get the point of Schrodinger's Rapist. What a shock! "
Do explain how it isn't profiling.
"2. To quote Gentleman Johnny–Everyone is a hypocrite to some degree. It amuses me that you expect feminists to be above such a very human tendency. "
I expect them to actually try to be, rather than just give themselves over entirely to it.
"3. Shoo shoo now. You're just going to annoy everyone here, convince no one, and eventually become belligerent and offensive enough to get banned. I've seen this show before. "
Ah ok, this is one of those sites that just bans dissent. Gotcha.
Nah, we just don't like assholes in the clubhouse.
It is profiling to a certain extent. We're going to have to thus make an evaluation on when the psychological toll on dudes for this exceeds the psychological toll on dudettes for lambasting them for having these fears. And it will vary from person to person, of course.
If you see an angry-looking dude who is physically bigger than you, do you not feel you have the right to be cautious around him? Do you feel he should try to do something about his body language to not intimidate people, if only out of politeness? This is basically the idea with Schrödinger's Rapist: be careful how you come across and don't take the other person's feelings of fear personally. It's sometimes motte-and-bailey'd into enormous distortions of this basic concept, but you call that out when you see it.
Genuine thanks for at least posting a reply of substance, but I can't say I'm convinced by this.
The original Schrodinger's Rapist post was addressed towards men and men only, needlessly gendering it.
Your paraphrasing of SR is literally the first time I've heard a summary of it like that….which is mainly why I'm not buying it. Every time I've seen it used since, it has been addressed to men and men only and involves little more than profiliing a man on the fact that he appears to be male, as well as making demands on their behaviour. Now, sometimes these are reasonable requests – a lot of the time they aren't. I've seen people use SR to claim men should cross the street if a woman is on their side of the pavement.
I also don't buy SR because it is primarily based on fear, and fear is not a rational process. Many people are genuinely afraid of people of a different race, but that doesn't mean they get to then conclude "well, I'm therefore oppressed, so black people? Y'all need to cross the street when I'm walking on it, kthx". Sometimes people's fears are justified, but *a lot of the time they are not*.
I put people who think SR is justifiable in the same category as I do people who think they need to lock their car doors every time a black person walks past. It's prejudice, as far as I'm concerned, and I have little time for anyone who makes excuses as to why their prejudices are totes ok but everyone else's are wrong. I would say that guys should indeed go out of their way to avoid doing anything that can be construed as intimidating on the street – but I would encourage that mainly so they do not fall foul of this prejudice. I would certainly not encourage them to internalise someone else's prejudice and paranoia.
SR is an overreaction based on one person's set of negative experiences with a tiny subset of members of a particular group being generalised to that group entire. Now, I'm more than willing to assert that the Scotts are describing the exact same sort of process as regards their dating experiences. But again – SR is taken completely seriously here, and niceguyism is mocked. You don't get to pick and choose which arbitrary and irrational generalisations are ok – there is no consistency to such a stance.
"The original Schrodinger's Rapist post was addressed towards men and men only, needlessly gendering it. "
"Needlessly gendering it."
…
"Needlessly gendering it."
Wow. Yeah, sure, buddy, whatever.
(nevermind how gross to tell people that their boundary setting is an overreaction. Look, the whole point of SR is that there is a NOT INSIGNIFICANT CHANCE that a guy can be very dangerous to a woman for the specific reason that she is a woman, and that without data, we really don't know who the dangerous one is, especially since the dangerous ones often present in non-threatening manners. But, yeah. Whatever. It's not about YOU, but taking it so personally is an excellent way to demonstrate that one way or another, you're not a particularly safe person to be around.)
"(nevermind how gross to tell people that their boundary setting is an overreaction. Look, the whole point of SR is that there is a NOT INSIGNIFICANT CHANCE that a guy can be very dangerous to a woman for the specific reason that she is a woman, and that without data, we really don't know who the dangerous one is, especially since the dangerous ones often present in non-threatening manners. But, yeah. Whatever. It's not about YOU, but taking it so personally is an excellent way to demonstrate that one way or another, you're not a particularly safe person to be around.) "
And again – this is exactly the reaction that Aaronson got to his piece. Plenty of feminists seem quite happy to mock his claim, based on his stated experience, that it was the *feminism* he encountered that terrified him so.
Where's the recognition for his choice of boundaries there? Where's the respect for the stated boundaries of people who still think like him for similar reasons? Where's the respect for their experience? I don't see that – what I see is people all too willing to talk over people who hold that stance, and tell them that their problems definitely aren't due to feminism, even as they state that in their experience it is feminism that harmed them.
And funny how feminists rushed to make it "all about them" when they were criticised, but hey, I tend to think that when you publicly call out or criticise a group then members of that group have every right to respond. (Any group – be it men being profiled by the Schrodinger's Rapist mindset purely on the basis of their gender and stereotyping, or feminists being lumped in with Dworkin).
Call me old-fashioned that way.
This shit cuts both ways, and you're gonna need to do more than snark to actually counter that fact.
"Where's the recognition for his choice of boundaries there? Where's the respect for the stated boundaries of people who still think like him for similar reasons? "
…wait, what on earth did his post have to do with boundaries? If he'd said, "Reading angry feminist discourse was making me upset, so I chose to not read it or discuss it with people," that's him setting boundaries. And in fact, if he'd approached his workplace and said, "I have an issue where sexual harassment seminars trigger an anxiety disorder, so I need to sit this out," I would support him. Hell, if he'd said, "I don't want people posting feminist thoughts on my blog," I'd support him. But that's not what he did.
That is not what he did.
He's allowed to have his choice and boundaries but not to ignore their consequences. He chose not to approach women. He didn't get dates. He started approaching, he's married.
The fact that anyone can read Aaronson's post and come away with "feminism made it so he couldn't get dates" instead of "his crippling anxiety disorder made it so he couldn't get dates" is just mind boggling.
Nah, I think the latter is a given. The question is, on that level, whether there is an acceptance that feminism contributed to his anxiety to a noticeable extent, and whether/to which extent this was unavoidable given the nature of his problem.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/brutereason/2015/01/1…
"Where's the recognition for his choice of boundaries there? Where's the respect for the stated boundaries of people who still think like him for similar reasons?"
What boundaries of his aren't being respected? I'm very confused by this.
"their problems definitely aren't due to feminism, even as they state that in their experience it is feminism that harmed them."
No, their problems aren't due to feminism. Aaronson's problems were in his own head. This is stated quite clearly in his own words, even if he himself doesn't seem to understand it. Now, if his lived experience had been that women identifying as feminist had done even half of the things that he was AFRAID (based on his own internal issues, not any rational fear) they did, I think you'd be seeing a lot more sympathy for him.
Also, you're still completely misunderstanding Schrodinger's Rapist. How, exactly, do you think that it works, and in what real, tangible ways does it cause you or other men harm?
"No, their problems aren't due to feminism. Aaronson's problems were in his own head. This is stated quite clearly in his own words, even if he himself doesn't seem to understand it. Now, if his lived experience had been that women identifying as feminist had done even half of the things that he was AFRAID (based on his own internal issues, not any rational fear) they did, I think you'd be seeing a lot more sympathy for him."
I'm pretty sure there exist plenty of people who have internalised the SR mindset without having been harmed by a man.
Even then, that still wouldn't justify it, IMO. Any one person's experience will by definition not be representative of that group entire, as such experience is necessarily limited. I was mugged when I was a teen, but I managed to not generalise my experience to all low-income white people. It wasn't an easy feat either, but at no point did I stop to think that my stereotyping reaction was something to be defended.
I can understand why someone might respond that way, it's only natural, but I'm still not going to condone any such mindset. Nor am I going to give a snappy meme-name and defend such thinking online.
In short, I think there's a lot of people who hold to SR in which the problem is still mainly in their heads – even if they have had negative experiences with members of that group.
And I hate to bang on about this, but I seriously, seriously doubt if the group being profiled was a group considered oppressed or disprivileged that people would be respecting their boundaries. A person with that as their boundary would be on the receiving end of multiple accusations of racism in a trice.
"Also, you're still completely misunderstanding Schrodinger's Rapist."
Lack of "correct" explanation of SR duly noted.
"How, exactly, do you think that it works, and in what real, tangible ways does it cause you or other men harm? "
I'm going by the original Kate Harding post.
Do I really need to explain how I think profiling a group is harmful to that group? It is completely dehumanising, and deindividualising. Much like all prejudices are.
"In short, I think there's a lot of people who hold to SR in which the problem is still mainly in their heads – even if they have had negative experiences with members of that group."
There's nothing wrong with this in and of itself. There's nothing wrong with Aaronson's avoidance of women in and of itself. The problem comes when he then says it's feminism's fault he couldn't meet women, or that it's feminism's fault that he's scared in the first place. If a woman isn't receptive to a guy's advances because she buys into SR, that, in and of itself, is fine. If she then goes on to lament not being able to find a guy because she thinks any guy that approaches her will rape her, that's problematic.
Do you not understand the difference?
I could see if women were, because of the SR idea, afraid to talk to any men, anywhere, that might be closer to what Aaronson did. And there may be a few women, who due to their anxiety issues, or PTSD, might actually do that – in their cases, though, SR (or men) isn't really the problem. The problem is something they should probably talk to a therapist about – just like in Aaronson's case, women weren't actually the problem.. But of the majority of heterosexual women still talk to, joke with, flirt with, and accept approaches from men in appropriate settings. Just, you know, not in dark alleys, public transportation, and a few other areas that might be not particularly safe.
"Even then, that still wouldn't justify it, IMO. Any one person's experience will by definition not be representative of that group entire, as such experience is necessarily limited."
Lord, you still don't get it, do you?
SR isn't saying that every man is a rapist, or even that women should act like every man or even most men are rapists.
The point is that one in four women will be sexually assaulted. That's a larger statistic than "people who will be mugged" for one thing. Women go around knowing that one day they could be that one-in-four.
I want you to understand that. And I'm trying to figure out a way to explain that that particular bit of knowledge isn't specifically about men, or a wariness of men or whatever.
I want you to try to imagine what it would be like to go through every single day knowing that if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could be sexually violated. And I want you to understand that the definition of "wrong place" for sexual assault is so so much broader than it is for being mugged. If you get mugged, it's probably by a stranger, outside, on a street. Maybe dark. Sexual assault can happen anywhere and from anyone. You're not likely to get mugged by your boss or your coworker. You probably won't get mugged in a bar. While home-break-ins happen, it's pretty unlikely you'll get mugged in your own home, and it certainly wouldn't be by someone you knew, like a friend, or a neighbor who helped you carry groceries in.
SR isn't even about telling women to be cautious in all of those situations. Because frankly, we get enough of that told to use from the time that we're teens–if we're assaulted, especially by an acquaintance or anywhere we were at to have fun, it will be our own fault because we should have seen it coming.
SR is trying to explain to men that women DON'T KNOW if a man is or isn't a rapist. So some women set very high boundaries, because that's what they need to feel safe, but it ISN'T PERSONAL. No woman is looking at you and saying: "I think he's a rapist." They're just being cautious because it's wise.
Look, I love German Shepards. I love most big dogs, really. I light up and want to pet them whenever I see one.
But I sure as hell don't just pet a dog I've never met unless I have some indication that it's safe.
"SR isn't saying that every man is a rapist, or even that women should act like every man or even most men are rapists."
That doesn't mean it isn't still sexist if it is only men you profile in this way. The profiling is done based on a presumption of the person encountered's gender and nothing else.
"The point is that one in four women will be sexually assaulted. That's a larger statistic than "people who will be mugged" for one thing. Women go around knowing that one day they could be that one-in-four."
Depends on the country. Here in the UK the group most at risk of street violence of any sort is men.
I don't consider appeals to stats to be justification for profiling though, even if the stats are entirely sound. It is treatment of a group based on nothing but their gender. There is no way that is anything other than sexist.
"I want you to try to imagine what it would be like to go through every single day knowing that if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could be sexually violated. And I want you to understand that the definition of "wrong place" for sexual assault is so so much broader than it is for being mugged. If you get mugged, it's probably by a stranger, outside, on a street. Maybe dark. Sexual assault can happen anywhere and from anyone. You're not likely to get mugged by your boss or your coworker. You probably won't get mugged in a bar. While home-break-ins happen, it's pretty unlikely you'll get mugged in your own home, and it certainly wouldn't be by someone you knew, like a friend, or a neighbor who helped you carry groceries in."
Except….sure I could. All of those things are risks. And I have been assaulted before to the point where I am hyper-aware of going about my business in the street. (I still manage to not rationalise profiling groups of people though).
Why is a supposedly higher risk of a bad thing happening justification for profiling? Where's the cutoff point? It seems to me to be a case of "well, I say your issues aren't as serious, so you can't justify profiling".
"Look, I love German Shepards. I love most big dogs, really. I light up and want to pet them whenever I see one.
But I sure as hell don't just pet a dog I've never met unless I have some indication that it's safe."
And now we analogise men to animals. Full marks, really *slow clap*
okay, so I'm pretty sure you're just a troll, but for the people following at home:
"Why is a supposedly higher risk of a bad thing happening justification for profiling? "
99% of female rape victims in the US are raped by men.
It's not sexist for women to be cautious of men when it's a 1 in 20 chance that they're talking to a rapist, when there's a 1 in 4 chance they'll be a victim and *not* be just as cautious when talking to a woman when it's a… what, 1 in 400 chance they'll be a victim? (300 who aren't raped, 99 who are raped by men) and I don't even know what the odds would be on the stranger being a rapist. To suggest that it's sexist to consider that a male stranger who violates your social boundaries might also violate your sexual boundaries would be. Is. Ridiculous.
Yeah, we consider that a man is more likely to be a rapist *because men are more likely to be rapists of women than other women are*.
And again, (as I'm sure many people have explained to you, but you're not listening) it's not a case of profiling based on gender. It's profiling based on behaviour. If there were a woman who pulled my ear buds out on the train, ignored my body-language signalling that I wanted to be left alone, and pressured me to give her my number I would be equally annoyed, and would also categorize her as a person who doesn't respect boundaries, and a person I don't want to spend time with. I am not likely to consider that she might rape me if I spend time with her, no, but that's because, again 1 in 400. But it is not a man's gender that puts him on the radar (or even, indeed, the 1 in 20/1 in 4 statistics). It's the fact that, in the first moments of meeting me, he's shown he doesn't care about whether I've said 'yes' or 'no'. His desire to interact with me/get my number/convince me to go to a party with him is more important than my right and desire to be left alone. This is guy who has shown he can't be 100% trusted.
This is the equivalent of saying that thinking a guy who is walking around your neighbourhood, stopping at every house, trying to peek in windows when people aren't home, maybe testing door knobs might be looking to break into one is "sexist profiling". It's not "hey this is a man, so he's a thief". It's "hey, this is a dude who *acts like he's casing the neighbourhood*. He might be a thief".
Kathleen,
I'm really only speaking for myself here, but I think there's so much defensiveness in this respect, because hearing about male violence from feminsts feels worse than hearing about it from non-feminists. For me, it seems that this has to do with the implicit individual accusations of moral failure present in the feminist argument which are not as present in the standard assumptions about men as socio-sexually problematic. When other people say "men are like that", there is an implicit acceptance of their assumed unchangeable problematic nature, as well as an implicit understanding that they're not responsible for "their nature". That, of course, is different with the feminist argument, which basically holds that, theoretically, "men aren't that way", but they're taught to be like that by patriarchy. Hence, "being that way" becomes a lot more of a personal, individual moral indightment than it was before when it comes from feminists.
Of course, what "being that way" means to someone will change from person to person, but that also means that some will take this stuff pretty seriously (as we discussed before), and thus the reaction to arguments like "Schrödinger's rapist" becomes a lot more emotionally charged.
"When other people say "men are like that", there is an implicit acceptance of their assumed unchangeable problematic nature"
I missed the point where Kathleen said anything remotely like that. In fact, she went out of her way to very specifically define this as a reaction to BEHAVIOR, not gender.
I'm sorry that hearing about male violence from feminists makes you feel bad about being a man. I've never really understood that problem because it seems very self-absorbed, but at any rate….
thatthat,
"I missed the point where Kathleen said anything remotely like that."
Like what? I'm trying to explain why I think the reaction to posts like Schrödinger's Rapist is usually so defensive.
"I'm sorry that hearing about male violence from feminists makes you feel bad about being a man. I've never really understood that problem because it seems very self-absorbed, but at any rate…."
Well, thanks, it's no longer as much of a problem as it was when I was younger. Not sure what you mean by self-absorbed, though.
not to speak over thatthat, but I'm pretty sure she means, self-absorbed in the sense of thinking your feelings (and I'm using the general 'you') are more important than the right of women to enjoy the same privileges (to living with a very-close-to-100% likelihood of never being raped or harassed for your gender).
I mean self-absorbed because I find that reaction disturbing and, well, yes, self-absorbed. Focused on self. I'm disturbed when people's reaction to "Group A sometimes does bad things to Group B" is "Wow, that makes me feel bad. For myself. Because I'm part of Group A. I don't think I've done those bad things, but wow, just hearing about them makes me feel bad. For myself."
To have that be the first and primary reaction is just appallingly self-centered. In a lot of discussions about one group of people oppressing another, it often leads to derailing (someone needs to be reassured that they're a good person, because they're male, or they're white, and they wound up hearing about how some men or white people treat women or PoC badly, and THEY'RE not like that).
Sometimes it's a sort of false nobility, taking on the guilt of your group and flogging yourself over it, in a way that makes you (general you) feel like a martyr–which ties back into the whole "I'm really a good guy" narrative people like to tell themselves.
Sometimes, like in the case that kicked this one off, it leads to a mindset that just hearing about this stuff is bad, because it makes them feel guilty and that's not fair. Which makes it REALLY difficult to get things to change, if the guys who are "decent" and don't do those things won't at least listen and help change happening, not for the sake of assuaging their own assumed guilt, but just for the sake of helping people.
If the conversation is about sexual harassment women receive at the hands on men, I don't think the reaction any reasonable woman wants is for a man hearing it to feel bad because he's a man
Well, I understand that's not what a woman would like to hear, but it's still not rarely the case. It's called secondary traumatization, and it's quite common, even in mental health care providers who *know* how to handle that kind of thing. To deny the validity of the experience as merely selfish, because the orginally bad thing happend to another group of people, is, I'd say, bound to create defensiveness instead of understanding.
What would you like the reaction to be?
I'm familiar with secondary trauma and it's certainly legitimate. The response of "my secondary trauma is a higher priority than your primary trauma," on the other hand, is some selfish fucking bullshit. "Comfort in, dump out" would be a good rule of thumb. Or just hire a fucking therapist.
Higher priority on *whose agenda*? On mine? On yours? Societies?
I think that matters a lot, and to say that your trauma should rate higher than mine on *my* agenda is selfish on its own, so that's a pointless argument. When it comes to social agenda, I think, yes, there's more important and less important things. But here we're talking about why people react the way they do, and this is one of those reasons. So I don't understand why there is apparently such an immense need to constantly enforce compliance with the statement "women have it worse" instead of acknowledging the secondary trauma.?
If you're comparing feelings to feelings, you might have a point. But when you're comparing my being chased through empty streets until I had to hide under a parked car to your hurt feelings about having to hear that sometimes approach is unwelcome, I suggest you go learn how to be a minimally decent human being.
Sorry that happened to you. And yes, that's why I said on a social agenda some things are more important than others. But telling someone they're basically immoral if they focus on their own pain because someone else's is more important in the abstract is also not what I'd call emphatic.
Okay, I give up. You are right. Women face no oppression or injustice. It's all in their feelings, and we always treat women's feelings as legitimate and meaningful. Let's make sure we go out of our way to pay more attention to the hurt feelings of men, especially when those feelings were hurt by women talking about their lived experience. Men definitely don't get their fair share of resources, particularly not emotional caretaking from women. But if we all work together I bet we can correct that, or at least finally give Sam the sympathy he so richly deserves.
No. I assume you mean empathetic, and in either case you are wrong. If someone thinks that marginally hurt feelings are more important than an actual threat to another person's safety, then telling them they are selfish for focusing on themselves is not lack of empathy. It's sheer fucking frustration that every single discussion about women's safety devolves into yet another man wailing "WHAT ABOUT MEEEEE" and failing to see that THAT, THAT RIGHT THERE, is exactly what we're talking about.
"But telling someone they're basically immoral if they focus on their own pain because someone else's is more important in the abstract is also not what I'd call emphatic. "
You're always removing context.
This isn't "suck up your stubbed toe because some people don't have toes."
This is like telling someone maybe not to fuss about blood that got on their shirt when someone who was stabbed passed them.
The problem here is people focusing with the way they identify with the aggressor, rather than the victim.
"Wow, I feel bad that that happened because that was a terrible thing that should not have happened to a person."
–^ secondary trauma
"Wow, I feel bad that I *heard* about that thing that happened, because the bad guy was a man, and I am also a man."
–^ self-absorbed
"The problem here is people focusing with the way they identify with the aggressor, rather than the victim."
That's a good point, but I woudn't say it's identification with the aggressor rather than with the aggressor's gender. Which is, well, kind of my point. And all you're saying to that is "don't identify with that gender", which, sorry, I don't think is a very helpful suggestion to solve that problem. Helping feel guys feel good about their gender will, on the other hand, increase their ability to not identify with the gender when a person of that gender is criticized.
No, you're identifying with that person because you share a gender. Maybe its identifying that guy as representative of the whole gender. Either way, those are not subtext that is being presented. Its subtext you're adding on your own.
I identify with being male all the time and yes, that includes identifying with the fact that I am a potential threat to some people. That means I have to be more careful to not come across as a threat, not that I am a bad person for approaching strangers.
"Its subtext you're adding on your own."
That's probably true to a degree. But what I'm adding, and what Aaronson added, and the people this OP is addressing are adding, isn't coming from nowhere.
I mean, I find it fascinating that you seem to be able to not care at all about being judged that way because of who you are the gender you identify with.
"I mean, I find it fascinating that you seem to be able to not care at all about being judged that way because of who you are the gender you identify with. "
I'm trying to get that sentence to make grammatical sense and it's just not coming.
I am still disturbed that you apparently feel it's only natural to identify with an abuser over the victim if he's male and she's not.
"Which is, well, kind of my point. And all you're saying to that is 'don't identify with that gender'"
HOW THE *HELL* DID YOU GET THAT FROM WHAT I SAID?
Seriously, what is wrong with you? Why in the name of little green apples would you read that and interpret THAT as the message, unless you are just LOOKING for ways to misinterpret what we're telling you so you don't have to change anything?
The hell, man.
It's got nothing to do with identifying as a gender, you…argh.
Why the hell does the gender you identify with need to come into play? When a man shoots up a school, do you feel bad because he's a man and you're a man? Do you feel guilty about Kim Jong Whichever, because he's a man as well?
When you read about a criminal in your state or city, do you feel guilty for being from the same place as them? Do you feel guilty if someone who's a fan of something you like does something awful?
To leap to that conclusion just tells me that you're more inclined to mentally identify with an attack that a victim just because the attacker's genitalia (probably) matches your own.
"All your saying is…"
screw you. Really. That's all I'm saying.
"Do you feel guilty about Kim Jong Whichever, because he's a man as well?"
No, that's true, these kinds of things are gender neutral in my perception, it's really only with respect to gendered violence that it makes me feel bad because I identify with the gender.
Why is it gender neutral? Most murders are committed by men (usually with men as victims) so why is that gender neutral but men murdering women is not?
I'm guessing because he doesn't feel entitled to commit murder, but at some level he does feel entitled to women's time, attention, and sexuality. He feels threatened because he actually does see himself in these men. Since he likes to think of himself as an ethical person, he works incredibly hard to create a logically coherent system under which it's not wrong to do so. Of course, an actually ethical person would work on the real underlying problem.
I guess there's something to that using your terminology. But entitlement is really not capturing the essence of the gender problem for me.
In your opinion, what would an "actually ethical person" work on?
And how could that actually ethical person avoid falling in the Aaronson trap while doing so?
I'm not going to play your game by responding in the abstract.
You, specifically, should do the following things.
1) Find a small group of men who are both ethical and sexually successful. Talk to them about your feelings. Let them help you work through it.
2) Find a woman you trust who is willing to help you with some 'yes means yes, no means no' practice. I would start very small, like holding her hand or touching her arm. When she says no, stop. Observe that the world does not end. Repeat until you believe it, though I'd keep each session short so you don't get overwhelmed.
3) Stop fucking generalizing. This is not a context-free problem and it's not one that gets solved by categorical pronouncements. You are using theory as a way to avoid facing your own issues. Stop.
"You are using theory as a way to avoid facing your own issues. Stop."
That may well be true to a degree, and to that extent, it's unhelpful to me. But the theory is still valid.
Thanks for your suggestions.
BWAHAHAHAHA! "You are using theory to. . ."
"Well its a valid theory. . ."
Stop now, Sam. Just stop. Otherwise I'll do it for you.
Well, the "not falling into the Aaronson trap" part is the easier one. The way to do that is, if you have trouble with women, or anxiety talking to/meeting/approaching women (not on public transportation, in dating-friendly spaces), take responsibility for that, and figure out what you're doing that isn't working. Don't blame it on women. If you're not ever approaching women because you genuinely feel that they will publicly, on a large scale, shame you for it, that might be something to talk with a therapist about (but, like a good one, not like the one Aaronson saw).
The other part is to try to help make rape culture not a thing. If I knew how to do that, this conversation wouldn't have to happen…
Also thanks for your suggestions.
So every time you hear about a man killing someone, committing fraud, kidnappings, etc. you identify with him because of his gender? Reading the news must be all sorts of traumatic to you.
"What would you like the reaction to be?"
Generally, "wow, that sucks." Maybe even listening and paying attention to situations like that around them, stepping in or speaking up when it happens. Modifying or being aware of their behavior based on input.
Primarily, it would be nice if people were doing this from a place of wanting the world to be better than from a place of erasing perceived guilt, because the latter doesn't really work. Not in sitcoms, not in real life.
Not: "This makes me feel bad AS A MAN." Like kleene said, the response is often tied in with "so we shouldn't talk about it!"
You hear it when people talk about racism too. They're "tired" of hearing about racism, etc. Let's talk about something "pleasant." Because if the only overt way that something affects you negatively is hearing about it, then you can just "turn it off" and not hear about it. So you (again, general you) insist, explicitly or implicitly, that that's what should be done for YOUR comfort, while ignoring the much greater discomfort that the behavior being discussed is causing, and the greater harm caused by silencing or dismissing the discussion.
I don't think it's quite the same thing that therapists get. Therapists, in general, may feel trauma from listening to traumatic experiences, but that trauma comes from EMPATHY. From putting themselves in the place of the person who went through the actual traumatic experience. The reaction we're talking about comes from a general lack of empathy–from focusing on how someone's bad experience affects you primarily.
And I do want to clarify that I said self-absorbed and self-centered specifically. Selfish is close to that, but by self-absorbed, I mean, specifically, focusing on one's self. Taking a discussion about what other people go through, and making it specifically about you.
Well, wow that sucks. And we should (and do) talk about it.
But I can't change the fact that this will make guys feel bad, not just for the other person, but also *as a man*. I don't see how that's a consquence of lack of empathy as such, bringing it up in certain contexts *could* be construed in that way, yes.
Do you feel bad every time you hear about a man doing something bad? You read about a guy who kills his kids or robs a store or embezzles money or commits fraud? Does that make you feel bad *as a man*?
Seriously, let's ramp this up ad absurdium. If there was an article called "Shrodinger's Serial Killer". . .by a man, a woman, doesn't matter. . .about how he has to worry that every guy he meets has a small but non-zero probability of being a serial killer, would you feel bad as a man that you're in this category of people who, with no information to go on, might possibly be a serial killer?
Serial killer, kidnapper, gun runner, drug dealer, thief, bar brawler, general hooligan, the list goes on of Schrödinger options
I rather think that's the reaction people have to hearing the Schrodinger's rapist .. (idea? theory? I'm not sure which word is right here..), too.
But the reality is that violence is a choice, it is not an inherent trait.
So yeah, I get that guys don't want to hear that sexual assault, and harassment are the result of conscious choice (if not intentional choice). You choose to bother the woman on the train. You choose to make lewd jokes about your female classmate or coworker. You choose to put your penis inside someone who has passed out. You choose.
I get that that's hard to hear, because it makes you feel bad about anything you've done, and feel bad by association because others have done these things.
But I hope you're not suggesting that it isn't hugely important anyway, that guys get over themselves and their hurt feelings, and start making choices that don't contribute to the systematic oppression women face.
Kathleen,
"But I hope you're not suggesting that it isn't hugely important anyway, that guys get over themselves and their hurt feelings, and start making choices that don't contribute to the systematic oppression women face."
No I'm not. I mean, we already realized that we're basically in agreement about the relative importance of things in the other thread, haven't we?
It's just that words are usually ill-defined, and *usually* people don't really understand what *exactly* someone they're talking to means when they're describing the same situation, sometimes by using even the same word. Take the example of "bother a woman on the train". I'd say – of course that's a bad thing. Who'd want to be bothered? But what constitutes "bother"? Smiling? Saying "hi"? A conversation that seems mutually pleasurable (but who knows what's really going on, maybe the other person is too polite to say "f*ck off"?) Staying on after someone said they'e not interested?
I guess we know the difference between, say, bothering and saying hi when we're experiencing it, or most people will, anyway. But it's much more complex to have abstract conversations about what's ok and what not, because one side will want to make sure that the moral thing is to err on the side of caution, and the other side will feel that that's unfairly limiting their range of expression. And while one side may have actual "bothering" in mind, the other side probably thinks of "saying hi".
So, when we assume that my point about not wanting to be morally judged makes sense, then there's two main avenues given that problem and misunderstanding: a) pushback, and b) acceptance of the moral prerogative and withdrawal. Sometimes they mix – people who individually withdraw will publicly oppose the authority or logic of the argument (while still accepting it for themselves).
So, in that respect, the message is – I think, and as I've explained in the other post – basically creating a double bind of contradictory messages: you have to ask women out (and women are demanding that, but feminists say talking to women is "bothering" them, which makes it morally questionable).
And given that men who do ask women out are logically more successful than those who don't, this is creating the angry defensiveness – "you're asking me to not do something, but when I do it it's my fault that I don't."
Basically, I think before this conversation (in general, not out conversation in particular) has any chance of getting anywhere, both the abstract foundations of what is being talked about in moral terms and the specfic consequence of those terms need to be defined much more precisely.
That would be true if the only way anyone ever got a date was approaching strangers in public and any such approach was "bothering".
You could get introductions from friends.
You could use an online dating site.
You could ask out people you already talk to in classes/activities/church etc you both participate in.
You could post a personal ad on Craiglist/a billboard/late night TV, although that latter might skew your audience somewhat.
You could learn to tell what constitutes bothering and what situations your approach is more or less likely to bother someone. The whole point is that yes, it is difficult to make ironclad rules because not all people you approach will have the same standards. Things like "never approach people on the bus" are intended as guidelines for people who can not tell if their approach is welcome or not. The 201 version of the class covers social calibration.
Gentleman Johhnny,
"That would be true if the only way anyone ever got a date was approaching strangers in public and any such approach was "bothering". "
Yes, but remember, we're talking about people who feel that approaching someone out of sexual interest is *inherently bothering*, if not worse, due to messages they've internalised.
"Things like "never approach people on the bus" are intended as guidelines for people who can not tell if their approach is welcome or not. The 201 version of the class covers social calibration."
I understand. But that class is hardly ever taught. There's no asterisk next to "never approach people on the bus (*)" that says (* unless you know what you're doing, here's how to learn social calibration"). And that's part of the problem that sets in motion the mechanism I've described, which, in addition, emphasizes usually the gender instead of the behavioral aspect.
And now I'm having the idea of rewriting Schrödinger's Rapist to take that into account… actually, I'm going to do that and put it in the forums when I'm done.
Really? Because I'm sitting here typing a comment on a dating site for guys, one that has specifically mentioned Shrodinger's Rapist (which is how I heard of it), one that covers social calibration, how to approach people, how its ok to have a sexual interest in someone and where the (feminist) women who comment on the articles agree with these things. In fact, I can, with enough effort, find the specific thread of comments on "yes, rarely, if you'e well calibrated, its possible to approach someone on public transit" because I participated in it myself.
Yes, but a) it's one page, and b) even here that asterisk is a rare thing. I really like DNL's more specific posts, and I'm sure he's written about social calibration. You know, exceptions, to every rule.
The point was more that the resources are out there. If you want to learn how to approach women without bothering them, its on you to figure out how, not the women who are bothered. You want the result, you do the work.
This! Schrodinger's Rapist and other "don't bother women on the bus" topics are not about how men can get dates. It's about not bothering women.
If a person is socially calibrated enough to get dates on a bus without bothering women (really not bothering them, not just ignoring or arguing away their discomfort), that's all well and good. If they're not, then they should not bother women on the bus. Instead, they should assume they'll need to look beyond Schrodinger's Rapist and similar articles to find discussion on where and how to seek dates (this very site has a goodly number of articles that are about seeking dates, in fact!), because that's not what the Schrodinger's Rapist-type articles are about.
And if they feel that an article on not bothering women should be teaching them how to get dates, well, I hope everyone reading this can understand why women would find that frustrating and offensive.
"And if they feel that an article on not bothering women should be teaching them how to get dates, well, I hope everyone reading this can understand why women would find that frustrating and offensive."
I think this is the main part of the misunderstanding – because you (and most feminist women who read the article) can apparently not understand that it is possible to read that article and think differently about it. And it is – I think it is about men being told they're usually scary to women because some men are rapists. And then she goes ahead and explains how to limit the risk of being considered a rapist – and the easiest way is to not approach. Which is the point where I find it strange that you – and other women – apparently cannot understand that someone could possibly think it's an article telling guys that their attempts to date are turning them into potential rapists, and how they may consider that offensive.
SR doesn't really get to the point of saying – *if a person is socially calibrated enough…", one *could* argue that Starling is saying that implicitly in one sentence ("some people should never approach strange women in public") but wanting to see that requires lts of good will towards the article, which I have, because I think Ms Starling is seriously making an effort to be open and fair here, for all the problematic wording she uses, and most other guys have not.
No, I think you're misunderstanding me here – it's not that I find it incomprehensible that a man would read an article saying don't bother women because it freaks them out, and interpret it that they cannot seek out dates without being considered to be a rapist. I think it requires an impressive ability to ignore stuff written right there in most of the texts, but I see how it can be done.
What I find offensive is that you think that your attempts to date are important to articles about not bothering women – that you cannot read something about women's wishes to be able to participate in society without being subject to social interactions and expectations that are not the social norm in contexts other than men wanting the attention of women, and explaining why they are sometimes threatening, without taking it as being about you and your romantic or sexual desires. Women are saying "we would like to be able to sometimes exist as just people who get their boundaries respected like other people do instead of always being required to be romantic targets first and foremost," and you are saying "my romantic targets are hurting me by making harsh assumptions about my approaches."
And you seem to feel that the solution to that is that, when talking about the fact that they don't want to be romantic targets all the time, to make sure to reassure you that they do in fact want to be romantic targets and teach you how you should be approaching them as such.
There is a place for women who are attracted to men (which is most women) to express that attraction; there is a place for advice on approaching women in respectful ways more likely to be welcomed. The kind of articles we're talking about are not that place.
I'm still not entirely sure what you're saying.
To be honest, if the article had actually said "women want to not be targets of male sexual attention" that would be totally understandable. But she's attempted to write an advice article about how it feels to be in that situation and what men can do to make it easier for her *in that situation*, which, to me, doesn't seem like what you say you think she's saying.
I mean, why attempt a how-to that explains how to not scare women when you're saying hi, when, according to you, her main point is to say, "we need a time out"?
The thing is, despite the title, it's really not a how-to. It's a "let me explain why X freaks women out even when that isn't your intent". The "guide to not getting maced" aspect is just a rhetorical device. (And note, even there, she's not promoting it even rhetorically as how to make successful approaches— surely not-getting-maced is a baseline which all social interaction should rise above?)
The purpose of the article is to help men understand that they need to be able to see their approach from the woman's point of view. If you're reading it as an actual guide, you are definitely reading it wrong. You should take some time and sit with that.
"If you're reading it as an actual guide, you are definitely reading it wrong."
Interesting, I had a brief exchange with the author when it appeared – can't remember on which site – and my takeaway was that it was helping guys to avoid freaking women out. So, "how-to". Why are you so sure your interpretation is right. It would be an even worse essay about "just understand women need a break and they always fear you're gonna hack them into pieces when they see you"-piece than it is a "how-to" piece. I like it because the author had the right intention, despite not really finding the right words, in my opinion. In my understanding, the article was not supposed to be what you're seeing in it.
It's a "how to" in the sense of "here is a new perspective that will let you reason more effectively about you behavior." Unfortunately, it requires basic empathy skills in the reader to accomplish its goals, which is why we end up having this same fucking stupid conversation over and over with guys like you.
Fine, it's a "how to avoid freaking women out" and not a "how to successfully pick up women".
You seem to want it to be the latter, and it's just not.
But isn#t "how to avoid freaking women out" the first and most important part of the latter, also according to her article?
It's a baseline.
What you're doing is like reading a pamphlet on kitchen safety, and complaining that it hasn't given you the skills of a master chef.
No, you're right, the original Schrodinger's Rapist post was attempting to help men understand how their behaviors can have effects they don't realize so they can interact with women without creating unnecessary discomfort. I was conflating it with the many, many, many articles that discuss Schrodinger's Rapist in a context of 'don't bother women in X situation" and/or that are focused on sexual harassment – I understood you to be referring to a range of articles, including several on this site. I apologize for the confusion.
So, my general point was that I find it deeply, deeply problematic to react to such a broad range of "it is a problem when people do X to women," articles with concerns about how it affects your dating life and feelings of romantic desirability.
If that doesn't clear up what I'm saying, I don't think there's anything I can do. I believe you are sincerely trying to listen, but I'm not sure you're capable of hearing.
Yes, that explains it, thanks.
Also thanks for believing that I'm sincerely trying to listen. I'm also trying to hear, but that doesn't automatically mean I'll agree.
I guess I can rationally understand the "time out" part and the desire to not be constantly sexualised. And I can see how frustrating it must be to be dragged back to that aspect whenever the topic comes up. But, coming from the other side – where sexualisation is an exception to the rule, I can't help but say that I think the reason for that disconnect is not an attempt to minimize someone else's pain, but to simply contribute and add a male perspective – and looking at such interactions through the dating lense is, I think, the natural male understanding of such situations. Yes, that is inherently sexualising women, on some level, but it also, I believe, comes from the fact that we by and large cannot fathom the annoyance described here because we've never felt it. Just like you probably don't know what's it like to almost never experience that.
I don't know. These are the points when I start wondering if it's actually possible to have a true conversation between genders – when it's hardly possible to have a conversation between people who know each other. We simply cannot make all hidden assumptions and personal prejudices explicit. You and some others here may laugh, but some of my female friends sometimes call me the woman whisperer, because I seem to get them in ways few men seem to do. But the more I learn, the less I know…
"But, coming from the other side – where sexualisation is an exception to the rule, I can't help but say that I think the reason for that disconnect is not an attempt to minimize someone else's pain, but to simply contribute and add a male perspective – and looking at such interactions through the dating lense is, I think, the natural male understanding of such situations."
Yes, we know. We keep having to have these conversations in which men turn "don't bother me" into "but how can I date you?", so we know.
That does not mean we should tolerate or encourage such reactions, however. Instead, we should (and do) keep arguing that that's not the point, and please start listening to what our point actually is, because I don't think you've heard it yet.
"These are the points when I start wondering if it's actually possible to have a true conversation between genders "
There are lots of people who do just fine. I have many of them in my life. It's because they start from the base assumption that 1) in the areas where I know my shit, I know my shit; 2) my feelings and desires are as real and valid as theirs, and 3) I am a just as much of a person as they are.
Of course, they also have the capacity for empathy with others, which the first 3 are pretty useless without.
"and please start listening to what our point actually is, because I don't think you've heard it yet."
Which kind of implies that it's impossible to even argue with your point once one has really heard it? I think that's a problematic assumption for any conversation, but certainly one that relies on so many implicit aspects of individual experience and identity.
"2) my feelings and desires are as real and valid as theirs, and 3) I am a just as much of a person as they are. "
Yes, I think a lot of online interactions suffer from that problem – I for one also get this feeling from some of the reactions to my comments.
"Which kind of implies that it's impossible to even argue with your point once one has really heard it"
*sigh*
No. Just no.
Let's talk about good communication, shall we? Good communication requires two things:
an effort to communicate in a way the listener will understand (age appropriate language, common language, etc); and good faith listening (listening to try to understand, rather than to find fault or just waiting until your turn to speak again).
Sometimes, having both of these is not sufficient for effective communication. Sometimes, a speaker simply cannot find the words that will communicate what they mean. Sometimes a faith listener will miss the point.
That's what I'm saying here (although I think I phrased it badly). "listen, because you've missed the point" doesn't mean it's impossible not to agree with me. It means good communication has not happened for one reason or another, and you have not understood what I was trying to say.
As for 'therefore it's impossible for people to disagree once the point is understood' (which was not implied at all)… again, no. I understand your points but I don't agree with you on a lot of things. So, no, that implication was not present.
2) interestingly, I've also read a lot of the responses to your comments, and yet, I can't see a single one that appears to come from a place of denying your personhood or your feelings.
"It means good communication has not happened for one reason or another, and you have not understood what I was trying to say."
Ok, that's of course possible.
"2) interestingly, I've also read a lot of the responses to your comments, and yet, I can't see a single one that appears to come from a place of denying your personhood or your feelings."
Really? Because a lot of the time my understanding is that the point is to explain to me how my feeling bad as a man about things that happen to women at the hand of other men, and how I want to include that perspective in some way into a conversation about male aggression towards women, is really just an indication of my quasi sociopathic nature, entitlement and lack of empathy towards what's really important. The gist of it feels like: if I were a moral being, I'd fucking shut up about my pain because it really doesn't matter in the grand scale of things. Plus all the slurs directed at me when I'm as polite as humanly possible. I'm kind of expecting this, but it is taking a mental toll, too, on some level.
I think it's possible to acknowledge someone's personhood and feelings while also believing they don't have a place in a particular conversation.
Also, it's entirely possible to argue in as polite of a manner as humanly possible while still being an ass.
I suppose it may not surprise you, but I don't think the Sea Lion is the asshole in that particular cartoon.
No, it doesn't surprise me. I think you'd barge into someone's house to make your point too. That's kind of what you continually do when you insist that conversations about sexual violence should include your pain, while you argue and argue and never seem to acknowledge anyone else's pain or the fact that your ceaseless calls for others to empathize with you when you can't even do a smidgen to empathize with them may actually cause pain to others.
I wouldn't call Sam a sealion so much as a black hole of empathy. Empathy goes in, but it never comes out.
https://i.imgur.com/IP73rh.jpg
I actually do think there's a role for guys to talk about their pain in these conversations. Unfortunately, it requires empathy and sensitivity to context. I recognize that Sam is a person, but all evidence here suggests he is a person who lacks both these things. Maybe he could look at some men who do a better job of this.
I can allow that it might be possible, in a theoretical way.
I just will say, though, that the men who are the loudest in insisting they have a place at this particular table are exactly the ones who seem least able to extend empathy. But I'm admittedly a bit tired after a couple of weeks worth of attempting to empathize with certain men who want a great deal of empathy and compassion but who don't seem to be able to display either quality when someone unlike themselves is in need of either.
What esselle said. None of those things deny your personhood or feelings. They deny the appropriateness of inserting those feelings into the conversation. It's okay for there to be things that are just not about you, as a man, or otherwise.
"Comfort in, dump out"
Denial of personhood means that a person effectively treats you as though you are not a person, with needs that are equally important to meet as the needs of anyone else.
For some examples: denial of personhood looks like a person always having to give up "personal space" (an office, a bedroom, etc), to become "shared space" to the extent that they never have personal space in which to 'be themselves'. Denial of personhood is the Quiverfull religion deciding that women should never have the right to not have sex with their husbands, or control when they have children. It is the denial of the right to go about one's business or the right to choose with whom one interacts (by having a cultural trend in which people's signals that they want to be left alone are routinely ignored).
Denial of feeling is saying that a person's feelings don't exist, or that they are not valid. No one is telling you that you don't, or that it's not valid to feel hurt because you identify with people being morally condemned. They're saying "this is not the right place to talk about that, and the fact that you won't stop says bad things about you".
Just so we're clear, Sam, I'm done responding to you.
These are the points when I start wondering if it's actually possible to have a true conversation between genders
Happens all the time. I recently had a rather in depth conversation with a woman on my "privilege is a superpower" comment here, juts as the most obvious example. I asked another one if she knew someone I was interested in and could put in a good word for me. That wound up spinning off into a conversation about dance classes and how annoyed we both are when guys want to "come watch" rehearsal.
No, yo probably can't go in with forekowledge of the other person's experience and assumptions. What you can do is listen when they make those explicit, digest them and make an effort not to contradict them. Its really not that hard.
The easiest way not to get in a car wreck is not to get in a car.
However, if you do want to get in a car, you need to learn the rules of the road.
If you want to go out on the interstate, you need a certain set of skills. If you want to drive in a complicated city with five lanes of traffic, you need a certain set of skills.
You have to know when you can and can't go 80 miles an hour. You have to know that sometimes just because the posted speed limit is 40, that it's wiser and safer (and sometimes mandatory) that you go much much slower. You have to pay attention to all the little rules of the road to be a safe driver.
"because you (and most feminist women who read the article) can apparently not understand that it is possible to read that article and think differently about it."
No, we understand that it's possible to think differently about it.
It's just that the guys who think a certain way about it are pretty much letting us know that they're probably not particularly safe people. Not necessarily horrible rapists, but certainly not people who can be trusted or confided in.
Gentlemen Johnny,
yes, of course – re the work aspect. The point is that the message that there is a 201 course is almost entirely drowned out by the sheer volume of the first message. Even here.
Mean Feminist here: That's fine. I'd say that this is a 501 skill. Most people aren't up for 501 classes, and if some of the ones who might be are deterred, it's no big loss.
Being able to take the bus to work undisturbed is about a million times more important than being able to approach any woman who interests you. If a couple of approaches that wouldn't have been completely horrible for the woman are deterred, it's a small loss.
Mean Feminist also:
You aren't Ted Mosby.
With 90% certainty*, the pretty woman on the bus is thinking about getting home, going to workout, her sister's health problems or any number of things. She is focused on getting somewhere. And above all: she DOESN'T want your phone number, your attention or your penis. Cry about how sad and unfair that is all you want, but all the Internet arguments in the world aren't gonna change this fact.
*percentage pulled out of my ass. But it's probably higher.
What would be different if I were Ted Mosby?
A bunch of sit-com writers would create ridiculously improbable situations in your life.
Your writers would make the random woman next to you on the train platform be your soulmate in every way– be delighted to talk to you, give you her number, date you, have your babies, etc
My life exactly 😉
Is there somewhere I can sign up to be Ted Mosby? My application to be John Galt got rejected.
Damn it Johnny! You know you can't go around helping your friends without being paid for it in solid gold. Tsk tsk.
Here in articles about troublesome behavior. If you go look for the articles on how to do better than that, you'll find it quite reversed. You have to establish "don't do this" before you can move to "do this instead".
Because logically, if "don't bother women" is such an overpowering message to how to meet them without bothering them, the inverse is true. Told "do this", guys without the former knowledge are going to bulldoze people who'd rather be left alone and not be successful.
For example, if someone feels that they cannot accurately judge when to approach women, they might be better off sticking to online dating where every participant is there to meet people for dating.
"Told "do this", guys without the former knowledge are going to bulldoze people who'd rather be left alone and not be successful."
I don't know. I think that's a prejudice.
This does not surprise me. Look, if it goes one way, it goes the other. Clearly enough women have problems with being bulldozed that they felt the need to write articles like SR.
Why do men have to get so worked up about, of all places, the bus? Probably .001% of dates, or an even smaller percentage, originate on buses. There are all kinds of other places to meet people, and in most of them, an approach is a lot more likely to be accepted.
Is it really so offensive to men that there might be some places where there sexual attention isn't welcome and where the world doesn't revolve around their desire to meet women?
esselle, it's not really about the bus, in my opinion, because it's not only a matter of practicality but also of principle. I think Kathleen has clearly identified the main aspect of the problem in her comment below, and I'll address it there when I'm back.
As a matter of principle, I think I should be able to have some spaces in life where I don't have to deal with men's sexual desires. It does seem very much to me that men who like to argue about approaching women on the bus think there's a principle involved as well, and it's that everyone they find desirable should have to deal with their desires regardless of the setting. As such, I tend to take a dismal view toward both these bus arguments and as to whether people who like to argue about this subject can safely interact with women in any setting.
Seriously! With the increased popularity of OLD, dating apps, singles oriented Meetups, regular Meetups, various flavors of clubs, activity groups, bars etc. the availability of spaces that are specifically geared to meeting people for dating or that provide a supportive environment for approaching strangers, there are more places to meet people of your preferred gender who are interested in meeting people than ever.
But all we ever hear is how not being able to approach willy nilly on public transit, on the street, or while the woman is working has eliminated ALL THE OPTIONS, even though those options were never the way most people got dates in the first place.
" There's no asterisk next to "never approach people on the bus (*)" that says (* unless you know what you're doing, here's how to learn social calibration"). "
So. What.
So what if they never get to progress to the advanced leagues where they figure out how to approach strangers in less-than-optimal situations. There's still a plethora of ways to meet people in ways that have the training wheels on.
I'm really squicked out by the guys who are so upset by the guidelines. Dude, if you read all the guidelines and figure it as "What, so, like, NEVER?" Then the answer for you is: YES NEVER. Because you're proving that you can't or won't observe and implement the more complicated nuances of trickier social interaction.
http://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-of-Scott-A…
I didn't really think you were suggesting that, SSS, but your post was lacking a clear 'thesis' like statement, so I wasn't quite sure if there were implications I wasn't getting, if/and what they were.
But as if happens, agreeing about one matter does not actually preclude disagreeing about another. As is the case with some of your statements here. {Editted for clarity}See, language doesn't really work if we don't have a common sense understanding of what words mean. If 'fire' didn't commonly mean 'big fire'… "There's a fire down the street!" would have people scratching their heads, and joking about camping instead of calling the fire department.
Similarly, "bother" has a common sense meaning of "any level of interaction that the recipient is not happy to have", and a common sense understanding that if the recipient does not make clear their lack of desire for that interaction, there's not way for the 'giver' (as it were) to know that they are being bothersome. There are also common sense interpretations of body language that indicate a person's desired level of interaction long before "hi" ever gets said. {/Edited section}
The fact is, that this is a moral question: is someone else's discomfort more important than my desire to do things that they are uncomfortable by. And I'm telling you (having once upon a time been on each side of the conversation), "this is unfairly limiting my freedom of expression" is a selfish, immoral answer.
Since it's a moral question, it's not surprising people are worried about being judged morally. They are. (So are racists, and homophobes and feminists, SJW's etc. We're a judgey species.)
GJ has already covered that your catch-22 actually, isn't, and therefore there is no contradiction.
Personally, what I see happening (again, having been on the side of defending my right not to have to put the work in, once upon a time), is that this defensiveness is not coming from a place of confusion and lack of a correct course of action to follow. It's coming from a lack of a correct course of action to follow /that will get the results they want, without taking more effort than they current expend/. This is natural, to an extent, but still pretty crappy.
It's not "you're asking me to not do something, but when I do it it's my fault that I don't." , it "you're asking me to do more than I believe will be worth my while, and making me feel bad when I don't want to".
What this comes down to, for me, is that people keep trying to frame making approaches in public, non appropriate spaces as some kind of emergency, where there is no good solution. But that's not the case. Wanting to get a date, or a number does not rate as more important than a person's right to be left alone. It just doesn't. Which is why every argument defending people who bother people on the train, or the coffee shop, or wherever it is not appropriate to be looking for date comes across as selfish and ends up with the defender getting morally judged. This is society as it is supposed to work, there's really not much you can do except deal with it.
Kathleen,
thanks for that post – it's right on the level I think this can be discussed productively. I need to run to the gym (to put it, you know, more effort), but I'll reply in detail when I'm back, until then, briefly –
"The fact is, that this is a moral question: is someone else's discomfort more important than my desire to do things that they are uncomfortable by. And I'm telling you (having once upon a time been on each side of the conversation), "this is unfairly limiting my freedom of expression" is a selfish, immoral answer. "
To which I would say: it depends, and that's the practical problem Kant could never solve despite coming up with the most elaborate logical schemes.
Well, if you want practicality, there's a ton of research showing that men and women are both taught to prioritize men's desires above women's. You can't answer the moral question without writing gender into it – otherwise you are removing meaningful context. We should prioritize women's desire to be left alone above men's desire to approach SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE we are very unlikely to make a moral judgment that is fair to women otherwise.
This is why it's not only stupid but immoral to try to erase meaningful context in the search for general principles.
"You can't answer the moral question without writing gender into it – otherwise you are removing meaningful context."
I might actually agree with that idea on principle if the practical consequence were not so fraught with prejudice on its own. I do believe that gender is an important dimension here, but I do not accept that feminism's prejudices – which are dominating the understanding of how women and men should be treated differently in this regard – are the most suitable answer to that question.
So when empirical evidence shows we are unfair to women in our moral judgments, it's prejudice because your intuitions about the outcomes discount women's preferences in favor of men's. Yeah, that's exactly the problem.
No, data is important. It's just that feminism has created a particular set of lenses through which to interpret the data. And while those lenses are dominant in gender realm, they're not always the most useful way to understand what's going on, because they, like all other ideologies, have prejudices and they will mostly be looking for confirmation – again, like everyone, including me. We should be aware of that.
Yes, I can see that you are really committed to finding reasons why we should continue to consider men's feelings and desires as more important than women's. Turn your fucking critical perspective on your own biases for a change.
I do that all the time. It's part of why I'm interestg in the gender discourse. It's challenging. Are you being challenged here? I'm really asking.
Absolutely, but not by you. "Let's discuss this in terms of abstract philosophical principles" is sophomoric and unhelpful.
I have to admit that I had a little chuckle at the idea of you being challenged by Sam
What I'm reading is: "Your lived trauma and experiences are my idle armchair philosophy. How fascinating to observe."
Fair, to a degree. Doesn't make it wrong, though.
Well, not morally wrong maybe but certainly repulsive.
Do you hear yourself when you talk dude?
Hey, since he thinks it's not wrong, that means that every.single.time Sam tells us about his dating experiences and trauma/pain, everyone here can bat them around like air-filled balloons for their own idle philosophizing with no concern for his feelings.
Somehow I don't think he would be cool with it.
Actually, it kind of does. Not in the factual sense but in the repugnant sense
Yeah, I think it kind of is morally objectionable, in addition to being pretty gross.
Incorrect? No, I guess not. "Wrong" as is "insensitive and gross" though? Yeah, it's kinda that.
I've been thinking about this comment a lot and I suppose I have to apologize.
Not because I think that separating emotions and logic are a bad idea, but because I suddenly had an embarrassing epiphany.
I have indeed applied a double standard in my arguments. I've been detached and attempted to be distant when it comes to other's experiences and the conclusions they drew from them, but I haven't been able to be as strict about my own. I guess that's what some of you mean by empathy goes in, but nothing comes out.
I would like to tell you that it's probably not been lack of empathy but rather self protection that caused this, but whatever the reason, it's a double standard, and I was unfair and wrong in applying it.
I sincerely apologize for that. I will not post on any subject (I might reply to this comment) until I've figured out for myself what that realization means for my general perspective on this subject and gender in general. I suppose that will take a while.
I'm not sure what made thatthat's comment above resonate with me more than the many other comments before that already alluded to this problem in my arguments, but whatever it was, it has done the trick.
Thank you for that, I really do appreciate it, thank you all for your patience, and again, I'm embarrassed and sorry for not getting this earlier.
I just want to say that I appreciate the self-reflection you're doing. I know it's difficult to do sometimes.
Thank you for letting us know, Sam. It's nice to hear that you're willing to rethink things.
Who said anything about treating people differently? You shouldn't approach men on the bus if they don't want to be approached. Someone tell that to the guys with religious pamphlets, PLEASE!
Do you see my longer reply? Because I could and now it seems gone? It seemed to have double posted and I deleted one of the comments, hope I didn't accidentally delete the real one, too…
I got a couple of email alerts for it, but no, I can't find it.
My response boils down to three things:
1) I don't really think that (if a woman is signalling disinterest in being approached) there *is* an sufficiently accurate judge of how much discomfort your approach will cause to justify approaching. Moreover, the 'potential of benefit' to her, is at the outset, infinitesimally small, and only gets smaller.
Maybe you'll only cause a little discomfort, but the potential that she will enjoy her time is tiny, and you shouldn't bother her.
Maybe she's been bothered by ten other people today, but the potential that she will enjoy herself is proportionally smaller, and you shouldn't bother her.
Maybe the person who raped her approached her in *exactly* the same way, and the likelihood that she will enjoy interacting with you is non-existent. You shouldn't bother her.
2) I do believe that choosing to approach a woman who clearly disinterested is selfish. You're not doing it for her benefit, you're doing it for yours, with the possibility that she *may* get some enjoyment out of it. The certain benefit is yours, and that's why it's selfish because it's prioritizing desire [to approach] over right [to be left alone].
I have had a guy chase me a block and a half to return my wallet. That was a not-selfish action, because I was the person receiving the certain benefit.
3) You seem to be conflating "men think that", with "everyone should act as if".
Yes, some men think that approaching women on the bus is their only option for getting dates. Once upon a time, some people thought the world was flat. They were (and are) wrong.
Yes, some people think SR is about how they shouldn't try to get dates. Once upon a time, some people thought that black people weren't people. They're wrong.
It is not the responsibility of anyone else to act as though they're right, and it should not be the responsibility of women to put up with being interrupted in what they're doing any time some poorly socialized guy decides he wants to.
So did read it? Great. I thought I had to write it again =)
"1) I don't really think that (if a woman is signalling disinterest in being approached) there *is* an sufficiently accurate judge of how much discomfort your approach will cause to justify approaching."
Why? That doesn't make sense to me. If we assume that it is possible at all to identify consent, then that should become easier as a conversation happens. You yourself said before that the definition of "bother" includes that the bothered person is communicating that fact sufficiently clearly – quoting you from above: "a common sense understanding that if the recipient does not make clear their lack of desire for that interaction, there's not way for the 'giver' (as it were) to know that they are being bothersome."
"Moreover, the 'potential of benefit' to her, is at the outset, infinitesimally small, and only gets smaller. "
Again, why? Maybe someone is sceptical at first and then becomes really pleased?
"2) I do believe that choosing to approach a woman who clearly disinterested is selfish. You're not doing it for her benefit, you're doing it for yours, with the possibility that she *may* get some enjoyment out of it. The certain benefit is yours, and that's why it's selfish because it's prioritizing desire [to approach] over right [to be left alone]. I have had a guy chase me a block and a half to return my wallet. That was a not-selfish action, because I was the person receiving the certain benefit."
Right, but that does mean that *all* non-altruistic interactions are necessarily selfish as they are coming from a subjective position of situated knowing. That doesn't invalidate my "discounting" approach, it actually increases its morality, because it implicitly includes a "calculation" about the assumed discounted benefits to the other party. That's clearly not failproof, but it's a structure to weigh to potentially competing interests without having to resort to problematic a priori statements that prioritize one over the other based mostly on prejudice: If the right to be left alone *always* logically were more important than the right to speak to another person, there could *logically* not be any communication. Since communication is a human necessity, that assumption doesn't work. Which, in turn, means that *sometimes being selfish is a necessary, and, thus ethically sound way of action. What I'm offering is a structure that (at least abstractly) can help identify the cases in which that is the case vs the rest. This, of course, is not limited to approaching people on the bus, it's a general approach.
And again, usually, but not categorically, it's good to err on the side of caution.
"That doesn't make sense to me. "
You don't want it to make sense to you. Because if you let it make sense to you, you would have to reevaluate the way you view and approach women, and you don't want to do that, so you dig your heels in, start from square one every time, and refuse to let it make sense to you.
There have been myriad articles, some of them here on DNL, about ways that women convey consent, and–more importantly for your social-interaction-kindergarten purposes–ways that women convey that they DO NOT want to be approached.
I know you've read them. You've commented on them before to explain how no, that's wrong, and maybe, just maybe those women with their earphones on, nose in a book, hunched posture, and lack of eye-contact aren't actually meaning to convey the attitude of not wanting to talk to you, and really, how can you be sure unless you talk to them.
I don't know what to say to you, man. You are hung up on the idea that you should be able to approach any woman at any time. You don't want that to not be true, so you just dig your heels in and set yourself from a starting point where all women are proooobably open to being approached.
Meanwhile, actual women are telling you that most of the time, unless we are in an actual social setting, we don't WANT to be approached.
Your talk about how you can't reeeeaaally tell if they're conveying a lack of consent is troubling.
Since you don't seem to really understand the complexities of the situation and keep asking basic questions, then I'm gonna say that you should probably keep the training wheels on. If it's that tricky for you to figure out consent, then you need to wait for enthusiastic consent, sorry.
Instead of looking for signs that a woman DOESN'T want to be approached, which you seem to have trouble reading and are already disinclined to heed as being genuine, look for signs that a woman DOES want to be approached. Look for open body language, for eye contact, for smiles. Approach those women.
Because the sad truth is, we're usually pretty aware of the people around us because we have to be. If we want to be approached, we'll usually indicate it in some way.
"Again, why? Maybe someone is sceptical at first and then becomes really pleased? "
Maybe. But the ODDS of that are really small, and get smaller the more you ignore her signals that she doesn't want to talk to you.
"You don't want it to make sense to you. Because if you let it make sense to you, you would have to reevaluate the way you view and approach women, and you don't want to do that, so you dig your heels in, start from square one every time, and refuse to let it make sense to you."
You see how much you're projecting into this? Why do you think it's impossible to not think that makes sense based on the argument's merits rather than other aspects? I don't think that arument makes sense.
"You don't want that to not be true, so you just dig your heels in and set yourself from a starting point where all women are proooobably open to being approached."
Not what I did. I don't think you're really getting my point, because nothing in your reply suggests that, just as I said, before, and at the end of my last comment that it's usually good to err on the side of caution, which is a reminder that not all women are open to being approached all the time, and that usually, it is better to not do it instead of trying one's luck. But that's not a categorical statement, and it cannot be one.
1) Except that "as conversation happens" means that you have already bothered someone who did not want to interact with you.
Thatthat has already mentioned that there are a myriad ways of judging before you even say "hi". If you, personally, don't know what they are, then you, personally, have only one moral course of action: do not approach women outside of acceptable approach areas (singles groups, social groups, clubs, parties).
Anyone else who can interpret those signals should feel free to approach women who are signalling that they would welcome an approach.
(Incidentally, re: "You yourself said before that the definition of "bother" includes that the bothered person is communicating that fact sufficiently clearly", please make an effort not to twist my words. An anecdote, since you didn't understand what I meant: years ago, I did not feel like I had the right to refuse to interact with anyone who wanted to interact with me. I gave off all possible signals of wanting to interact, and then was miserable when people thought my longish sentence answers, return-prompt questions and continued eye contact meant I was interested in talking. That's the kind of situation I was talking about. Anything short of a woman engaging fully in conversation (/hiding that she doesn't want to be part of it), and my statement does not apply.)
As someone up there said. The chances of interacting with someone who had signalled disinterest being "pleased" with any imposed interaction is %0.001.
2) Again, the reality is that there is only a %0.001 chance that the woman you are bothering (who has signalled that she is not interested in talking to anyone, remember) is going to receive any benefit from the interaction. That is not a strong enough chance to just.
"That doesn't invalidate my "discounting" approach, it actually increases its morality, "
No. Just no.
"If the right to be left alone *always* logically were more important than the right to speak to another person, there could *logically* not be any communication."
Again, no. You're stripping context again. I am not saying the right to be left alone is always more important. I am saying it is always more important *when the person has signalled that they want to be left alone*. There are lots of times/places where people signal that they would welcome interaction. You don't go to a party to be alone. You don't go to a class to be alone. You don't put out an ad advertising some service you want people to know about (and contact you about) if you want to be left alone. I'm saying right + desire trumps desire. That's it.
And no, if you're planning on saying "well the approacher has the right to talk to whomever they want", still no. It is generally agreed in ethical philosophy that each individual person's right ends where they impinge on someone else's rights. Your 'right' to put whatever you want in an alcoholic beverage does not trump someone else's right not to be poisoned.
"that each individual person's right ends where they impinge on someone else's rights"
Absolutely, or, I think in this case the second formulation of the categorical imperative may be more useful: Don't ever treat a human being as a means to an end. The problem, of course, is that this, while being a sound logical structure, doesn't help determine where these specfiic points are. Hence my considerations about how to better identify them.
"Again, no. You're stripping context again. I am not saying the right to be left alone is always more important. I am saying it is always more important *when the person has signalled that they want to be left alone*"
Ok, that makes sense. I agree, as signalling implies communication. This brings us back to the specifics of what is a clear-cut signal, but on principle – yes. This still doesn't invalidate the "discounted value" approach though, it just makes it really unlikely to find a reason that could be discounted and still be more important than the clearly communicated signal – so, yes, in that case, for about all imaginable practical cases, I agree with you: "That is not a strong enough chance to just."
Okay, let me try one more time, and then I'm done. I'ver officially run out of ways to explain this to you.
Every person has the right to choose with whom they interact. Every person has the right to refuse communication. No one has the right to force communication with someone who doesn't want it.
To insist that there are particular circumstances, however rare, in which those right don't apply (your 'discounted view') is a denial of the approachee's personhood under those circumstances.
If I don't want to talk to people, then as a person I should not have to talk to people, not even if they really think it'll be worth my while. Not even if I'll be losing out on something amazing.
There is no circumstance under which it is morally okay to override someone's right to be left alone when they do not want to interact with you. (keeping in mind, we are still talking about public transportation and romantic approaches here)
The only moral choice is to pay attention to the body language of the person whom you want to approach. If they look like they might be receptive – ie. are communicating an openness to approach – then approach in an appropriate fashion. If they are not communicating openness, then do not approach unless it is strictly necessary – they've dropped their wallet, they're the only person with a clock and you really need to know the time, there's a bomb on the bus, etc. In those cases, communicate only what is necessary, and then cease interaction. They do not want to interact with you, you do not have the right to force interaction.
There may be that 0.001% chance that they are giving off all the wrong signals, and do want to interact, or that you have the skill to jolly them into wanting to continue interacting, but approaching a person who is communicating disinterest in interaction is never a morally correct choice.
To refuse to respect their right to be left alone is to deny that they have it. That is denial of personhood.
OK, let's forget about theoretical cases.
"There is no circumstance under which it is morally okay to override someone's right to be left alone when they do not want to interact with you. (keeping in mind, we are still talking about public transportation and romantic approaches here)"
Once that clear lack of consent has been established, yes, I agree. I also agree on the body language part and the necessary part. So, basically, we agree.
If you are interested in someone, you are using them as a means to an end the moment you have an indication that they do not reciprocate. Its not complicated!
This is yet another lengthy example, so far as I can tell, of someone equating what is essentially a safety behavior that is proved over and over again by actual statistics to be a completely reasonable response to the world (i.e. Schrodinger's Rapist) and somehow saying it's more harmful to men and their fears all the shaming that could potentially happen to them in some hypothetical situation.
Men have anxiety issues around women. *I* have often crippling anxiety issues around women.
Women fear for their ACTUAL PHYSICAL SAFETY.
Another example of someone else unfamilliar with the notion of two things being similar in principle but not necessarily in degree.
Given that the fear Aaronson brought up was the fear of being thought of as a predator, then yes, that is a matter of personal safety for men, given the potential consequences of being seen as one.
Maybe *you* think that fear is unreasonable, but if you don't think it's fair for men to challenge boundaries set by women based on their fear, then who are you to do the same with men?
No one is doing this with Aaronson though. No one is saying that his fears aren't real (they're not rational, but that's not the same thing at all). What people are criticizing is him not accepting the consequences of the boundaries he set for himself.
Er, I was responding to a comment that equated Aaronson's concern to "mere anxiety issues". That's what I think SR is, to put it mildly, but I accept that the proponents of it consider it to be inextricably linked to their personal safety.
It is wrong to then go and argumentum ad Atwood to the former concerns of someone like Aaronson. Being wrongfully thought of as predatory IS a concern about personal safety because of how predators can end up being treated.
So, it's not the case that "no-one is doing this."
As for accepting consequences – that's one thing, but I notice a lot of proponents of SR seem remarkably unwilling to accept that a consequence of profiiling people on the back of a gender and a generalisation will be that people think you are being bigoted.
I fail to see how calling them "mere anxiety issues" is the same as saying they don't exist. In fact, it's explicitly saying they do exist, just saying that they're not as serious as concern for physical safety. That's a completely different conversation, and quite frankly, not one I'm interested in having right now.
"a lot of proponents of SR seem remarkably unwilling to accept that a consequence of profiiling people on the back of a gender and a generalisation will be that people think you are being bigoted."
Only if you act bigoted. There's nothing wrong with profiling in and of itself, only with decisions that profiling can lead to. In the case of SR, the only thing that happens as a result of the profiling is that a woman isn't receptive to a man's advances. What more serious consequences are there that you think happen?
" I fail to see how calling them "mere anxiety issues" is the same as saying they don't exist."
Er…..where did I say people were claiming they don't exist?
I said that from the point of the view of people we are discussing – Aaronson and SR-proponent – both consider their issues to be related to their personal safety. There might be different relative risks, but that doesn't change the fact that both consider them to be related to their personal safety.
I can see why someone who sees SR as relevant to their personal safety might take exception to someone who rightly or wrongly calls their concerns mere anxiety issues.
I don't see why such a person would then do the exact same thing to someone else's concerns. It's more than a little hypocritical.
I'm quite content to say that both mindsets are unreasonable.
"In fact, it's explicitly saying they do exist, just saying that they're not as serious as concern for physical safety. That's a completely different conversation, and quite frankly, not one I'm interested in having right now."
Can't say I blame you. It becomes increasingly difficult to justify defending hypocritical behaviour.
"Only if you act bigoted. There's nothing wrong with profiling in and of itself, only with decisions that profiling can lead to. In the case of SR, the only thing that happens as a result of the profiling is that a woman isn't receptive to a man's advances. What more serious consequences are there that you think happen?"
You honestly don't think there's a problem with concluding "potential rapist" purely on the grounds of clocking someone's gender? I'd say there's a huge problem with concluding anything about an individual's character based on something that has little to nothing to do with their character. I'd have a problem with someone who looks at a non-white person and concludes "potential criminal" – more than likely some racist thinking going on there. And yet when people point out that SR is similar, we drift into Opposites Land.
I'm concerned about profiling mindsets because that's how we end up with profiling in our institutions. You think there's nothing wrong with profiling? The reaction of people to the profiling of, say, the police system would be a significant point against that. That became the acceptable norm because it became the norm in the minds of the citizenry.
It is a flawed mode of thinking that can have serious repercussions, and I don't particularly think it should be encouraged.
"You honestly don't think there's a problem with concluding "potential rapist" purely on the grounds of clocking someone's gender?"
You still don't understand SR. It's not based just on gender. It's based on gender + behavior. What level the "potential" is at varies based on the behavior.
The behaviour is literally lower-limited to "approaching".
I.e. physically being near.
" from the original SR blog post that you say you read and understood: "
Which I did, viz:
"When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me."
It is literally started up by "approaching". Meaning? Walking past? How very dare I walk past a woman on the street.
And the only way out of the catch-22….is to rape the woman?
You're shitting me if you think this mindset is in any way rational.
Two sentences up from the part you quoted:
"How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?"
From the 2nd paragraph:
" you would really like to have a mutually respectful and loving sexual relationship with a woman. Unfortunately, you don’t yet know that woman—she isn’t working with you, nor have you been introduced through mutual friends or drawn to the same activities. So you must look further afield to encounter her."
From the 4th paragraph:
"Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public."
The post is clearly talking about romantic approaches.
Just saw your post below, disregard.
"It is literally started up by "approaching". Meaning? Walking past? How very dare I walk past a woman on the street."
But the point here isn't "don't approach," or "don't walk past." It's "I have to keep that possibility in the back of my head until I know more." It's, "Some of my decisions will be made based on the possibility that you might be someone who will assault me. And that doesn't mean that I am saying you are, just that I don't know, and so my risk assessment is going to be based on my ignorance."
It's like… when Tylenol gets a few bottles of contaminated pills killing people, even though it's only .0002% of bottles out there, everyone plays it safe and participates in the recall. Is this bottle poisoned? Almost certainly not. But why behave in risky ways?
And what I took away from the SR essay is that she's telling men, EXPLICITLY, "The fact that I take these actions doesn't mean I think you're a rapist." I don't think this Tylenol is poison! "It just means that I can't know for sure, and I always have to keep in mind that the risk is there, because if I do that with the next 500 guys I meet, I will probably be right a handful of times."
"And that doesn't mean that I am saying you are, just that I don't know, and so my risk assessment is going to be based on my ignorance."
When the guy has done nothing more than approach her and be male – then no, I do consider it a problem if on that alone she considers even the potential threat of it to be worth concern.
I really, really hate to bang on with this point, but if someone did the same based on nothing but race (you know, one of those qualities like gender that doesn't really guarantee one's behaviour in any essential way) and simply approaching them – then yeah, they'd be called a bigot, and rightly so.
"It's like… when Tylenol gets a few bottles of contaminated pills killing people, even though it's only .0002% of bottles out there, everyone plays it safe and participates in the recall. Is this bottle poisoned? Almost certainly not. But why behave in risky ways?"
Reminds me of that abominable M&M analogy that was intended as a counter to #notallmen ^_^
"And what I took away from the SR essay is that she's telling men, EXPLICITLY, "The fact that I take these actions doesn't mean I think you're a rapist.""
No, just potentially one, and the only apparent way out of the dilemma is to rape her. That's the only way she says she'd know for sure that you're not a rapist. That's not a brilliant setup, to say the least.
"No, just potentially one, and the only apparent way out of the dilemma is to rape her. That's the only way she says she'd know for sure that you're not a rapist. That's not a brilliant setup, to say the least."
… no, that's the way she'd know for sure WHETHER you're a rapist. And the answer would be yes. Because there's logically no way to prove that you would never do something.
"When the guy has done nothing more than approach her and be male – then no, I do consider it a problem if on that alone she considers even the potential threat of it to be worth concern. "
And if she doesn't consider it, then if she is assaulted, huge numbers of people will race to blame her for not protecting herself. We are basically told both, "Never assume a man is a rapist just because he's a man," and "Protect yourself by never taking any risky behaviors, including imbibing alcohol ever, being out after dark, or being alone with a man."
"… no, that's the way she'd know for sure WHETHER you're a rapist. And the answer would be yes. Because there's logically no way to prove that you would never do something."
Hmmm…and assuming someone did end up dating Phaedra, would that mindset continue during the relationship?
After all, he hasn't raped her yet.
"And if she doesn't consider it, then if she is assaulted, huge numbers of people will race to blame her for not protecting herself. We are basically told both, "Never assume a man is a rapist just because he's a man," and "Protect yourself by never taking any risky behaviors, including imbibing alcohol ever, being out after dark, or being alone with a man."
I realise there exists advice that puts you in a bind. That still doesn't have anything to do with whether such profiling is ok, which it is not.
I am against gendered profiling irrespective of its source, for the record.
Yes, women who have concerns about rape sometimes continue them even into certain stages of the relationship. If you've dated at all, I'm sure you've noticed many women are fairly careful about things like sharing cars, going to someone's home, or having him over to theirs.
Likewise, most people of either gender don't leave people they've just started dating in their apartments for long periods of time unattended or let them babysit their children. Doesn't mean your specific new love is the sort of person who'd steal your electronics or abuse your child, just that you're still getting to know them well enough to make that judgment.
"Hmmm…and assuming someone did end up dating Phaedra, would that mindset continue during the relationship?"
…I don't understand what the significance of this is, but I really hope it's not going to take us into false rape accusation territory.
My apologies. I have mythology on the brain, and TOTALLY spaced on the fact that the blog was Phaedra Starling and not actually Kate Harding.
I thought the Phaedra bit was referencing the false-rape accusation figure from Greek mythology.
Just don't get "media references" confused with "Medea references". Aside from a particular one liner in American Gods, there's not much overlap.
LOL!
Not that, not that, I do entreat thee, Creon.
Who's that?
Media.
Greek girl, ate her family?
Eh. . .same basic idea.
-Very rough paraphrase from American Gods
Would you jump into the car of someone you just met? Or invite them to your home? Would you do it no matter who it was driving or who was coming to your home?
My parents are deathly afraid of all "young people" (young defined as under 50) they see when they walk to the store or hanging around their housr. It mostly inconveniences them (and me or my brother if we happen to be with them), but harms no one. If they choose to have an irrational (and possibly bigoted fear – ageism) but only cause problems and inconveniences in their own lives and those of their family, where is the problem?
Again, really?
I'd argue that causing a problem to your family is still a problem for starters.
"Hey dad, you're kinda sexist to me and your other daughters. But hey, it's in the family, so no biggie"
That's the decision of the family, though. It sounds like both reboot and her brother are both willing to put it in the "minor nuisance" category.
Sure, but no-one else is obligated to abide by the effects of ageism at large, which is reinforced by the attitudes of individuals such as her parents.
So, in turn, it's quite acceptable to challenge such thinking wherever it arises.
I find it rather naive to assert that such attitudes don't hurt anybody though. The same has been said of a lot of quite harmful prejudices on the individual level.
"I find it rather naive to assert that such attitudes don't hurt anybody though. The same has been said of a lot of quite harmful prejudices on the individual level."
They sure do, when the people with the prejudices have power. The fact that deer are all afraid of me has left my life remarkably unscathed, whereas a lack of fear of people would make their lives a lot harder.
"They sure do, when the people with the prejudices have power."
I would entirely agree, however such a statement usually entails "and by power, I mean political and social representation".
Not quite. More than one way to skin a cat.
Actually, since their fears trap them in their house, it only harms them. They never act on them by, say, calling the police or confronting the young'uns. So yeah, it never impacts anyone except them and my brother and I when we visit because we always have a metric fuckton of errands to do.
"I really, really hate to bang on with this point, but if someone did the same based on nothing but race (you know, one of those qualities like gender that doesn't really guarantee one's behaviour in any essential way) and simply approaching them – then yeah, they'd be called a bigot, and rightly so."
False equivalence, and an incredibly offensive one at that. Crossing the street when you see a black person coming comes from hundreds of years of racism and prejudice directed at black people. A woman crossing the street when she sees a man is acting out of self-protection informed by very real rape statistics. How do you not get the difference?
"No, just potentially one, and the only apparent way out of the dilemma is to rape her."
Holy crap, you have issues.
Also, just checking, but you do realize virtually every single human assesses every other approaching or nearby human as a threat, right? Like, consciously or otherwise.
Seriously.
It's usually a split-second judgement, not always something you think about, but anyone who's moderately aware of their surroundings devotes at least some brainspace to considering the threat-level of whatever is around them.
Men get to set a higher bar for "potential threat" in their mental checklist because in general, they are less likely to be threatened.
from the original SR blog post that you say you read and understood:
"you must be aware of what signals you are sending by your appearance and the environment. We are going to be paying close attention to your appearance and behavior and matching those signs to our idea of a threat."
"That's what I think SR is, to put it mildly, but I accept that the proponents of it consider it to be inextricably linked to their personal safety. "
Wow.
This is what frustrates me about the comparisons to this and Schrodinger's Rapist. Women who are using that to explain why women behave certain ways sometimes aren't following it up with a complaint about what a terrible effect this fear response is having on their opportunities to meet men and how it's not fair that women who have these fears have a harder time dating while ones who do not scoop up all the men.
Yes. This. Let's compare –
Aaronson: "I didn't ask out women because of anxiety that arose partly from reading feminist literature. Thus exposure to feminism harmed me"
Woman who acts according to SR: "I didn't respond to that guys advances because of SR." MEN: "Thus SR harmed us"
There is a difference here, let's see if you can spot it.
And let's totally ignore all the women out there with a lower threat assessment level that men could be talking to rather than agonizing over being rebuffed by women who have higher threat assessment levels. If one woman is spooked by an approach, move on and no harm done to anyone.
What I'm really interested in is how these guys magically know that she was spooked by the approach, as opposed to just not interested.
Silly! It has to be SR or some other evil, feminist thing. Normal lack of interest is not possible because…..
I dunno, I tried to do the logic but can not see it either
More like:
SR proponents: This particular group's actions caused me to have a particular reaction"
Reaction: Mmm yes, absolutely tell me more, we do live in a rape culture
Aaronson: This particular group's actions caused me to have a particular reaction
Reaction: Well, that never happened, how dare you criticise us!
Given the shitstorm that followed Aaronson's comment, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think a number of feminists found his one comment harmful/problematic. (Just like a lot of people find profiling of men to be harmful and problematic)
God forbid people might stop listening to feminists like them, and they are the way and the truth. So no, you're not demonstrating much of a difference between the two here.
That's not what happened at all. Like, even a little bit. You're ignoring the crucial part where Aaronson winges about not being able to talk to women because of his reaction, where your "SR proponents", you know, don't do that.
Except they do. Maybe not all of them, but even so. I've suggested more than a few times that if SR really is sensible then those women should, for example, initiate more. That doesn't always go down too well.
Really dude, if your response boils down to "but the side I'm defending would never do that" when it's overwhelmingly likely that a number of them *are* doing just that, then that's pretty weaksauce.
I'm not saying that no one ever has ever, but I've never seen it. Usually what I see is women talking about how guys think that the subway is a good place to pick up women, and then guys saying "well how can you expect us to approach if we can't do it whenever, wherever, and in whatever manner we feel like!?" Apparently you have, hence my [citation needed] comment below. If I did see it, I wouldn't defend it.
It's possible we're mixing up definitions of "approach" here. I don't mean approach as in to try and hook up with someone. I mean literally approaching them in public, for whatever reason. Might not even be to hook up with them.
Iirc though, the original SR piece does use the word approach, and I don't think she's using it simply to refer to hooking up.
I haven't seen any guy try to pick up a girl on the subway, but I tend to just…well…believe that it happens when people say it does. It is enough for me that you wouldn't defend it if you encountered it, and if you are willing to believe that I've seen it, then I would at least hope you can partly see where I'm coming from on this.
"I mean literally approaching them in public, for whatever reason"
The original SR post, and most uses here use "approach" to mean "initiate verbal and/or physical contact, usually with romantic/sexual intent".
Argh. Yup, fair fucks, I got that wrong.
I have seen people use it with the more broader definition of "approach", and people use it along with a gendered expectation that men should approach them to really put men in a catch-22.
But I fucked up with this one – I think I got Harding's piece and a…Jezebel piece mixed up in my head. I still don't consider it entirely unproblematic, mind, not least when people use it to try and direct the behaviour of men walking down a public street and minding their own business.
SR never applies to someone minding their own business. Its a very specific metaphor for a fairly broad but not universal situation.
Well, you say that, but – people DO apply it to people effectively minding their own business. I can agree that this isn't necessarily done in the spirit the original blogger intended though.
But if you validate one reaction based on fear, what's to stop others from demanding the same?
Let me rephrase. Yes, threat assessment in general occurs to strangers minding their own business. If its 4 AM and I'm alone on the street, everyone I pass is Shrodingr's mugger, too. However, my assessment of them as a threat or not has no effect on anyone but me unless they try to engage me.
Yeah, people can think what they like. They have that freedom, that is entirely their prerogative.
I think the confusion of mine occurred when I was thinking of a Jezebel? piece that basically say "guys, why not cross the street if a woman is approaching you and it's after dark?"
Nothing to do with approaching in the hooking-up sense….just, y'know, walking past.
Again, let 'em. That hurts no one and they're not complaining about men walking down the street.
That advice was given specifically to someone who asked if there were ways he could make women feel more comfortable in such situations. There's a lot of ground between requested advice and social obligations.
And there's a pretty glaring elephant in the room with that one – again, substitute in gender for race.
You think a forum full of white people giving out polite advice when requested about how the big ol' scary black peoples can stop scaring white people would be taken even remotely seriously?
It is outrageous that the discussion would even considered sensible and reasonable in the first place. No-one has the right to request that someone cross the street just to assuage their personal paranoias.
Oh, goodness, yet another person getting the privilege roles wrong in this example? Flip the races around and it would be a better comparison.
"Oh, goodness, yet another person getting the privilege roles wrong in this example?"
Literally makes no difference whatsoever. It isn't right to make any such demands of any group, irrespective of which group it is.
And if you're going down the line of claiming that because male privilege, I should consider it perfectly acceptable for men to be subject to demands to cross the street, then I absolutely have no interest in what you're selling.
Goodness, you didn't read above at all, did you? Or you're a troll. Probably a troll.
Yeah, I'm going with troll.
I'm starting to lean that way myself. Lucky for him, I've got plans tonight. So he's got a few hours either way.
I did, it's just your response was completely irrelevant.
Dude. Stop bringing race into this. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about and you're crossing the line. Take fucking hint and fucking leave.
….
Through playing around here.
EDIT: Just realized that was posted over a day ago. My b people
And I would agree that that's over the top. I'd be interested in seeing that article, for reference: it's not one I read, and the only think my google-fu turned up was a comment on a video about colliding privilege, where a commenter said she was grateful when men do that, not suggested that all men should.
http://jezebel.com/5881785/a-rape-joke-that-will-…
I'm trying to dig it up. I'll need to dig into my chat logs, I think – it might not even have been jezebel. But I do remember discussing it with someone over IM.
What if those women don't want to initiate or have anyone approach them? What if they're not interested in meeting any new men and just want to be left alone?
I'm referring to the women I encountered who were very much pro-SR but still wanted the….more gentlemanly aspects of conventional male behaviour to apply, shall we say.
Then, again, I'd say this is a self-correcting problem. If they have negative anxiety reactions when men approach them and also don't approach men, they'll continue to be single. If I see one complaining, I'll point out to her it's a consequence of her boundaries. I'm not really seeing the problem here.
The difference is, unlike Aaronson, no shitstorm of alleged equality-seekers will descend on such women.
In the cases I saw, I don't think anyone even called them entitled. At least not seriously – maybe to demonstrate the double standards in play.
The problem is in the double standards in the response to such behaviour.
Which, as I said earlier- is exactly the same point Alexander made, and that both Harris and many commenters have ended up inadvertently proving correct.
Next time a woman who's so anxious about being approached that she experiences anxiety whenever she's approached, even at the low limits of the behavior where a man is approaching politely in an appropriate situation, let us know. We can criticize her too.
The solution here isn't to let Aaronson off the hook.
Also? I like "equality-seeker" as an insult. It's even easier to reclaim than Social Justice Warrior.
Also? I like "equality-seeker" as an insult. It's even easier to reclaim than Social Justice Warrior.
Maybe but warriors have swords.
Equality-seeker is actually a prestige class, so depending on your character build, both are options.
Personally, I'm still going to stick with Social Justice Mage, though.
I feel good sticking with Social Justice Bard. Tremble before the power of Public Speaking!
Then again, in D&D I was always the guy who took Leadership and the upgrade, because 10,000 level 1 swords are better than one level 20 sword.
I'll go with Social Justice Rogue, myself. But the Equality-seeker prestige class sounds like it'll come with some cool skills…
Sounds like we've got a nice party put together. I assume we're sticking Doctor Nerdlove with the DM job again?
Sigh. I guess I'll be the social justice cleric. Someone's got to heal the burn damage from all the flames.
Can I be the Social Justice Kender?
Isn't Kender a race? You have to pick a class, too. Then you can go around and get people to stop stereotyping Kender as thieves while stealing all the shiny things.
Hell, on this site we have laid into women (e.g. Marty Farley) for not approaching men and she did not have any particular safety concerns.
I would be most interested in seeing a link to this.
Not doubting it happened or owt like that. Just curious
I can't find a link to any actual ripping-into-Marty, but I found an exchange I had with her where we both talked about it.
http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2014/10/ask-dr-nerd…
If your browser, like mine, won't travel to that link directly, the comment starts with "Oh, yes, I totally understand about sometimes being exhausted"
Just look for the poster "Marty Farley" and see the responses to her posts about not approaching men. It has happened so often that it would be hard to link all of the times.
You can see her posting history if you click her user name
Since we drug Marty into this when she's not here, I think it should be noted that after it was established that people found her frustrating when she mixed the approaching issue in with certain complaints with dating, she listened to people's feedback and found other ways to talk about relationships and dating.
Definitely! And Marty, sorry for using you as Exhibit A.
Now I feel like a dick for asking.
Thank you both for responding either way. I don't wish to resurrect any old debates, if it helps any.
" Next time a woman who's so anxious about being approached that she experiences anxiety whenever she's approached, even at the low limits of the behavior where a man is approaching politely in an appropriate situation, let us know. We can criticize her too. "
Please do. I think you're going to end up with more women of that sort than is ideal though if you encourage SR-type thinking, however.
"The solution here isn't to let Aaronson off the hook."
I agree, would be good to see a bit more balance in the criticism however rather than laying into mainly the men.
"Also? I like "equality-seeker" as an insult. It's even easier to reclaim than Social Justice Warrior."
I think you missed the "alleged" preceding it.
And I wouldn't exactly call SJW reclaimed ^_^
Shrug. It's not my job to control the number of women in the world who are both extremely anxious about being approached and who expect men to approach them.
Well, like I said, I'm a Social Justice Mage. You'll have to speak to the sword-wielders about Social Justice Warrior.
" Shrug. It's not my job to control the number of women in the world who are both extremely anxious about being approached and who expect men to approach them. "
I wish people were as sanguine as that with regard to that attitudes of niceguys, but people in hell want icewater I suppose.
"Well, like I said, I'm a Social Justice Mage. You'll have to speak to the sword-wielders about Social Justice Warrior."
can't be too mad at that, i usually play as a mage m'self ^_^
If we're talking about the Nice Guys who simply whine online for hours on end, I don't care how many of them there are, either. I'll tell them they're being ridiculous, and they can go on being unhappy.
If we're talking about the Nice Guys who mistreat their friends, they're in a completely different category than people who are anxious and prone to complaining. Those who cause harm to others are a menace to people other than themselves.
I don't think there's much distinction made between the two. Where did Aaronson harm people?
OK, explicitly:
Aaronson made a choice and complained about the results.
Sr using women make a choice and other people complain about the results.
See the difference yet?
Aaronson made a choice and whined about it. I criticized him, but don't care whether or not his type proliferates. The women we're discussing made choices and (you claim, at least) whined about them. I'll criticize them, but I don't care whether or not their type proliferates.
Nice Guys who manipulate their friends or react angrily when rejected or favor shark or do a thousand other little things that harm others are hurting people. I want there to be fewer of them, because those men do hurt people.
When he inserted his fears and anxieties into a conversation about how to handle sexual harassment at MIT, where his a professor. There's a very good recent study showing that high numbers of women in science experience sexual harassment and that most are reluctant to report it. In that context, arguing that sexual harassment should be treated more leniently because it might make guys like him anxious is fucking horrible, and actively harms not just his own female students but other female students at MIT. Given how many shitheads have crawled out of the woodwork to support him, I'd even say he's harmed women who experience sexual harassment on a much larger scale. Every guy who supports Aaronson is essentially saying, "I value my feelings over real harm done to women." If you don't think women are watching that, you're wrong.
Social Justice Warrior here (but I am more of a battle axe type). Folks can set their boundaries wherever they like. Those women picked their path and their path is unlikely to harm anyone but themselves. They are the ones that might be ruling out men that might make them happy. Their loss.
No one else is harmed, though, so whatever.
*puts Social Justice Mage on shirt with a fancy font*
So, depending on the level of their threat assessment, they may end up not getting what they want. Who cares? The bad outcome only effects them.
Seriously, why the huge concern that some women somewhere may (through their own choices) end up alone? Why do you care so much?
That really isn't my concern. It's the difference in reaction women who act this way get compared to a guy acting on his irrational fears and unreasonable standards (Aaronson).
As has been established, both are allowed to act on whatever thing they want. A guy can date only Asian women. He's allowed to do this. He's not magically protected from being called a racist just because its a legitimate choice to make and sure as hell I'm going to call him on it if he complains about the results of making this choice.
The point – again – is that the calling out for virtually identical behaviour is utterly one-sided.
And what? A guy dating only Asian women isn't racist.
The point, again, is that the complaining about the result of behavior is one sided and THAT is what's being called out.
No one's saying Aaronson can't refuse to approach women because of his anxiety. They're sayinghe's an ass for bitching about not getting dates while behaving that way.
And even beyond being an ass, he's an shitty person for using his fears to argue that sexual harassment should be treated less seriously, particularly in the context of ongoing abuse by a very senior male professor at his institution.
Also what Jess said.
That…kind of depends why he's interested in only Asian women. If he's also Asian, and wants to date only Asian women because they have a lot in common culturally, cool. If he's dating only Asian women because he thinks that they will all be submissive and, well, geisha-like, that…seems racist.
I have yet to see proof that this happens.
I also have yet to see any reason that my earlier assumption about you was incorrect. The others have more patience–I'm off to bake some feminist cookies. Requests DNLers?
Oatmeal raisin!
Mmmm, my favorite.
Can a tweak a suggestion to ask for oatmeal with golden raisins and dried cranberries? They are. The. Best. Ever.
Dried cranberries are excellent when paired with white chocolate chips in a delicious buttery cookie. <Drools on work keyboard>
Oh, I will be trying that now….
If we're bringing in cranberries and chocolate of any sort, I'll join the drooling!
Oooh, another of my favourites. The sharpness of the cranberries offsets the sweetness of the white chocolate. Dried cherries are good too, especially the extra sour ones.
Let's not get into the oatmeal raisin wars of 2014 again. Oatmeal raisin for everyone!
Those two statements kind of contradict each other 😛
I'm going to go against the crowd here…and go with the classic chocolate chip.
I can support this. Assuming that I will show my support by eating them 😀
I make mine with all brown sugar…
This is a fascinating blog post on the science of chocolate chip cookies: http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-la…
You know what? I might be one of those women. I am incredibly pro-SR, and I still prefer to be approached by a guy: I like the romance of being desired first. Those are not contradictory ideals.
The reason is that being pro-SR is not the same as being paralyzed by the presence of men. It's embracing the metaphor as an explanation for why I'm not going back to your place even though the evening is going great, and why I'm frightened and avoid eye contact when you're walking near me on an otherwise empty street, and why I'm worried about my kids going inside the new neighbor's house to play if I'm not there.
It doesn't mean I'm incapable of interacting with men, or of being flattered by an approach in a well-lit public place or at the local sports bar. It just means that when that guy at the bar suggests we carpool together over to see a band, I'm saying no.
" You know what? I might be one of those women. I am incredibly pro-SR, and I still prefer to be approached by a guy: I like the romance of being desired first. Those are not contradictory ideals. "
I'd say they are. You are so concerned about risk that you think it acceptable to profile men, but….you won't take the step of initiating, which would surely give you somewhat more control over the situation from a safety point of view at least.
"The reason is that being pro-SR is not the same as being paralyzed by the presence of men."
Again, not really buying this. It doesn't match the rhetoric of SR. You genuinely think all men should be treated as potential rapists until proven otherwise (well, not even that, given that hey, you can't prove he's NOT a rapist) – but it's not about fear of men?
You don't know who's a rapist. Initiating doesn't guarantee you safety, and I say that as a woman who's both initiated and waited for men to initiate (and also as one who's been raped).
You missed the "paralyzed" part of Eliza Jane's statement. People can assess the risks and still take some actions. The fact that Aaronson's an all or nothing kind of guy doesn't mean other people have to follow his poor example.
Yup!
Set them all on fire and throw them all in the ocean. They're clearly guilty, and we've got enough sperm banked to save the human species.
(In other words, since you are unwilling to admit that the universe contains anything but black and white absolutes, and are, over and over, responding to me as if I'm using TOTALLY different words from what was in the quote, I'm through believing you're arguing in good faith.)
How am I misrepresenting you? You're the one who said there's no way to prove that any given guy isn't a rapist. That's not a great basis for relating to someone, and when such a mindset is directed at men qua men, before they've even opened their mouths – yeah, I'm not convinced there isn't some kind of bias against men in play there.
My point is if you are willing to go that far, to then not take one small additional step and approach yourself – yeah, sorry. Not buying it.
You're right! I said that already. When men come near me, I freeze up completely, shaken to the core of my being. I want men to sweep in and romance me, and will never approach a man myself, but whenever a man comes within 5 feet of me, I burst into terrified tears and ask them why they want to rape me, since I've never done anything to them.
Sorry, I did imply you never approached. My bad.
Ideals are still contradictory, however.
That's just logically true, though. The only way to prove that you HAVEN'T done something is to have videotaped your entire life. By the same logic, it's pretty hard to prove you're not a cheater. And you can't prove future actions, either. Which is why a large portion of women err on the side of caution until they think they have enough evidence that a guy is not dangerous. A lot of factors will make this a lot easier/faster, for example, that you meet through mutual friends, or that the other person is respectful of your boundaries. And the level of caution varies by situation. If you're a guy twice my size talking to me on a subway at 2 am, I'm going to be at a pretty high caution level. If I meet you at a boardgame night, sure, I'll have my radar on, but unless you do something offensive, or you've given me a really good reason not to, I'm probably going to talk to you,
I think one key point you're missing is that a given woman's SR assessment of a given man might well be "near zero".
Again, this is the same assessment I apply to violence whenever a stranger approaches me. Am I in a crowded place? Lower risk. Is he approaching from the front? Lower risk. Did someone grab my shoulder from behind at 4 AM on a deserted street? DANGER!
Would you get in the car with someone you just met at a bar? Would you invite them to your home? Would you accept the invitation of a stranger to go from the bar to a party at an undisclosed location with them and their friends?
Does it make a difference if the person is a man or woman?
You know what, dude?
This rant feels … kind of ridiculous.
Because here's the solution to your alleged "profiling".
(I'm not even going to get into the issues with your word choice, because I've been following the discussion and I .. don't think you'll get it.)
Are you ready?
Are you sure?
Here it is.
Adjust your behavior so it will be reasonably likely, according to current cultural norms, that the woman whom you're approaching will be put at ease.
See? So easy.
So what are you saying? Eliza Jane is obligated to go home with a guy she only just met,or else she's unfairly discrimating against men?
If a guy won't give me his credit card and pin code on a first date, is he profiling me as a thief?
I also fail to see how initiating would give her more control of the situation, unless she has some kind of magical mind reading ability that only activates when she approches men.
So. . .they wanted to be allowed to gauge whether or not someone approaching them was a threat and continue the conversation or not based on that assessment? I fail to see a problem.
So those women do not meet men, which may make them sad or may make them glad. Either way the outcome only impacts their lives and their dating opportunities
Yeah, it seems like this is self-correcting. If women don't want men to initiate and don't initiate themselves, they're likely to stay single, and those are the consequences of their boundaries.
And that is a perfectly fine outcome for everyone
Yup!
Why should they initiate more? Clearly these women are not having a problem with men initiating. They're having a problem with men who don't know when to walk away.
It wasn't I who brought up SR, but rather our esteemed blogger.
And again, not in my experience – I've seen plenty of women who openly admit to profiling in this way and yet still expect men to approach them.
Can't imagine why they don't.
Edit – and still, guess which group gets more sympathy ^_^
"I've seen plenty of women who openly admit to profiling in this way and yet still expect men to approach them."
[citation needed]
Now, to meet this citation, you're going to need to find "plenty" of women (I'll settle for 3) who:
– Describe being approached by guys in situations that would not normally be considered "creepy" (ie. a bar, or a meetup group. NOT work, the grocery store or public transport)
– Explicitly or implicitly cite SR as why they didn't respond to the approach. ("he wasn't attractive" doesn't count)
– Complain about how no men approach them
Not required, but extra credit:
– Receive sympathy for this from the general audience of wherever they post.
But who cares what they expect? They can have their criteria and end up not getting approached or not getting approached by anyone who meets them. It only harms the woman with the criteria because she will not meet anyone. The men can just shrug and go meet someone else.
They're not similar in principle. One is "There are things I'm scared to do because of how people might think of me if I do them," which under many circumstances is perfectly reasonable ("I probably shouldn't murder that yapping dog") and under other circumstances less reasonably ("If I approach that woman less than perfectly, something horrible but hard to specify will happen.")
Even an unreasonable reaction leads to real anxiety, and that is a serious issue for the person dealing with it. Did I say "People have anxiety and they should get over it, those weaklings"? No. I said "I often have crippling anxiety around women." It can be a serious problem, on a personal level.
Women's fear is that "Any given guy *might actually attack or rape me*." Do they then shy away from every person? No, but the consequences of being wrong aren't embarrassment. They're, uh, let's see… Assault and/or rape.
That's a difference in type, not degree. One's an internal issue, one is very much external.
I see you also have multiple other conversations going on, and I'm sure some of this is touched on, but I don't have time right now to do more than respond to your specific response to me.
"I see you also have multiple other conversations going on, and I'm sure some of this is touched on, but I don't have time right now to do more than respond to your specific response to me. "
Ah don't worry about it. Appreciate the courtesy of a direct reply!
"Even an unreasonable reaction leads to real anxiety, and that is a serious issue for the person dealing with it. Did I say "People have anxiety and they should get over it, those weaklings"? No. I said "I often have crippling anxiety around women." It can be a serious problem, on a personal level.
Women's fear is that "Any given guy *might actually attack or rape me*." Do they then shy away from every person? No, but the consequences of being wrong aren't embarrassment. They're, uh, let's see… Assault and/or rape. "
Again, it's not simply a matter of "I get anxious around women". It's "if I fuck this up, I might end up in jail (where odds are high of being raped), or beaten up by some vigilante, or socially vilified and ostracised".
Both people are concerned about their personal safety.
Sorry, but I find it rather dubious that Aaronson would ask for a chemical castration because he was simply scared of being embarassed
Look, I know the Atwood quote (or similar) is fashionable to plaster under topics of this kind, but it really, REALLY is complete and utter bollocks. You don't get to tell men what their fears actually *are*, never mind whether they're reasonable or not. Fucking hell, few if any are doing that with the fears women are expressing re. SR.
In a survey of what men and women dreaded most in a blind date, the majority of the men's answer was that the woman would be fat. The women's general answer was that the man would be a murderer.
This is somehow both awful and funny to me. These men realize that, if the meet the woman, and she's not attractive to them, they're require to neither sleep with or date this woman. The worst consequence is that people might see the man in public with a fat woman. Which obviously is the worst possible thing ever.
"Again, it's not simply a matter of "I get anxious around women". It's "if I fuck this up, I might end up in jail (where odds are high of being raped), or beaten up by some vigilante, or socially vilified and ostracised". "
1) fumbling a 'can I get your number?' does not lead to jail. We have this thing called the justice system, which is flawed in many ways, but not this one.
Things that will (hopefully probably) lead to jail: punching someone; stealing a car; putting your penis inside someone who has demonstrated that they don't want it there; sexually touching someone who is under the age of consent.
Things that will not get you sent to jail, ever, in the current system: bothering women on the train; hugging someone who doesn't want to be hugged; asking for someone's number; making lewd jokes, even a lot of them; walking within three feet of someone; forcing someone to walk within three feet of you.
Fearing going to jail for approaching someone with romantic intent is irrational, and therefore internal. It is not going to lead to jail, ever, unless you actually assault them and leave evidence that that is the case.
We have this thing called 'innocent until proven guilty', that unfortunately results in many, many people who have assaulted women not being sent to jail, but also protects people who haven't from the same.
2) Batman is not real. Neither is the Punisher, or Green Arrow. Fearing vigilante justice for a romantic approach, if you haven't actually assaulted someone is fairly irrational, given that most people agree that "Can I get your number?" is not a horrible thing to do. Obviously, nothing can guarantee your physical safety, but hey. If you do get beaten up? *That* person will likely be sent to jail.
3) Social ostracism and shaming will not happen unless a) your acquaintances and friends are jerks, b) you have actually physically assaulted someone and they can prove it.
These fears are internal, because they are irrational. These things are highly, highly unlikely to happen in the real world.
These fears are also far more irrational than assessing each stranger you interact with on a case by case basis to determine your level of trust and how much interaction you wish to have and the nature of that interaction.
For example, if someone of any gender got strangely insistent with me about getting in a car with them, I would likely end the interaction because I felt unsafe. With a man it would be a combination of Schrödinger's Rapist and Schrödinger's Kidnapper with the balance tilted to SR. With a woman, the balance would be tilted towards Schrödinger's Kidnapper very heavily with an element of SR.
"These fears are also far more irrational than assessing each stranger you interact with on a case by case basis to determine your level of trust and how much interaction you wish to have and the nature of that interaction. "
Oh yes. So much more irrational.
I think you do not understand the way that actual sexual predators get treated, particularly by other men. "Oh, he's such a nice guy!" "Oh, you must have misunderstood!" "Oh, he told me you wanted it!" The women I know are terrified to label ACTUAL sexual predators as predators because of the consequences, primarily from men but also from women. When sexual predators ACTUALLY get treated as badly as Aaronson imagines, let's talk. Until then, fuck that guy for expecting other people to suffer injustice so that he doesn't have to feel anxious.
"Where's the recognition for his choice of boundaries there?"
What are you defining boundaries as? Because he wasn't setting boundaries to protect his physical safety. What he was saying was that other people setting boundaries made him uncomfortable. Even if those boundaries largely weren't directed specifically at him and were completely reasonable, like having an in-office seminar on how to recognize, prevent, and report sexual harassment. If that's his "boundary" then what I'm getting is that his "boundary" is that other people shouldn't have boundaries.
And I don't think that's what he meant.
"Where's the respect for their experience?"
It's been said over and over in the comments that the difference is that actually none of the things he feared were things he EXPERIENCED. He did not get decried as a harasser or a creep for daring to speak to a woman. He did not get mocked and thrown out of science, or brought to a supervisor's office to explain himself, or anything like that. The fear was something he gave himself. Compared to the women who actually EXPERIENCED sexual harassment on a regular basis.
Yes feminists can be problematic, and hypocritical. You know who the first people to call them out are? Other feminists. Go to any article on xojane or jezebel or feminists websites that you could describe as problematic and you can find at least one comment thread where everyday women(you know? the women who make up the movement) criticizing the article or you could raise your own concerns and find at least one woman who is sympathetic.The difference between feminists and some of the men commenting on this article is that feminists will attempt to listen and understand. I'm going to level with you. I know how frustrating it is to deal with people who are feminists in name only who don't really want equality so much as they want patriarchy at their convenience. I get frustrated when I see those people championing against the very language and attitudes they themselves use and posses. I chose not to surround myself with those people or read their articles. It also helps to realize that I poses some problematic attitudes as well. It helps to know that while I am frustrated about the above that their are WOC who are frustrated that I call out racism when I see it but don't examine my own sexist behavior. We're all dealing with it man.
"Yes feminists can be problematic, and hypocritical. You know who the first people to call them out are? Other feminists."
Really not the case IME. Maybe a handful of exceptions, but most would rather ringfence their own group from criticism.
I'm quite happy to acknowledge those exceptional feminists exist, but to identify with the movement or refrain from calling it out on the dumber stuff its members do? Fuck no. I don't think it's much help to either gender, tbh.
"The difference between feminists and some of the men commenting on this article is that feminists will attempt to listen and understand."
Again, not in my experience. I get as het-up as I do about this issue because while I'm not a nerdy niceguy anymore I was in the past. Now, I'm pretty sure thinking back I got my hangups from tropes in popular culture and evangelical Christianity, two things feminists have no problem whatsoever in challenging. It doesn't seem that implausible to me that a guy who read Dworkin as a scared, awkward teen might have internalised the same sort of hangup from reading that het intercourse in a patriarchal culture is rape. And appeals to "but conteeeext" like Harris does ring about as sincere as gay-bashing Christians doing the same. It's a get-out.
And yet will feminists accept criticism of this kind, the sort of criticism they regularly dish out to mass media and religion? Based on the reaction to Aaronson's comment – many apparently will not.
Sympathetic is not what I would describe the typical feminist reaction to niceguys to be. I felt entitled to very little, and certainly not to female attention, but it's rather annoying to be constantly told what my feelings really were by a bunch of people who don't know the first thing about me. Not least when those people would freak if you ever dared to do the same to them. To be quite honest, I think their reaction is utterly inhuman and cold, never mind hypocritical. I rarely see women being called out for Nice Girl Syndrome ™, even though it happens all the time.
I am glad such feminists like you exist, but you are by far and away not representative of your group online.
Profiling suggests women are somehow targeting men for negative attention rather than just avoiding them.
I bet people who are actually racially profiled would LOVE to get that kind of profiling.
I think the whole category of "nerd" is close to meaningless in this context. You can't know anything about a person based on the fact that they like superhero movies or video games precisely because these things are so popular. The men who are at a disadvantage with women are ones who have particular life histories and personality traits which may also lead them to develop "nerdy" interests but that is not really the key issue.
Not everyone who likes Batman and works in Silicon Valley has trouble with women and likewise not everyone who has trouble with women is all that technically minded.
And of course it is also possible for nerds to be assholes and for assholes to be nerds, these are all largely meaningless categories.
So I do feel that you and Laurie Penny and the rest are doing a kind of bait-and-switch by saying that nerds are now popular and therefore have nothing to worry about. Those who identify with Aaronson's post would do so regardless of how much their interests overlap with what's marketed by the big media companies.
While you pay lip service to the idea that privilege isn't a single absolute axis, you still end up arguing as if it were, by saying things like "One of the privileges of being a man – even a nerdy man – is that we’re shielded by virtue of our gender from what so many geeky women go through… but that doesn’t mean we don’t try to claim the same level of injustice." Isn't it possible that while we are shielded from many things that women go through, we still suffer the same level of injustice, but in different ways?
But I understand that the core of your argument is that as "nerds" the solution to our romantic woes is in our hands and to argue otherwise is counterproductive. But women have models in their minds the same as men do. The article you linked about how women tend to be hired less often than men for the same job in certain fields discusses how this discrimination is less a result of over sexism than implicit stereotypes than live in the minds of both men and women. Why then are you so resistant to the idea that there are certain stereotypes of what a male partner should look like, and that those who don't fit into these stereotypes are disproportionately rejected?
An argument I have seen come up often in these discussions is that nobody has it easy with romance. I realize that this is true. And in the same way, few people have their ideal employment and their ideal salary, but nonetheless there is supposedly a salary gap between men and women. In the same way I would argue that there is a "romance gap" such that certain men really will have a more difficult time as a result of gender norms, and it's not just because they don't show their interest.
This is not a trivial matter of course, since even if you would seriously argue that one's romantic and sexual success should not at all influence one's happiness, or that one's happiness is not imporant, then even in our modern world this has significant economic implications as well. People who have a partner and can rely on that partner for support have greater economic freedom and prosperity.
Where Aaronson's post comes into this for me is, in years of interacting with women online and offline, I have come to the conclusion that for the most part they just do not see me as a potential sexual or romantic partner because I don't fit some of their ideas about what that kind of person should be like. And it has become increasingly clear to me that by expressing my interest in women who are never interested in me I am doing nothing more than contributing to the overall background noise of unwanted advances that women are subjected to. I know that if and when women fantasize about being approached by a man they are interested in, it is never someone like me, and that makes me wonder how to justify expressing my interest.
I don't lay this at the doorstep of feminism for the most part – I do think that stuff like the street harassment videos show a real problem from the perspective of women. What I am seeing however is that I am nothing but a problem in this, an unwanted element who if he had any respect for others would simply disappear. In a society in which we seek to eliminate anything which is annoying or obnoxious to women (surely a laudable goal), we must also elminate men like me, and I wonder where to go from there.
Careful.
You're straying into the same line of thinking as Aaronson when you use the term "injustice" in regards to romantic success. In situations where two people have to choose voluntarily, we can't talk about injustice without implying coersion at some point.
In the same vein, I feel really sorry for a subset of african immigrants who don't meet many of the majority population, sit in their ghettos and feel detached from society. It'd be really cool of me if I looked for a passtime or a meeting place where I'd encounter these guys. They would get the opportunity to practice the language, they'd feel more grounded in society. I know about people who take such things upon themselves and that's super cool of them. It's an invaluable service that can change lives even more sometimes than good housing and job programs.
But again, nobody can be coerced. Nobody can say it's your duty to befriend and spend time with this or that person without violating personal integrity.
So when it comes to human relationships, friends or otherwise the best we can do is just to try and prepare the person who is missing out to do the best he or she can to change their situation.
And still there are no guarantees, and yes, life is unfair and sucks that way but what can you do, really?
Yep. Justice is being free from negative outcomes like bullying, name calling, etc. and being allowed to pursue your life and leisure free from harassment. It is being ignored by people rather than mocked.
Injustice is forcing anyone to have romantic and sexual interactions with someone they do not choose
I never suggested that anyone should be coerced and I take umbrage at your implication that I am some kind of ideological rapist.
Social justice advocates talk about injustice caused by nothing more than preconceptions all the time. Changing people's opinions is a widely acknowledged part of social change.
To twist my words into saying that there should be some kind of law that women should be required to sleep with me is a (probably intentional) misrepresentation of my comment.
"Why then are you so resistant to the idea that there are certain stereotypes of what a male partner should look like, and that those who don't fit into these stereotypes are disproportionately rejected?"
I don't think anyone is resistant to the idea that there are traits that will generally be considered more attractive than others, and people who get rejected more than most other people. Why you think this is exclusive to men is beyond me, though.
And what you wríte has the smell of coercion because you compare jobs to romantic relationships. I think it is widely agreed that people are entitled to be considered for jobs based on their skills and competences and that passing them over because of things like gender or race is wrong. No one is entitled to be considered
for a romantic relationship.
What? no!
I didn't mean to imply that you were an ideological rapist (whatever that means). I only tried to illustrate what the reasoning means when carried out to its logical extreme.
Do you always do this btw? Internalise everything critical everyone says to you and magnify it to horrific proportions?
You're kind of making a monster out of me, but I'm cool with it because I suspect I'm not talking to you but the devil on your back.
I'm sure that social justice advocates (I guess I fall somewhere within their ranks) don't want people to take it as personal insults the way you do. I'm sure anti-racists don't mean for people to take their message "Oh hey, interaction is really tricky what with the structural racism and discrimination. I'll just try and avoid all dark skinned people, because that way I can at least avoid screwing up".
Similarily, I think that feminists silently grieve sometimes over men who swallows a disproportionate level of guilt and withdraws without actually getting it. A responsibility not claimed is a responsibility that can't be betrayed after all.
If you come across some unhinged SJW who doesn't seem to want things to be better but wants to see half the population reduced to nothing, don't listen. They are in their own personal hell.
What would all of this be worth in the end if our response to social problems would be to withdraw and detach? True, the cat calls are gone except for the few incorrigable who don't listen anyway. Everyone else go into their respective bubble careful not to interact, being of no use to anybody else, but above all, of no use to themselves either.
You are not useless. You aren't a "guilty oppressor by association". A person who has passively withdrawn is neutral IMO. You are untapped potential to really enrich your life and that of someone elses, if the real you is allowed to come out.
Don't worry about privileges, social structures or whatever the fuck right now, Worry about YOU, without pushing blame on others, or trying to position yourself against others. Worry about social problems when you actually have others who deeply depend on you.
Only people who can sympathise and love themselves can do the same to others.
We don't expect someone who's tormented to champion any cause. It wouldn't be fair.
What I am seeing however is that I am nothing but a problem in this, an unwanted element who if he had any respect for others would simply disappear.
You need therapy. I'm not saying this in a disrespectful or dismissive way. It's terrible that you feel this, and I have a huge amount of sympathy for you. And what you're describing here is self-hatred. It's projected outward onto women, but it's you hating yourself. It isn't true that "women" see you as an annoying, obnoxious problem. We are a heterogeneous group. Even if your experience tells you that some women do see you that way, you can't generalise from that to all of us. At the same time, there is no woman in the world who can fix this problem for you, and when you project the problem out onto "women" you run the risk of expecting waay too much of the women you do get involved with, or stand a chance of getting involved with, and conscious or subconscious awareness of that burden will drive them away before things even get started.
It is a real problem, and it is genuinely terrible. I've also often felt that the world would be better off if I disappeared. I think your brain is latching on to "respect for women" as a reason to justify the self-destructive feelings. Because I am a woman, my brain had different rationalisations. I've found ways to fix it. I hope you do too. And I'm sure you'll find the right person for you, if that's what you find you want, after you've done a bit of work on healing the self-hatred. Good luck.
There are many men who experience self-hatred and nevertheless they get laid. Indeed I would say that Western culture is built on such characters. There are plenty of women, too, who experience self-hatred, and they certainly are not lacking in the attention of male suitors.
It seems a tall order that I should have to fix all my flaws before I can even get started whereas plenty of others are happily knocking boots while being very flawed individuals. It seems like a typical Impossible Quest, like when a princess tells the hero of the tale to go and fetch her some precious jewel from a faraway land, and then she will consider him, but when he returns she merely sends him on another quest.
Why is it so difficult to accept that maybe the obvious fact that I am a small, awkward little shit is where the problem lies? Obviously women want a suave, calm protector hulk, a bear not a mouse, or at least a sheepdog. This is obvious to me. Honestly, telling me that solving psychological problems that few people in history have ever been able to solve for themselves is insulting my intelligence. I see the difference between the men women are interested in and myself very clearly and the difference does not lie between their ears.
I think that Scott Alexander's previous post on the subject does a good job of explaining what I'm talking about: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing…
I quote, and please explain to me why Henry did not have to get his problems sorted out before women were interested in him (I bet he was taller than 5'7):
– I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife.
So I asked the obvious question: “What happened to your first four wives?”
“Oh,” said the patient, “Domestic violence issues. Two of them left me. One of them I got put in jail, and she’d moved on once I got out. One I just grew tired of.”
“You’ve beaten up all five of your wives?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yeah,” he said, without sounding very apologetic.
“And why, exactly, were you beating your wife this time?” I asked.
“She was yelling at me, because I was cheating on her with one of my exes.”
“With your ex-wife? One of the ones you beat up?”
“Yeah.”
“So you beat up your wife, she left you, you married someone else, and then she came back and had an affair on the side with you?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” said Henry.
I wish, I wish I wish, that Henry was an isolated case. But he’s interesting more for his anomalously high number of victims than for the particular pattern.
Last time I talked about these experiences, one of my commenters linked me to what was later described as the only Theodore Dalrymple piece anyone ever links to. Most of the commenters saw a conservative guy trying to push an ideological point, and I guess that’s part of it. But for me it looked more like the story of a psychiatrist from an upper-middle-class background suddenly realizing how dysfunctional and screwed-up a lot of his patients are and having his mind recoil in horror from the fact – which is something I can sympathize with. Henry was the worst of a bad bunch, but nowhere near unique.
When I was younger – and I mean from teeanger hood all the way until about three years ago – I was a nice guy. In fact, I’m still a nice guy at heart, I just happen to mysteriously have picked up girlfriends. And I said the same thing as every other nice guy, which is “I am a nice guy, how come girls don’t like me?”
There seems to be some confusion about this, so let me explain what it means, to everyone, for all time.
It does not mean “I am nice in some important cosmic sense, therefore I am entitled to sex with whomever I want.”
It means: “I am a nicer guy than Henry.”
Or to spell it out very carefully, Henry clearly has no trouble with women. He has been married five times and had multiple extra-marital affairs and pre-marital partners, many of whom were well aware of his past domestic violence convictions and knew exactly what they were getting into. Meanwhile, here I was, twenty-five years old, never been on a date in my life, every time I ask someone out I get laughed at, I’m constantly teased and mocked for being a virgin and a nerd whom no one could ever love, starting to develop a serious neurosis about it.
And here I was, tried my best never to be mean to anyone, gave to charity, pursuing a productive career, worked hard to help all of my friends. I didn’t think I deserved to have the prettiest girl in school prostrate herself at my feet. But I did think I deserved to not be doing worse than Henry.
You realize that all of the people involved in that scenario are people who have serious problems, right? People who get involved with partners, and continue to stay involved with them once they are aware that said partners are abusive, usually have terrible self-esteem/self-worth/etc? And that these are really, really shitty relationships? I'm pretty sure I'd consider my not-so-happily single status to be infinitely better than "married to a spouse I beat, while cheating on her with an ex-wife, whom I also beat". That's not doing well. That's not even doing "okay". And I think beating 5 of your wives qualifies as "has trouble with women".
Also, for the love of pizza, this idea that all women want a "hulk" or a "protector" needs to die in a fire. I do not want those things. Many women I know don't want those things. Maybe the women you want to date want those things, but you're ignoring an entire contingent of women out there who don't.
Oh, and of the three guys I've dated, one was 5'5''. Know how many fucks I gave? Zero. I would guess that there are far more men out there who won't date fat women than there are women who won't date short men.
At least Henry's wives consented to be in a relationship with him. "I deserve to be doing better than Henry" – with whom? If anyone wanted to be with you, they would. So the implication is that because you, what, don't beat people?, therefore others are not entitled to their preferences that don't include you. That's not just gross and entitled, it's the same pathology that drives abusers like Henry.
That's exactly my point. I'm unattractive and what psychological issues I do or don't have has nothing to do with it.
Except that means that the most likely people you are going to attract are…women who have deep psychological issues. And that combination most likely will not end well for either party.
I think the useful point of the Henry story is that there is no universal standard of attractiveness. Almost everyone is attractive to somebody. The number of people attracted to you as you are now may be small, and they may not be the people you are interested in, but you can think about how to be a more attractive version of you instead of conforming to some other standard.
I think the useful point of Henry's story is that getting laid should not be the most important thing to you. Yeah, guys like Henry do great. They do it through predatory behavior. If someone's looking at that going "I should be doing that well", its a tacit equivalence of the kind of relationships Henry has and how he goes about getting them to relationships that do not involve coercion. Its really only one more step to asking why you're not "doing as well" as the guy who uses roofies.
"I'm unattractive and what psychological issues I do or don't have has nothing to do with it. "
Nah, psychological issues can make a HELL of a difference between what women do and don't find attractive.
And honestly, judging just from your comments here, just because you are "nicer" than a guy who beats his partners regularly, that doesn't really make you "nice." Having a cold makes you healthier than someone with the swine flu, but not actually healthy.
"I am nicer than someone who regularly beats people" has to be the lowest bar I have ever seen. That is not even a minimum standard of niceness, it is a prerequisite for even being considered for the niceness scale.
It's definitely a red flag of danger. I learned a long time ago that people who define their good qualities by the bad qualities that they don't have or that they refrain from are really Not Good People To Be Around.
"I don't beat women. I /could/, but I don't."
(Alternately: "I don't beat women. I'm too short/weak to do that."<implied "but if I was built like an athlete, who knows?")
There's a line from "Komarr," by Bujold, that I love:
“He never hit me, you know.”
What an obituary. When I go down into the ground at last, as God is my judge, I pray my best-beloved may have better to say of me than ‘He didn’t hit me.’
Not to mention that leaves out all the other forms of abuse.
I wonder if there's room to thread the needle here. Obviously nobody is entitled to another person's affection, time, or body. And, everybody is entitled to their own preferences. But, is there room to say something like "each individual choice is legitimate and no coercive power should be used to change their choices or preferences, but it is, in some meta cosmic sense, unfair that Henry gets relationships while Scott doesn't"?
Now, I suppose the counterargument would be that this sense of unfairness is not useful, or even meaningless, given that there is nothing to be done about it. Probably, but maybe is there room to express the emotions behind it? Or is that still problematic?
Maybe I just don't see Scott as a better person than Henry. Does he do less direct harm to individuals? Absolutely. But I do not trust his testimony about being a good person, given the evidence of his behavior and attitudes, and particularly given that the things he lists as virtues barely exceed the self-serving. From him specifically, yes, I dont fucking want to hear it. From other guys? Yes, I think there's room to thread the needle, depending on who they are and how they do it.
I'll agree that its unfair that Henry is able to continue to abuse and coerce people to get what he wants, yes. I think defining whether you're "doing better than Henry" by the number of times each of you has gotten to stick your dick in someone is troublesome at best.
Since I'm sure you consider your behavior above reproach, I will instead define whether I'm doing better than Gentleman Johnny by the number of times each of us has gotten to stick our dicks in someone. Which I'm sure I'll lose by an order of magnitude. And I'm sure you're not 5'7 either.
The point isn't the guidepost, the point is the metric.
In other words, that sentiment is disgusting, and when GJ put it that way, I knew he was being hyperbolically crude for rhetorical purposes. The fact that you took is seriously actually has a physical revulsion effect on me — I literally gagged at your message.
Consider the possibility that your problem isn't that you're short, it's that you come across as a misogynistic, crude, asshole.
I think before we go any further we have to discuss your sex-negativity.
BWAHAHAHAHA! At least now i know you're just trolling.
Yeah. Should not poke. And yet…
Seriously! That statement is laughable
Dude, sex negativity has nothing to do with crudity and misogyny. Trust me.
I am all for sex. I am for sex under lots of circumstances. I'm for sex with lots of people. Keeping score by how many times you "put your dick in someone" is still vile, and has nothing to do with sex. It turns sexual partners — people with whom you should be SHARING something, even if that something is a quick fuck in a stairwell with the hot masked stranger at the Halloween party — into objects on whom you're acting.
In other words, fuck off.
In fact, I am pretty much for sex for EVERYONE BUT YOU.
Oh my. . .that sounds like about the hottest thing ever. The masked stranger thing, not the keeping score thing.
Have never done.
…kind of want to?
Have. . .had similar but less outright sex involving experience. Feel free to message me over at the Nerdlounge for details.
What is the difference between "sharing something" and "putting your dick in someone"? Your words seem euphemistic, why do you need to hide behind such language unless you have some kind of shame about sexuality? Literally speaking nothing more is shared. And of course for every penis insertion there is a corresponding penis reception, and the other person could be keeping track as well … or not as they wish.
To me it is all about how quantitatively minded someone is. Some people like to keep track of everything, others don't. And numbers help us be objective where otherwise emotion would intrude.
I'll give you an example of why this is relevant – any girl I talk to will assure me that of course we're friends, of course she likes me, of course I'm attractive, she sure hopes I find the person for me – but I believe these are all lies. The only possible objective demonstration of my worth to her would be a penis insertion and since this is denied to me but granted to lots of others who are clearly better in some way I have yet to define (many people here insist it's not because they're taller), I must face the fact that I'm nothing.
If I didn't treat things so rigorously, I might actually be fooled in thinking that I mattered to these people, and then obviously disappointed after that. Or worse, that they mattered to me, which is also an unreliable emotion.
"What is the difference between "sharing something" and "putting your dick in someone"?"
Seriously? Because one is about two people having an experience together in which they are both invested, and the other is about you doing something to someone else. Your partner plays no role in "putting your dick in someone" other than existing in the right place.
I'm not talking about euphemisms, or I wouldn't be discussing stairwell sex.
I am talking about actions with two participants, instead of actions with an actor and and an object. "We fucked" versus "I fucked her." If your partner doesn't get verbs of their own, or share your verbs, you're thinking about it wrong.
"What is the difference between "sharing something" and "putting your dick in someone"?"
One of those guys is a lot more likely to have anyone interested in sleeping with him the second time around.
"And of course for every penis insertion there is a corresponding penis reception…"
Penis insertion and corresponding reception. That sounds like just the bestest sex ever
OK, rather than throw my hands in the air and shout "Foo!" which would confuse my co-workers, let's try this.
Do you see a difference in your success between someone who really wants to have sex with you in particular and someone who reluctantly has sex with you because you (not to say you would do this) just will not stop badgering her about it until she does?
Both of them fit the "put your dick in something" category but only one of them is enjoyable for both of you.
It seems ridiculous but this is approximately how I had to think about it before it actually did "click" for me. This was recent.
I think I framed it a little more broadly. I still allow for the notion that Henry might very well be happier than I am, for instance. But I would still object very strongly to having my "viewpoint", my whatever-it-is that makes me think of myself as me, inserted into Henry's body and mind and personality traits and made to bear the responsibility of his actions even though after that point "I" would also be fine with it. I think this is part of what defines a value in the first place.
Call it your soul?
That works, except that I keep wanting to convey an idea that is a little more specific and a little less tied to religion than "soul" would connote.
I don't really believe I've got a soul or a spirit. But then, when I type with "my" hands, which part of me is it that owns the hands?
If my entire mind were forcibly transplanted into Henry, I'd just have a lot of new problems and I wouldn't lose my current ones; I obviously wouldn't magically be more confident or have a more attractive personality (whatever that's like) or know more things or have more talents.
And if I had Henry's mind and personality and everything as well, by definition I wouldn't really give a shit about the things that make me not want to be Henry, because I would literally be the kind of person that is sufficiently comfortable making the choices Henry made.
Yet for a reason that I am insufficiently holy to articulate without relying on the conceit of a "soul", I do strongly prefer being a mostly-harmless but constantly lonely and occasionally suicidal person over the idea of being vaguely similar to a "Henry".
So, metaphysics it is, I suppose.
Locus of perception?
(In case I did not phrase that quite clearly enough, I want to add that I can think of many people whose lives I would prefer to inhabit, even if—especially if that meant taking on their problems, difficult times, responsibilities, and any other mental and physical qualities, instead of my own. Happiness/self-satisfaction is a consideration in the selection of that set, but it is not the only one. In any case, the "Henry"s of the world are not in that set.)
How about defining whether you're doing better than Henry by whether or not you can look at yourself in the mirror in the morning? Would you really want to be "doing as well" as Henry if it meant you had to act like Henry?
But yeah, by all means attribute my success to having three extra inches of leg bones. That's probably it.
Nerdlovers tremble before my mighty leg bones! They are many and long!
But I _don't_ act like Henry. That's the whole point. I'm not looking for justification to act like Henry. I'm looking for ways to be a "decent" person and still get the "results" I want. I guess if you're a former "nice guy" this should be easy to understand. You look in the mirror and while yeah you don't beat and abuse people, you're all alone, and you don't matter to anybody. You go to social occasions and you say hello to people and then you leave and it's like you were never even there and you could have just stayed home and gotten drunk by yourself for all the difference that it makes. And that makes it hard to look in the mirror too.
"I'm looking for ways to be a "decent" person and still get the "results" I want."
And there's lots of advice about that in other articles on this site.
But then what does Henry even have to do with it? I can pretty much guarantee you that he's not getting the women because he hits women. He's getting them because of other traits — NOT just physical attractiveness — that he has. Maybe he presents a protective, cherishing vibe, and appeals to women who like that. Maybe he comes across as vulnerable and damaged, and they want to fix him (a message a lot of women get from media about our role in life — fixing damaged men). Maybe he exudes raw physical magnetism (which is not, by the way, purely about appearance). Maybe he comes across as a little bit dangerous, and they're digging that. Maybe he makes really fucking amazing origami chihuahuas.
What do you do, other than whine a lot and make the women here feel like we're walking fuckholes to you?
Maybe he pushes against women's boundaries to find the ones who will let him ignore them. Bullies know how to find a soft target.
Right, but in my experience, even women in abusive relationships could at one time point to things that drew them to their abuser. There was something they liked about him. I'm sure he did push to see who'd let him get away with it, but they probably loved him, and while it's possible, I suspect they didn't love him because he was abusive, but for other factors in spite of the abuse.
Also, not every abusive relationship starts that way. Things like job loss, pregnancy, financial strain, etc. can trigger abusive behavior. The potential might have been in the partner the whole time but when things were going well it did not manifest. Once manifested, it can be hard to believe things will not go back to how they were before the trigger.
I think there's a connection between why he gets them and the fact that he beats them. Namely, that he acts on his emotions without considering too much how they affect other people. Or as people like to say, he's "being himself." It seems that kind of indifference is attractive to people.
And what's this complaining about feeling like you're a "walking fuckhole"? I think I am probably just a "walking nothing" to you, which is hardly better.
Not "to people." To SOME people – in fact, to very specific people. For example, I will tell you that men who act on their emotions without considering how they affect others get ejected from my social circle very damn fast. Thoughtful, considerate, kind, generous, loving dudes, on the other hand, get set up on dates and invited to racy parties and recommended to other people I know as a Good Person To Have Around.
As for you, do you really want to be with someone who expects you to treat them in a shitty, inconsiderate way? Would you feel good about yourself if you were in a relationship where you continually treated your partner badly because you didn't think about her perspective?
Dude, 98% of people I see every day are invisible to me. Or possibly more.
Right now, you are not a "walking nothing" to me. You are a "fucking asshole" to me, which is very different. There are very few people on this site that have commented often that are "nothings" to me. I know them, I have a sense of how they'll respond to things. Some of them I cannot read without wanting to hit something. Others I almost always agree with. Some split the difference.
But the idea that someone might evoke an emotional reaction from me — might flirt, and date, and get me to care about him — not because he cares about me, but because I am an interchangeable vagina to him? That's incredibly gross.
And here's another thing to think about: if you feel invisible, you can choose how to become visible. Clearly today, you've chosen "act like a jackass on a popular blog." But you might have chosen, "Wear an interesting shirt," or, "Lead a food drive," or "Get good at dancing." You have ways to become visible. It's a lot harder for someone who's been shoved into an "object" box to ever be seen as anything else.
I think you have me mistaken for someone else. I would never manipulate someone emotionally for the sake of increasing my PIC (penis insertion count). That is not the nature of what we're talking about. I try to be honest about everything.
Yes, yes it is the nature of what we're talking about. When you say "Henry is more successful than me", the only way in which he is more successful is in the penis insertion department. He's not happier. His partners aren't happy. He doesn't have a good job. He's not a role model. He's a guy who gets lots of tail.
But every time we've pushed back against your notion that somehow Henry is winning just because he's had sex with more women than you, you've doubled down on it.
Let me lay it out really plainly — Henry is probably not a better human being than you (though honest to God, I'm starting to doubt that). That means YOU WIN. You don't beat women. You are a greater success as a human being.
Henry was an abuser. Abusers (wait for it) manipulate people emotionally for the sake of increasing their PIC. You are claiming that the fact that he did that better than you means he "won".
There's been no suggestion here that you care at all about whether a woman is smart, funny, into historical novels, enjoys music, or likes playing freeze tag in her pajamas. All you care about, by words that you have INSISTED ON DEFENDING, is whether she lets you "stick it in her."
This suggests to me that any interest you might show in a woman in a person would be secondary to how much sex you can get from her.
If this is not what you meant, then maybe you should reconsider this whole "keeping score" concept, and the way that you seem to feel you're the only person that matters in your love life.
Or else get a fucking blow up doll.
Ok, two things.
*Obviously* if she isn't interested in my penis then it doesn't matter whether I stick it in her or not. The purpose is to measure my objective value to other people which is *not* established by how many women reluctantly allow me to penetrate their dry wincing genitals while they cringe and post on Facebook about how they're looking forward to Game of Thrones tonight. Of course I want it to be a mutual interest otherwise it is meaningless.
*However* I don't see what the person's other interests have to do with it. Maybe just because I'm not very experienced in such things but I don't see why penis-vagina enjoyment should have any relationship with a person's interest in historical novels.
I might be interested in a woman for the same reasons why I am interested in any human, BUT there is an additional reason to be interested in women, *above the baseline*, which relates to their ownership of a vagina.
Am I thinking about this the wrong way? How would you rephrase this?
You're being stupid on purpose, so I'm not going to seriously attempt to discuss this matter with ya.
Instead I have a meeting to go to–and then a late dinner date with a very cute nerdboy who happens to be 5'6". We will be chatting about our shared interests, plans for the next month, and MAKING OUT. There will be no penis insertion, because he's recovering from the death flu.
😀
Don't catch death flu. But have a REALLY GOOD TIME. 😀
Well you are in the sense that you're talking about the "above the baseline" interests before establishing that you actually are at that baseline. Basically, it's really hard to have any good meaningful sex with someone until you establish that you're going to treat them as a human being and not a glorified blow-up doll.
And no, you can't say "of course I treat women as human beings!" because 1. Anyone can say that, in fact most people do and 2. There are tons of people who say that, and demonstrate otherwise with other words/actions. It's on you to prove that you aren't such a person.
I will say, as a general rule, having motives for sex other then "enjoy myself and help someone else enjoy themselves too" is never going to come across as treating someone else as a human being. People are usually ok with having sex in the name of having fun with someone else. But a LOT of women object to someone trying to have sex with them in the name of upping their self-worth, penis-insertion count, social status, etc. That's because her body does not exist for those things…it exists FOR HER, her benefit, her pleasure, her needs. Not yours. You have your own body for that.
If you want to ask a woman to give you sex just to make you feel better about yourself, you're welcome to try. but trust me, "Hey can you fuck me so my pals will think I'm awesome?" is a horrible pickup line. Furthermore, some women are capable of figuring out such intentions even if you don't say them. Ergo having any ulterior motive at all is generally not going to do good things for your chances of getting laid.
Way I see it, people ascribe positive intentions to people they like and negative intentions to people they don't like. Women don't look too closely at the intentions of men they're interested in, who are often no better than the rest (see Henry, again). It's only when they're not interested in someone that they start coming up with all these explanations about how you have to think about things "the right way".
Remember how others were trying to explain to you how you could come across better here and be given the benefit of the doubt more? Saying sweeping generalisations that "women don't look too closely at the intentions of men they're interested in, who are often no better than the rest" is not one of the things folks recommended you do.
Stop it with the sweeping judgments and sweeping condemnation of women. It doesn't make you look that swell, sir.
Oh look, you're ascribing intentions to people. . .
At this time you are not a walking nothing to me. You are a walking jerk (I would like to say worse), given your posts here. A nothing is preferable by a long shot. I feel indifferent to pleasantly polite to nothings. I feel hostile to jerks.
Some say a strong aversion is preferable to indifference…
Well, it seems you've succeeded in your goal of not being invisible, then. Although by that logic, you might as well invest in a giant chicken costume to wear whenever you go out.
Guy In Chicken Costume > Guy Who Acts Like Douchecanoe on Internets, hands down. And is more interesting.
Well you have certainly achieved that. Congrats
And you don't think you could maybe try for something on the positive side of indifference instead of the negative side? What you say and do makes a difference to how people are likely to feel about you.
Isn't that the thing about toddlers? They act out because they haven't learned to distinguish good attention from bad attention yet?
I thought they acted out because WANT COOOOOKKIIIIIIIEEE!
ETA: Oh, wait, no, that might be me I'm thinking of 😛
dickweeds say that. To justify being dickweeds.
"And what's this complaining about feeling like you're a "walking fuckhole"? I think I am probably just a "walking nothing" to you, which is hardly better."
If you don't think that "invisible" is significantly better than "object I can use for my pleasure", then you really have no business interacting with human beings.
Very few domestic abusers act this way all the time, though. They often come off as charming and kind in social settings, and maybe even for 95% in the relationship. They frequently apologize over and over for their behavior, and can be very believable. That's part of why it's so hard for the abused to leave.
You know, when you put it that way I know his great blog that's all about providing tips for how guys can be decent human beings and still meet women. . . even better, leg bones really don't come up.
You thinking about women as a monolith who all want the same thing out of men, and refuse to date short men, as well as you thinking that we are things to put your dick in, doesn't really seem like you being a "decent person". It sounds like you'd have to work on that part, first.
"And I'm sure you're not 5'7 either. "
GAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH
*hulk-like ripping of a shirt*
Wait, if you are hulk-like, the wimmins will want you!
Huh. Things might get awkward…
Yay thathat, all the women will throw themselves at your feet!!!
But then I'll just trip…
But at least they'll break your fall!
I wouldn't blame the fact that your 5'7 on why you're not having sex. It's not that tall but I've dated (and had sex with shorter) and I'm pretty tall myself.
For a moment, my brain interpreted that in reverse: "i don't think your lack of sex is making you shorter," and it made me laugh.
Dude, women's lack of interest in you has nothing to do with your height (seriously, 5'7'' is not that short). It has to do with your obvious hostility towards women.
But, but "Henry" is hostile to women.
Hol' a mom-en'.
Sorry, my tongue temporarily fused to the inside of my cheek for a moment there.
I don't see how that changes anything besides papering over the fact that there are a group of human beings in this story who are neither Scott nor Henry.
I would also agree with the assessment that I've seen nothing that indicates that Scott would be a particularly good romantic partner.
Why? What would be the point? Will it make Henry less attractive? Will it make Scott more attractive? It won't do anything. There is nothing of value in mulling over the unfairness of life. It is unhealthy, unproductive and ultimately time wasting. Your best bet is to take control of the only thing that you have control of, your own life. A better question would be "Why am I not attractive to people I want to be attractive to?"
Why is that a better question, if the answer is equally unknowable?
I don't know that it's a more useful question, but it's a question that at least doesn't play quite so lightly with the experiences of complete strangers who have been abused.
Or underhandedly blame the victims for their abuse because obviously they loved the qualities that made their partner, such as his indifference to controlling his emotions, as stated in this very thread.
That's true. I suppose I read "nothing of value" and assumed he was making some kind of claim that his recommended train of thought did not have nothing of value. I suppose "is a less harmful diversion" might be a value, but only for as long as it serves as a diversion.
ETA: I also made the mistake of implicitly parsing "better question" as "good question".
What women find attractive isn't unknowable. I'm sure all women like being treated like human beings and not interchangeable fleshlights. I'm sure all women like someone who is interesting and isn't boring. I'm sure all women like men who are well dressed and not a total slob. There is a ridiculous amount of good to be had by pondering why you are failing and seeking advice/adjusting your technique. What is the value of wondering how a wife beater finds his next victim?
What is the point of pondering "each individual choice is legitimate and no coercive power should be used to change their choices or preferences, but it is, in some meta cosmic sense, unfair that Henry gets relationships while Scott doesn't ?"
One more time through it, then: Henry has had multiple marriages. He has, during his adult life, on multiple occasions and from multiple people, heard the words "I love you" said with genuine feeling in them. He has physically touched people and they have physically touched him, and I'm not just referring to the hitting.
To be fair, the women in this story also deserve to be doing better than Henry, and they almost certainly aren't.
And to be correct, we've also already gone over why it's not a great comparison in the first place. I'm not trying to defend the value of previous statements; I just (still) question why you're so convinced your questions are any of any more use to (for example) me or Wisp than the rest.
When I ask why women don't want to date me, I may not know what the answer is, but I know what it isn't. I know because for all my anxieties about what other things I might do that are problematic that I haven't noticed, I know I don't think of women as interchangeable fleshlights or treat them as such. I know I have most of my life in order, and had a lot more of it in order last year. I know I have a sizable range of interests and hobbies, including some physical activities and some creative work.
I know I'm ace, and that makes it harder. I know I'm Asian, and that makes it harder, especially in a city where almost nobody else is Asian. But there are also plenty of aces and Asian men (okay, most of the aces I'm thinking of are women or especially outgoing and extroverted men) who get into relationships as happily as anyone else, and from what I've been able to gather they don't have a damned clue what the important differences are either.
If I do someday find someone who agrees to go on a date with me, let alone someone with whom I develop a romantic relationship, I'll have to attribute it all to luck. Looking for another explanation is equivalent to trying to find a general-case root cause of "love" or "attraction". In other words, the question is philosophical, not practical.
It is no less a philosophical question to wonder about notions of fairness, and notions of what people "deserve", need, want, earn, and so forth. Bob lives a life of kindness and charity and thoroughly despises himself through most of it, and Charlie is constantly selfish and cruel to everyone around him and yet feels secure and respected, and neither would trade for the other's life or lifestyle, but why is that? What does that say about the human psyche, or rather, the psyches of at least certain specific types of humans? Is there any further meaning to be gained from the observation that Alice briefly entertained the thought that she might like Charlie, or is that ultimately meaningless because she didn't end up liking either one of them?
I might have come off as hostile and I promise I wasn't trying to. I kind of wrote my comment in a hurry because I was cooking. Now that I look back at it my initial comment was worded funny. I'm curious as to how it came across to you?
The point I was trying to convey was that asking how to make yourself more attractive to women is going to be more practical than mulling over the fact that attraction is not fair. I guess I just don't understand why anyone want to spend time thinking about it. It may have been out of line for me to make a judgement based on my own personal beliefs.
I think there is room for both. I agree just wallowing in how unfair it all is is not useful. At the same time, I think there is also room for venting about things, too, that can be healthy if not practically useful.
You didn't really come off as hostile, by the way, just strongly disagreeing.
This exactly. Everyone is making this Henry thing about the abuse but the fact is he probably had some good times with all of his wives. The important thing is not that he beat them, the important thing is that they loved him. Nobody has ever said "I love you" to me and nobody ever will. People are saying, in essence, "that's because you're a really shitty person" but Henry is a shitty person too. So being a shitty person is not the reason why nobody loves someone.
People love people despite them being shitty true, but they don't love the shitty elements. Instead of focusing on what made Henry a shit, if you indeed insist on continuing to focus on this fellow at all, focus on what made him a success. What about him made women fall in love with him? It wasn't because he treated them badly, it was because when he wasn't being abusive he treated them really well. Was he charming? Was he funny? Was he a blast to go out with? Was he adventurous? Was he the king of romantic gestures?
What did he do to make women like him? Focus on that instead.
(look dude, I get it, you're really unhappy, the "nobody ever will" line is not the line of someone who's approaching dating sans emotion. But what do you want from people here? We've acknowledged dating is easier for some more than others, we've acknowledged that assholes do at times get the girl, what do you want from us? This is a site where we work to create practical solutions for dating problems. It's not the place to vent. Do you actually want our help, or do you just want to vent? If it's the latter, this might not be the site for you.)
My point is to push back against the article and support the two Scotts. I wouldn't have commented on an article giving dating advice because what would be the point? Those who take comfort in such advice can have it. But this article in my opinion makes the world a worse place by "femsplaining", if you will, telling the reader that his problems are all his fault and besides others have it so much worse.
Dr. Nerdlove takes the predictable position that the reason why the nerds have trouble is simply because they're entitled assholes, and any unfairness they see is actually just because of how entitled they are. Oh, and they should be happy that they don't get raped as much as women, what could they possibly have to complain about?
I think I've accomplished my purpose at least a little bit.
Also my perspective on the whole "unfairness" thing is, I think knowing it's not all your fault takes the edge off a little bit. It's like the "not taking rejection personally" thing that is often discussed on these types of sites. But the thing is they don't often talk about HOW not to take rejection personally. Often the advice is, "Just don't take anything personally" but that's how you become Henry. Or they say "There's 3.5 billion women in the world, one of them is sure to like you," which is also unhelpful.
I think it's not entirely useless to say "Because of who you are, your dating pool is smaller. That doesn't mean you're a piece of shit or you need to become someone else. You may go months and years of people ignoring you, yelling NO THANK YOU at the top of their lungs when it looks like you're about to talk to them, or just looking down at the ground and mumbling until you go away. This is not because you are a contemptible loser who should go die. People have certain cultural notions about how gender relations are supposed to work and you will not often meet the exceptions in places where traditional courtship takes place. The world is unfair and you may often find that others put in a lot less effort to get relationships or sex. You might indeed see them violating the very rules people tell you are crucial to success. You will also be told that your natural anger at this unfairness is precisely what makes you unattractive." I think there is some comfort in that. Something to lean against while moving forward.
No one is arguing that all nerds are entitled assholes. The Doc's point is that many nerds, like the Scotts, think that being a bullied nerd makes it impossible for nerds to be entitled assholes, when they are in fact demonstrating precisely the opposite. The "entitled asshole" subset of nerd culture looks different from how entitled assholes in other subcultures behave, but it's informed by the same underlying cultural misogyny filtered through nerd culture's very specific problems with women. I mean, when many guys' founding myth of nerddom is "I am so persecuted by jocks and women," it's hard to argue that nerd culture can't be toxic – and the Scotts are both pretty good examples of how that looks in practice.
As for what you've accomplished here … I suppose you've made it clear that you support the two Scotts, but it hasn't changed my opinion of them – only of you.
I think all victim cultures are toxic, which is not to say that they don't have a basis in reality. The culture of Jewish victimhood has enabled what I think is one of the greatest ongoing injustices in the world. It is based on persecution that was once very real but the pathological response it has resulted in has harmed millions of people. Womens' victim culture also has a very real foundation, but I will leave it to you to explore the ways in which it is likewise pathological.
I guess I agree that if someone out there believes "I am persecuted/girls don't like me because I like comic books and video games" then that person needs to examine their attitude, but I'm not sure that's actually what the Scotts are claiming.
As for me, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have liked me no matter the circumstances, so I don't know if we can really say I've changed your opinion…
Oh, wow. Okay, thanks for making your beliefs clear. You'll get neither help nor sympathy from me. I hope every person you encounter gets such a good view of who you really are.
Oh wow, this is special.
So you think you yourself are toxic, because you certainly view yourself as a victim.
Oh, wow, that took a left turn at uncomfortably anti-Semitic.
But I'll be sure to let all my Jewish friends know that they don't have to deal with persecution and prejudice anymore.
While you're at it, want to explain to my newborn daughter why she only has extended family on her father's side? I might accidentally mention the mass murder. I'm sure you can come up with something plausible.
There are plenty of Jews who fight for Palestinian rights…
Let me just give you a friendly suggestion that you should drop this conversation RIGHT NOW if you want to continue posting here. I guarantee you you're on the path of being banned if you continue down this road, or at least mobbed out of here.
You seem to have real issues, but instead of talking about them it seems like you'd rather get into stupid arguments.
I don't think "path to" is the phrase anymore. Huyvanbin, if your next post doesn't contribute something to the conversation. ..even if its dissent, as long as its well thought out, respectful dissent that is open to critique. . .your posts will not be staying up long.
I agree. Right now you’re on probation, Huyvanbin. If you’re not able to convince me VERY QUICKLY why I should let you stick around, you’re out. You don’t have to agree with everything people are saying but if your next post is anything like these others, you’re out.
Thanks for playing.
Here's the thing, though. You can't come in here and be all, "Why aren't people sympathetic to me because I'm short and women don't want to date me", but have zero empathy for anyone else and their experiences of systematic oppression. But, much like with the Scotts, you don't seem to understand why women wouldn't date you. With Aaronson, it's because he was so terrified that he avoided them, so even if they liked him, he would never know. Did that suck for him? Yeah. Should he have gotten some help for his mental health? Definitely. But he seems to be taken it out on the messages that feminism tells men about things like sexual harassment, which didn't actually cause his problem. In your case, you think it is because you are short that women don't like you. Plenty of women here have said that they like short men, or don't care about height. So even if that limits your dating rule, it is not "the problem". The problems are you NOT LISTENING to women who tell you what they DO like, NOT LISTENING to their experiences, and only seeming (I'm hoping it's seeming, and not actual) to care about how all of this affects YOU.
"You will also be told that your natural anger at this unfairness is precisely what makes you unattractive"
It IS.
Look, you call it "natural anger." You're not the first guy to refer to it as anger, and I'll be honest, that freaks me the hell out. And I'm sure a lot of other girls feel the same.
Because if you're ANGRY–not sad, not upset, not disappointed, but ANGRY that you don't have a girlfriend even though you're totally "playing by the rules"…that's a really really frightening thing to hear as a woman. Because angry, whether or not you mean it to, implies entitlement. It implies that something should be yours and isn't, and that's Wrong, and you're Mad about it.
More than that, your anger is directed outwardly–at the people who either have what you don't have (girlfriends) or aren't giving you what you want (themselves, as a girlfriend). Maybe not aimed at a specific person, but aimed at PEOPLE.
And angry guys Do Things.
And honestly, even the angry guys who don't Do Things…they're unpleasant to be around. They're frustrating and annoying to be around. And women learn to pick up on when someone is an Angry Guy.
The fact that you feel that sort of anger–again, ANGER–is only natural is just as unsettling.
So yeah, "natural anger" at other people having SO's when you don't, even if they're Not Doing It Right is hella unattractive.
So much this. I have no problem with someone being sad about being single. Sometimes I feel that way about myself. But that sadness is directed inward. When it becomes anger, you start blaming everyone else for your experiences and problems, which does not lead to great things.
So. . .Doc is womansplaining?
" "Because of who you are, your dating pool is smaller. That doesn't mean you're a piece of shit or you need to become someone else."
Agreed but. . .insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. All anyone's ever said here is if what you're doing (externally or internally) isn't working and the results matter to you, you're going to have to change something. If you're ok with your results, cool. Be happy. No snark, no irony, do what makes you happy. If you're not happy, you and only you have the ability to change that.
I conceded it didn't have practical value. There's still human emotions there behind that statement that I'm not sure can be easily repressed, though.
I guess the reason I disagreed is that I personally have a hard time doing things that aren't practical because of who I am.I don't understand the emotion behind it. Again which is why I believe my statement might have been out of line.
To me it seems fair when you consider the woman's desires. Lets say that a women has two men approach her. One is a not a good person, and the other is a saint. Let's say that she chooses guy one. It was fair because she went with someone she was attracted to. That is just my thought process. I guess that's why I don't see the point of pondering it. To me there are no emotions behind it because I just don't see why that scenario isn't fair. Again this could largely be due to differences in personality.
Yeah, possibly. I don't begrudge you your view!
Also, it's bizarre to me that anyone would read that Henry story and have their first thought be, "man, Henry's got it better with the ladies than I do". Like, really? My first thoughts were: "why is this man not in jail?" and "I don't know which woman to feel most sorry for".
It's not just bizarre – it's selfish to the point of caricature. This is part of why I think Scott is not actually a good person.
Also, "when do I get rewarded for being good" is creepily immature for an adult, even in cases where their self-assessment is accurate.
I couldn't find anywhere on his blog that talks about his specific job, but it sounds like Scott is some kind of therapist? That worries me. As someone trained in the mental health field, I can't imagine listening to a student/client talk about this kind of thing and having my immediately emotional response be jealousy. I mean, I know most therapist aren't paragons of mental health, but this sounds like some serious narcissism (at best) on his part.
I think he's a psychiatrist rather than a therapist.
Either way, he's in the mental health business, and, in this case, actually wields more power in that field. Yikes.
He's a psychiatrist but seems to be doing therapy training. There's a long post on the first page called "The Phatic and the Anti-Inductive" which talks about it a bit.
He's phenomenally intelligent along a number of dimensions, he's brilliant at looking at data and thinking outside the box, and I think any patient who gets him writing their prescriptions would be lucky.
But that therapy post! It reads as if he doesn't think empathy is a real thing that people can genuinely feel. I hope I'm reading it wrong.
In my experience, psychiatrists do tend to have less empathy than therapists (part of this is probably for efficiency, since you often only see them for like 15 minutes every few months) – which is why I wouldn't really want one being my therapist! I don't think you're reading it wrong – I tried to read some of his other stuff, and couldn't really get through it for similar reasons.
Ugh, one more reason that I'm annoyed with my brother not going to counseling and dropping his psychologist in favor of a psychiatrist.
Not that he's actually, y'know, bothered to make the appointment. But it's still the thing he would be doing if he could be bothered to take any steps whatsoever to aid his mental health.
My psychiatrist won't agree to see you if you aren't also going for some kind of counseling – which I think is sound practice.
Well, in his defense, he is talking about how he used to feel in the past, when he was a "young guy", he is now with someone. He is trying to explain the mindset of someone like the younger him, and why it is not so much entitlement as cognitive dissonance. Of course kleenestar went ahead and gave us exactly the reaction he was trying to prevent with that explanation.
Also, my mother is a therapist and she was recently making fun of one of her patients at the dinner table. Therapists are human and no less awful than other humans. Just one more reason why in spite of her trying to get me to see therapists all my life, I am quite reluctant to do so…
Unfortunately, it's pretty clear that he still holds many of those hateful attitudes. He's just learned ways to disguise them.
Hmm – I think it's one thing to laugh at things my students do that are…actually funny. Or funny to me as an adult, but frustrating for them as teens. But I can't imagine laughing about the student who told me that she watched her dad try to strangle her mom. And it does seem like he's using this Henry story for some humor, and it just seems in poor taste at best.
Bizarre, nauseating, tomato, tomahto.
It's sick, is what it is.
Interestingly, in a study comparing egalitarian and/or matriarchal cultures with patriarchal cultures, the cultures that taught men that women were to be respected had extremely-little-to-no domestic violence and rape.
The ones where men were taught to protect women? Lots of both.
Except that's not how romance/sex/dating works.
You don't get a partner because you meet the basically standards of human decency. You get a partner because someone else wants to be your partner. People wanted to be Henry's partner. Probably because he had qualities that compensated for his assholery, at least to some degree.
Editted for: Duh, I should read more closely.
Henry VII only had one wife. Henry VIII had six wives. I think Scott is talking about an actual patient of his whom he named Henry.
Edited as you were typing dude.
Heh, I initially read this comment thread as about Henry VIII, too 😛
Second verse, same as the first
Henry the Eighth I am I am
Henry the Eighth I am
Curse you. Now that's going to be stuck in my head all day.
A correction: I didn't say you had to sort out all your problems. I said you had to do some work on the self hatred. Just work on it. Nobody's perfect. No one said you had to be.
Some short, ugly men are actually attractive to women. What's the difference between them and you? Think about it. (No, not money. Some short, ugly poor men also get partners.)
Regarding Henry: I genuinely don't understand why guys like you are so quick to compare yourselves to guys like Henry. It's… bothersome, I would say. But anyway, Henry's problems are different from yours. I have never met Henry. I have never read the output of him writing down his thought processes, as I have with you. I've only seen him described by a transparently unreliable narrator.
But if Henry finds it easy to attract partners, I'd venture a guess that Henry's problems do *not* include the kind of self-hatred you display, though they arguably should. They do not include the assumption that he is an irritating annoyance that no one wants to have around, even though almost no one who knew in advance what they were in for would in fact want him around and he is considerably worse than an annoyance.
A lot of the time, other people will believe you to be whatever you believe yourself to be. And if Henry believes he's the bee's knees, even if he's actually an abusive alcoholic shitbag, some people will fall for it.
Case in point: you believe yourself to be annoying to women, an obnoxious irritant. I originally responded to you in a spirit of kindness, because you seemed to be in pain, and I wanted to reach out to you. But I have now started to find you annoying and will not respond to you again. Believe me, it's not because you're short.
I agree that you do not have to fix all your problems, but I would suggest you fix one: thinking you know what women want. Women are different human beings with varying tastes. Claiming that we all want protective hulking guys doesn't just make you sound ignorant to the point of delusion, it also directly and personally insults exactly the women who might be interested in you by denying their preferences. Bonus: you're advertising to them that if they date you despite the insult, they'll be spending a lot of time reassuring you and trying to convince you they aren't lying about what they want. I wouldn't sign up for that!!
"it also directly and personally insults exactly the women who might be interested in you by denying their preferences. "
THAT. YES.
Like I said, I tend to be attracted to short guys. But as soon as a short guy starts talking about how women only like "x" and never like "y" and "y" happens to be exactly what I like, I am DONE. You can be exactly my type physically and a huge nerd besides, but man, I am almost 30, I don't have the time or inclination to play the "Oh no, no, honey, that's not truuuueee, let me prove it with my love" game anymore. Leave that stuff in high school.
"I don't have the time or inclination to play the "Oh no, no, honey, that's not truuuueee, let me prove it with my love" game anymore. Leave that stuff in high school."
THIS! Times a million!
Yes, I do seem to have that effect on people.
You say this as if it is completely random, and not related to your behavior/attitude towards women.
"Obviously women want a suave, calm protector hulk, a bear not a mouse, or at least a sheepdog. This is obvious to me"
It's obvious to me that you have a difficult time ACTUALLY listening to women and what they want, since you've gone and decided what women-as-a-hive-mind-collective want.
Gross.
I don't want a mouse or a bear. I'd prefer a human.
The "mouse" comment actually makes me think about a fandom revolving around a certain very short character in a live-action show, and how he gets called "pocket-sized" a lot when girls are squeeing over how attractive he is.
Admittedly, that's probably not what a lot of guys want to hear either, so I probably wouldn't lead with it. But, y'know, he is awfully cute…
Also, I've kinda got to the point where I want to punt every schmuck who whines about being short as if it's some kind of Mark of Cain. It's really freaking frustrating to hear, because dangit, I actually PREFER short guys, and I know I'm not the only one, but oooh, "women only like tall guys." Hell, there are plenty of women who just plain don't CARE about height, but no, no. Those few inches might as well be miles. Woe and misery.
I can tell you exactly what makes some short guys such unattractive dating prospects, and buddy, it sure as hell ain't being able to look you in the eye.
Yeah, and they seem entirely unsympathetic to the women who are OVER 5'7", who get the same problem the other way around.
Edit: Which is to say not that they can't get dates, but that there are more men who prefer shorter women than men who prefer taller women.
I'm even okay with guys who say, "It sucks that my dating pool is smaller," because you know what? I think it is, in the same way that anyone who deviates from the cultural norm has a smaller dating pool. It's a totally legitimate thing to be unhappy about. It's when they start telling me what all women want that I get severely skeptical.
Yes! This is it exactly. Yeah, it's harder for some people. It's harder if not attractive. It's harder if you stutter. It's harder if you're overweight. It's harder if you're not very intelligent. It's harder if you're infertile. It's harder if you have chronic pain. It's harder if you have a STD. It's harder if you're trans, or non-neurotypical, or are poor.
But the people who declare that it's impossible, that one aspect of themselves makes it impossible for them, and then blame their desired dating poor for their lack of success, they piss me off.
Doesn't much of that come down to alot of societal ideas of what makes a hot guy or girl though? (I mean the former "detriments" you mention: stutter, body size, general attractivenes)
It took me ages to realise that I wasn't actually much attracted to billboard hotties, but that I prefer somewhat overweight carefree women with simple interests who don't even know how to apply make up or dress feminine.
And I blame locker room talk between guys, societal norms, but above all, my own cowardice and willingness to shrink my own desires just to fit in.
On the flip end, I think we could take some time to romantisize shy nerdy guys, without posture who cutely ramble about their special interests when given the chance. Because I knew a girl who specifically targeted those guys and her dating pool was thus practically endless. Maybe there are more girls who actually deep down prefer that without knowing it themselves? Only they, just like me were told early that: THIS is what you are supposed to like, not THAT!
I'm not talking about "nice guys" and female equivalents thereof, because those are a bunch who are trying to mold themselves into what they percieve OTHERS would like and not make clear what they want (and often don't even know).. The kind that can be effectively doomed despite how large or small the pool is, and that's never going to change unless their attitude and sense of self does ofc.
I'm all in favor of seeing more sexy nerds in media, both male and female!
And the thing you describe is exactly why conventionally attractive folks have bigger dating pools – it's the people who would be attracted to them no matter what, as well as the people who have been successfully taught they should be.
Some of it, yes. I do think that there are people for whom lack of attractiveness is not just about societal norms, and I don't want to discount their experiences — I know a woman, for instance, with significant and really obvious burn damage to a lot of her face, and even among well-meaning compassionate groups, the majority of people have a hard time even looking directly at her for a while after knowing her. She has a hard time with dating, because she just can't effectively do cold or lukewarm approaches. And I think that if someone were actively looking for someone with burn scars, because that turned them on, it would distress her more than it would make her happy, although I've never asked her about it.
Similarly, a stutter can make conversation a lot harder, and especially soon after meeting someone, can be a deterrent. DNL tends to hold up conversational cleverness a lot — it's a strength of his, and he sees how much good it does — but it's hard to come across as clever when it's difficult just to articulate words.
I will note, though that shy nerdy guys are absolutely the preferred demographic of a lot of women, especially shy nerdy women, and it doesn't actually make their dating pool endless.
You are indeed right.
The thing about people with actual impediments is that they often learn that they will need that winning attitude, self-esteem and the muster to search far and wide for their love that they in fact often do. I was surpised when I read an article about wheelchair bound guys in a basketball team and how most of them were married or in relationships because of that knowledge.
But yes, Some impediments WILL as you say, make it extra tough. We do need to acknowledge that. If not only to bolster that iron will these people need to cultivate… and if it doesn't pan out, at least get a sense of closure in the face of reality.
Shy nerdy guys a largly preferred demographic? Perhaps that's true actually.
I remember I cheered when I read an article "What's attractive about a man with asperger syndrome?" and this woman who was married to one said "I just don't like ordinary guys. They're predictable and boring. I don't want normal".
But we can go further still
PS: I don't have asperger syndrome myself.
My experience is similar to your friend with the burn scars. The pool of options for people with facial defects or damage is very limited. I have cold and lukewarm approached men because I have a thick skin and do not mind rejection, but it takes some serious guts because people can react extremely negatively and occasionally violently to someone so far off the attractiveness scale having the gall to approach them. Best case scenario I have had is "Let's just be friends" with people I like enough to be friends with despite rejection.
I offer jedi hugs, should you want them.
I honestly think people a few standard deviations below average (significant scarring, deformity, etc) are probably the most ill-served by our cultural dialogue. While we talk a lot about minority and female representation in film and movies, "evil" is incredibly widely portrayed as something that twists the outward form to match the inward, so there's a real, conditioned fear reaction to seeing people that don't match our ideas of what people should look like.
Short version: that must suck. I'm sorry.
The deformed/marred face=horrible, evil, etc person thing is so, so, so strong in our culture, even back to myths and oral traditions and it would be nice to just once see someone with those qualities be a hero. I think it is why I am still watching American Horror Story: Freak Show, despite the pretty marginal quality, messy plot, because it is not often I get to see people with birth defects as main characters and even hero's.
ETA: And Jedi hugs accepted!
In a similar vein, I remember that in my high school circle of nerds, most of my friends were into tall skinny guys–nerdy, but also tall and skinny. I blame anime?
Took me a while to realize that no, I'm way more about short and cuddly.
What humans have found to be "ideal" has always been in flux, and very easily influenced by the media and norms around them. Just a look at the history of art tells you that.
It's like…it's like clothes, I guess. There's this particular shirt that's super popular, and everyone just figures that's the shirt to wear, but it doesn't fit everyone in the way that made it popular and…meh, metaphor coffee sleepysleep…
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Maybe you should be my spokesperson in this forum, since you know how to say these things without producing hostility.
For what it's worth, these are learnable skills. I've seen guys here do it! If you are willing to put in the effort to learn how to talk about your problems in a way that doesn't make you sound like a jerk, people here would LOVE to help you, or even just to listen. I know you probably haven't had the greatest first experience, and I want to apologize for my part in that – we see a lot of really hateful guys who often talk like you. But if you're willing to try, I'm willing to try, because I can see that you're in pain and that sucks. I truly wish the best for you.
Jess is a paragon of patience and clear communication. If you really want to work on how you come across, take her offer. Trust me managing your impression is a worthy life skill. Not necessarily an easy one but a worthy one.
Thanks for the kind words, but I actually haven't been doing as well as I would like recently. I've felt a lot of despair about nerds and gender – I don't want to get into the specifics, but bad things have been happening to me and to many of my colleagues and friends – and it's absolutely taken a toll on my ability to be patient and communicate clearly.
That said, if huyvanbin does take me up on my offer, I'll look at it as an opportunity for me to practice, too. I could use it.
You still last longer than I do. I'm just not nearly as good at online compassion as I am face to face.
Uhhh actually his reply was to Karl_Johan. And now I have to wonder why the one he sees in a positive light is a dude given that such a thing is statistically somewhat unlikely (he's been talking to 5+ women but only like, 2 men). Will try to contain skepticism in the meantime.
It actually makes sense to me – he can see that Karl faces some of the same issues that he does, but is also doing a better job communicating with the other forum members than he is. He's not saying, "Karl, you are doing a better job of communicating with me," which indeed would get a bit of side-eye from me.
Ahhh…I was skimming through and picked up just a general "approve of this person". Re-read it, and yeah you're right as always 😉
Is she offering something?
"If you are willing to put in the effort to learn how to talk about your problems in a way that doesn't make you sound like a jerk, people here would LOVE to help you, or even just to listen. I know you probably haven't had the greatest first experience, and I want to apologize for my part in that – we see a lot of really hateful guys who often talk like you. But if you're willing to try, I'm willing to try, because I can see that you're in pain and that sucks."
I believe she was offering to try to help/listen(and for others here who might be willing to do so to do the same) if you are willing to try to learn to talk about your problems in a way that doesn't make you look like a jerk.
You are definitely not alone in not initially recognizing that you weren't actually into what was considered "conventionally" attractive. This is one area where I think there is a bit of room for society to change. I don't know that people can change their physical preferences, but I think not having pressure from friends/society to have the "right" preferences would be fantastic. Glad you were able to figure this out for yourself, though! I tend to go for scrawny menfolk in glasses (and redheads. So many redheads), which I don't think is what we're told is conventionally attractive, but I don't think there was the same amount of pressure to change my preferences to the "norm".
Yup. I've had this discussion, but about how mine is smaller due to being a fat woman. Is it frustrating sometimes? Sure. Do I think this is the fault of all men, or the preference of all men? Shark farts, no.
SHARK FARTS
Oh, ok. My dating pool is smaller, then. Obviously when I say "women want X" it is not meant to mean literally all women, but a generalization with exceptions. Just like if I said "People in England speak English" I don't expect someone to respond "YOU DON'T SPEAK FOR ALL ENGLISH PEOPLE YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT LANGUAGES THEY SPEAK UNTIL YOU'VE ASKED EACH ONE OF THEM YOU RACIST FUCK."
Those aren't quite the same thing, though. English is the official language there – it's an established, factual thing. Please, show me the evidence that even the MAJORITY of women want the men you're describing.
Except it isn't obvious. We've had men come here and said such generalisations and then when women come along and say, "Not me" and then they will say, "Well you're the only one then and in my world your type doesn't exist so I have to stick with "all women"."
And quite frankly, when people start talking generalisations of "All women" this or "No women" that, well wtf do you want people to say? I mean even if it's the truth (which it isn't), what exactly can anyone do about that? What do people want us to say? "Okay, well, you're screwed."
Yeah, that I can understand. The dating pool might be smaller, but it's not a puddle by any means.
There is no point in the comparison. For starters the only thing you have control over is yourself so hoping that the world will change is pointless. Yes some people have qualities that will outweigh their shortcomings, but again there is nothing you can do. Your best option is to make up for your own shortcomings. Holding on to resentment at the fact that someone who is a terrible person is doing better than you with women is unhealthy and depressing. It won't make you better at dating, it won't make you feel better, and it will make you unattractive to women who like you.
Also I know that men who are short/fat/ugly/etc. have more trouble than people on here will admit, but they also have stories and examples of those same people having successful dating lives. My friend Nicole is over weight. She never has a shortage of guys hitting on her or dates with attractive strangers. When I asked her how, she said she just came to terms with person she was and realized somethings were beyond her control. She is fun to be around, flirty, outgoing, and genuinely the nicest person I've ever met. Secondly she said the easiest way to overcome conventional dating standards is to have fewer of them yourself.
> Also I know that men who are short/fat/ugly/etc. have more trouble than people on here will admit
This is exactly what's so frustrating. Why won't they admit it?
From right above this post courtesy of ElizaJane:
"Yeah, it's harder for some people. It's harder if not attractive. It's harder if you stutter. It's harder if you're overweight. It's harder if you're not very intelligent. It's harder if you're infertile. It's harder if you have chronic pain. It's harder if you have a STD. It's harder if you're trans, or non-neurotypical, or are poor. "
But no, nobody here ever admits to things being unfair here. No, never happens. Ever. At all.
We ALWAYS say that it is easier for some people than others. No one ever says otherwise. We say it in general conversations and we say it every single time someone like you comes along and insists we don't.
However, what we also say is it isn't impossible for those who have it harder and that if a person is dealing with one of those things that can't be changed there's really no point on dwelling on it since there's nothing one can really do about it. It's about focusing on what you CAN do to make a difference, to improve your chances, not wallowing in what you have going against you. You can do that at any time in any place, why here at a site that is all about trying to figure out solutions??
They do admit it. They just don't dwell on it. There is ultimately nothing that can be done, except look for the women that don't mind those things If i'm not mistaken one user was angry with you because you all women find those unattractive. Also one user clearly states
– "It sucks that my dating pool is smaller," because you know what? I think it is, in the same way that anyone who deviates from the cultural norm has a smaller dating pool. It's a totally legitimate thing to be unhappy about. It's when they start telling me what all women want that I get severely skeptical.
Isn't that the whole point of social activism, though? Not to accept that you can't change the world? To make the world fairer for everyone we can't all just look out for ourselves. That's kind of what the two Scotts were talking about.
Also, sometimes you just want sympathy. Sometimes you want to know that others know what you're going through. Just to be told that yes it's harder for you and it's not because you're a bad person, or because you don't look into womens' souls deeply enough, or something like that. That would have kind of helped.
It's the way people insist on denying the obvious that makes me so angry.
No it isn't the point. If you go sexless you won't die, if I don't change how the world sees me as a black male I might. Changing yourself can change your dating success, a woman changing her her behavior won't change millions of men's sense of entitlement to her life. Follow me chief?
You have self esteem issues anyone who has read your comments can tell that . You also view women as monolith so chances are you don't view them as individuals/people. No one is denying that you aren't going to have a hard time. We are acknowledging it. Because we realize this, users are flooding in to tell you that they have seen men in your predicament pull it off and with amazing results. Listen to them you have nothing to lose.
I haven't seen anyone tell me that. All I see is how I should stay away from women or humans in general because of what an evil person I am.
And again here you (and enail0_o below) saying that if I want something in general to change, that automatically means I want womens' freedoms taken away in order to benefit men. That's not what it means. Got it chief? Buddy? Broheim?
Social activism has nothing to do with your personal dating problems, it has to do with ensuring that peoples rights are respected regardless of who they are.For example if we don't change how the world views women their lives will continue to be in constant danger. If you never get laid it won't seriously impact you standard of living. Do you understand? Sex is not a right, you don't deserve it from anyone put you dominant hand. Social Activism is not failing you by not making sex more readily available for you.
Several people here have already said that they would date, or have dated, guys who are shorter than you are. But they've also said that if that guy needed constant reassurance that his height wasn't an issue, that would be a major turn-off.
There are ways to seek sympathy without saying anything with implications that what you would consider a fairer world is one where women are parceled out, and without showing an incredibly shallow and self-centered understanding of the very complex and painful subject of abusive relationships. If you'd like to commiserate with others and get sympathy, you might do better to stick to talking about your own distress and staying away from assertions about what women want or how unfair it is that bad people sometimes have partners, on this site at least.
As for social activism, again, I think that trying to make romantic interest "fairer" involves denying some of the involved parties any choice in the matter. Romantic partners are not a fungible resource, and cannot be distributed like one.
Yes!
huyvanbin, if you're willing to frame you personal problems in ways that keep it about you and your struggles, you're open minded, and you don't act like women's choices are somehow unjust, people here are extraordinarily compassionate.
I love hearing this advice from you.
Well, what words can I use to express my distress other than "I feel bad", then? I have to make some statements about the world and my place in it. And then people will latch on to whatever statements I make and use them as proof that the reason why I have a lack of success is that I'm a really crummy person, and everyone, even the girls on Tinder who have never spoken to me, can readily see that.
And again: I take umbrage at the notion that because I want things to be fairer therefore I see women as slaves (and that the reason why I can't get laid is because deep down I really see women as slaves and everyone senses that).
But HOW do you want things to be fairer and for whom exactly? You see I see you complaining that short men don't get the girl, and yet I know so many couples in which the man is the shorter of the two so it doesn't seem to me that there is any big social upheaval that needs to happen there. Is it you think ugly men don't get the girl? Or fat men? Or what exactly? Because again I see such men successful all the time. Is it that kind men don't get the girl? Well I really ought to tell my boyfriend that who is one of the kindest men I know and also before we were dating and we were just friends was a total ladies man and played the field widely (one of the reasons I was skeptical at first to date him).
Hell you want shy awkward nerds to get the girl as Aaronson complained about? Guess what? Shy awkward Aaronson the moment he started actually asking women out got the girl.
What do you want? All of society to no longer be superficial? You're not the only one who wants that. You think it's easy for women who even if they are beautiful and slender and everything a man could want are still told constantly that they have a shelf life? Who are shown studies on OkCupid that men of all ages say their ideal age is 22 (whereas women have a much broader spectrum of ages they find attractive)? The thing is, virtually EVERYONE knows what it feels like to not be wanted. The vast majority of people do not fit into any kind of romantic ideal. That's what's so bloody frustrating about the people who come here to complain it's hopeless for them as if they are some special case. Has it not occurred to you that the people trying to offer advice and to try to alter your negative way of thinking are doing so because they have experienced precisely the exact same thing and have been working on it themselves???
So I ask you again: What is this fair world you aren't seeing and how do you want to fix it and what would you like the end result to be aside from you getting a date?
What do you think would have to change in society before men and women send each other roughly equal quantities of messages on OkCupid? Or for men to get roughly equivalent numbers of "likes" on Tinder as women they "like"? To me these things are pretty damning evidence that something is askew.
When I stopped using OkCupid it was pretty much impossible for me to get a reply to a message, and I was never getting replies from girls I was actually interested in (I was messaging almost everybody in a futile attempt to "lower my standards"). I'm told this is because girls get too many messages — but they don't send very many themselves.
Then we might even move on to having women ask men out roughly as often as vice versa. I know that's a shocking idea. I wonder how people here will twist it into how I'm a misogynist and generally awful person.
What would have to change? Seriously? Men would have to stop sending out bajillions of messages.
Women on OKCupid send messages. I promise they do. And we've talked this conversation through so many times that I'm just… pretty much done with it after this post. Let's please, please, please not transition into another fucking agonizing rehash of EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of dating and how gender roles play into it in this thread.
Do you want links to the 27694203 other times we've beaten this dead horse, tied it to the back of our chariot, and rode around the walls of Troy? Can I offer those in substitution for continuing this thread?
Sure. Go ahead. I will offer my thoughts after I've read them.
Then I won't bother. The point was that I'd give them INSTEAD of you offering more thoughts, not as an "I do a shitload of work so you can continue to raise EVERY ISSUE WE'VE EVER TALKED ABOUT HERE, no matter how tangentially related to the original post." Instead, I'll just stop responding.
ETA: Removing unnecessary frustration-based rudeness.
"To me these things are pretty damning evidence that something is askew. "
Because you're also not considering the risk/reward scenario.
You sound like the guys who complain that women don't approach. Ignoring the fact that some women DO, there is are several reasons that women in general don't make the first move:
1) We've been raised from childhood not to. That's the sort of programming that can take a helluva lot of work to break out of. Some people don't bother, because it works for them.
And this is the important one:
2) There's more at risk for us on average.
Just about any article about women's experiences (or men's experiences as women) on OKCupid talks about the sheer volume of harassment women get, sometimes for not replying favorably to a message, or not replying withing ten minutes, or for no reason at all.
That's what we get without actually doing anything.
If we BREAK the engrained social code and message a guy, we're running a huge risk that this guy will view that as a street full of green lights. If at some point in that conversation we realize, wait, no, I don't want to be talking to this person, we're opened up to even more harassment for "leading him on." Because breaking the social code to message someone doesn't mean "I'm interested in talking to you" to some guys, it means "I want it bad."
Men often take an impersonal shot-gun approach to online dating because there's less risk to them–less chance of them getting stalked or harassed, less chance of the woman being a rapist.
If you're pretending there's some kind of vacuum and it's just that women are withholding themselves out of spite…dude, I don't know what planet you live on.
Short version: Women don't approach as much because the consequences of that approach going badly can be much more severe for women.
FWIW, I agree with you wholeheartedly that women should take more responsibility for approaching men, and men should take more responsibility for being approachable – it's a skilllset I think most guys never get taught.
If you want something you can personally do to encourage women to approach more, teach the guys around you to receive an approach gracefully, even from a woman they are not interested in. Women notice!
I can understand how that would be difficult to deal with, but your expectations and desires come without full knowledge. You want the same amount of messages that girls get? Then that means what you want is for women to send out harassing and disgusting messages to men. Is that what you want? You do understand that just because a woman gets tons of messages it doesn't mean that any of them are viable right? I've had female friends leave OkCupid (just like you did) because there was literally no one who actually wanted to date them. Fuck them? Sure. Harass them for fun? Troll them? Tell them they weren't really Doctor Who fans? Sure. Date them and have a meaningful relationship? Nope.
I guess the issue I have with your desired changes is they come with absolutely no empathy at all towards women. If you wanted to truly change OkCupid you wouldn't phrase it by numbers. You would phrase it like, "I want men and women to feel safe enough online dating to be able to approach each other in equal measure. I also want an environment where men stop sending harassing messages to women so that women feel safer approaching men." You need to understand the complexity behind your request. But instead you make it all about a numbers game. More numbers must mean it's better. You see damning evidence that something is askew, darn right it is. More women SHOULD approach, but also men need to be more respectful of women and not assume she just wants the D if she does approach. And then not threaten to rape and kill them if they say that's not what they are interested in.
Also, I have to say, even if we lived in a perfect society where men didn't harass women in messages and women approached more, even then things wouldn't be perfectly even. Some people are more desirable to a greater number of people. That's just how it is. Would you be happy if the end result ended up with you getting more messages but not nearly as many as your friend Joe Smith? Or would you find that unfair as well? When does your desire for fairness end? Life's not fair, it never will be. What will be enough for you?
When I was in school, we read the Kurt Vonnegut short story "Harrison Bergeron" and whenever I think about imposed fairness or hear people complaining about how some thing is "not fair", I think about that story. I'm pretty sure Vonnegut wasn't talking about how everyone should have the same number of available sexual partners… but it was kinda implied?
What's even more damning is that you realize that we already *do* drown people out with headphones and tie rocks to people's feet, but it's not so that everyone is equal. The women I know who are single would love to be empowered to make the first move and quit acting like this huge part of their life is up to the whims of complete strangers. But, alas.
I didn't remember the name but I recognize that story from middle school! Its a lovely demonstration of the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
It obviously made a huge impression on me, because who the hell pays attention during the short story unit? At least the poetry unit has shorter assignments.
The Lottery, anyone?
Yeah, turns out I only message guys I think I'm very well matched with, and who seem like they would respond kindly, because I don't really need a response of "No, you ugly whore". I get enough of that from the guys who message me who I'm just not interested in.
The funny thing is, phrased like that, a lot of women here are going to agree with you. You know what the main block to women asking men out is? The way they're received when they try. Everyone who would like to change cultural expectations so women are equally expected/allowed to be open with their interest in men, raise your hand!
From the previous post, I hadn't gotten the impression that what meant by 'fair' was for approaches to be more gender-balanced. That's certainly a reasonable thing to say you wish was the case (and I think many people here are all for it), but I think there are three things there worth thinking about (and which probably affect how people react to your comments on that subject):
1. There are some pretty major reasons that approaching is a higher risk activity (socially and in terms of physical safety) for women than for men. If you don't seem to be aware of that when you talk about "fairness" in approaching, you're likely to come off as clueless or self-centered. If you want to usefully talk about changing gender norms around approaching, it's also going to be a conversation about changing some other attitudes around gender.
2. A lot of people, on this site at least, who talk about wanting fairness of gendered work in dating ignore or deny the kinds of work that approachees need to do to be successful. People may jump to that conclusion based on how you frame your comments. If you'd like to talk about what you can do to increase appeal and signal approachability to women who do or might be willing to approach, that might be a more useful way to come at this subject.
3. Fairness, in the sense of "men and women are equally likely to do the work of approacher" does not mean fairness in the sense of "everyone will be equally likely to be approached."Approaches are currently not equally distributed among women – some women are approached often; some are never approached. If you're looking at "women approach more" as a solution to "no one approaches me," I think you'd be likely to be disappointed. It's possible that people here will react badly to that assumption because it implicitly suggests that women never have trouble with not being approached, and many women who do have that problem are pretty frustrated by the fact that many people believe all women have dates raining down from the sky.
Hope this is helpful.
All I can say is, whenever I approach a woman she is not interested, and that's where this whole "harassment" angle comes in. The only success I've had with women is when they approached me. It's hard to feel any pride when you're at someone's beck and call and they can come up to me and do whatever they want whereas if I come up to them I'm shooed away. But it is what it is.
I think some people are better off being the approachers and some the approachees. Maybe those with better social skills and lower levels of anxiety are better positioned to take the risk of approaching, whether they're male or female. It's hard to make a good impression on someone when you're shaking and scrambling for words and so on.
There's a difference between harassing and approaching someone who turns out not to be interested.
I'd agree that some people are better suited to approacher or approachee, but I'm not sure that better social skills is a determining factor – being good at being approached, especially if you're not especially conventionally attractive, requires social skills as well, just different ones. If you've had some success with having women approach you, it sounds like it might be a better fit for you, in which case you might do well to focus your efforts on improving your approachee skills.
So. . .why do whatever people want when they come up to you? Are you being at the beck and call of the same person who's shooing you away when you approach them? Not the same type of person, the same exact person? Because that's fucked up behavior on their part.
If you approach someone who isn't interested, that is not harassment. If you approach them, and they tell you that they aren't interested, and you continue to approach them, THEN it's harassment.
I don't understand why you say that they can come up to you and do what they want, because that isn't remotely true. You have just as much opportunity to reject them as they do you.
I think what you really need are some female friends. If you don't have any, you may want to think about why that is.
Instead of saying "I feel bad that I'm not getting dates because women unfairly don't want to date short men" say "I feel bad that I'm not getting dates, and I feel really insecure about my height and I feel like it's hurting my ability to get dates". The difference is subtle, but in the former you're telling other people how they feel and then judging them for it, while in the latter you're merely express how you feel without describing others.
If you use so called "I" statements when describing your feelings (e.g. "I feel" "I want" "I'm sad") and avoid describing how other people think and feel (unless an individual has told you how they feel), then you will come off as much more sympathetic to others.
Bingo. I tend to get frustrated when men tell me (especially to my face) that women (as in, zero women)don't find them attractive because of quality X, when I happen to be attracted to quality X. That's like they're saying…oh, I meant ATTRACTIVE women…not you.
Have to add a caveat to that. Yes describing your feelings is better then trying to tell someone else what their feelings are. But its also not incredibly pleasant to be around to someone who only talks about "me, me, me". So yes, use "I" statements, but make sure that in between doing so, take a break – *TO LISTEN*.
I know where you are coming from, I'm fat. I empathize with you boss, I really do. I know what it's like to be made fun of. I was always that fat kid on the team. I had to deal with coaches, teammates, class mates and relatives making fun of me. Coming in last on conditioning tests. I took it upon myself to deal with it. It has been hard, and I still have trouble with it.
I've have only had one sexual with one girl in my entire life/ in all four years of college. It was also the only time where I felt(was drunk enough) to believe that my personality/qualities where an asset and that I could possibly be found attractive. I haven't felt like that sense or at any other point in my life. The reason I believed I was unattractive was because I had terrible self esteem. The other reason, I didn't believe that women had diverse physical types like I did. What was really going on was that I, like you held the very problematic belief that women are more shallow than men. I had to come to terms with it and learn from it. Letting go of that terrible attitude was the biggest improvement I made. I willing to bet you probably need the same thing boss.
Thanks for sharing. Hope things work out for both of us.
I really hope you take some of this to heart. I'm trying really hard to level with you.
It's a little hard to be sympathetic when someone in and says something like "I'm alone because you (all or most women) want X, and I'm not X". That's the kind of venting that can happen with friends, and with a therapist, but probably not on a comments section of a blog. This is a place where people try to give practical advice. And there isn't a whole lot of that to give when the problem is "dating isn't fair". Of course it's not fair. But we can't control the attractions of other people.
Yeah and there are probably serial murder-rapists out there that would put even Henry to shame, if all we're going by is "How often do I have sex with a woman". Thus proving that "How often am I have sex" is a horrible metric for "how well I'm doing".
You know what I really hate about the Henry story? Is the complete fixation on the "success" in sleeping with and marrying women and the complete ignoring of the fact that, whatever methods he used to make this happen, he is committing a crime against them. Beating people up is a crime!
If you hear about a guy who managed to con several people out of their life savings, possibly managing to con a few of them multiple times because he persuaded them he could still be trusted and it wouldn't happen again, would you be thinking, "Gee, I wish I could be as successful at making money as this dude. It's not fair that I'm not making as much money as he does."? Or would you be thinking, "Wow, there really are some scummy people in the world. I feel sorry for those who for whatever reason end up taken in by them and then hurt."?
Because these are approximately equivalent scenarios. And it says a lot when a guy hears the former story and responds with envy toward the criminal rather than empathy or at least pity for the victims.
What you’re describing sounds scarily like the banking industry pre-meltdown.
I can kind of get Scott’s point of view, in a Just World Hypothesis sense; “why is this bad person so easily getting something I want, that eludes me so?” The Dan story serves as a counterpoint. (And more importantly, how both Henry and Dan are there to help springboard a post about sympathy. Dan and Barry get way more focus than Henry.)
The way so many people fixate on Henry while ignoring both Dan and the rest of the post, though, say something very worrisome about themselves.
My memory from the 80s is that "Nerd" also meant a specific kind of intelligence–intelligence in a field that was impractical or not very useful in the day to day world. A nerd was someone who could not distinguish between knowledge that was important and knowledge that was trivial. Another defining element of nerd was physically weak, uncoordinated and/or unhealthy.
I think that for males, the lack of physical skills and common sense was a big part of the nerd stigma, maybe even moreso than the social difficulties. Although we weren't building log cabins and riding horses, I think its easy to overlook how much more 'physcial' the 80s were; the lack of computers meant many more jobs required the ability to handle tangible objects. Engineers used drafting tables and equipment. Film editors needed to cut and splice film by hand. We did a lot of the same things, but HOW we did them was different.
So the 80s nerd was defined by their skills (or lack thereof-) and how they did (or didn't fit) into society. Whereas 'nerd' now seems more like a marker for a cultural group (that covers a zillion sub-groups) WITHIN SOCIETY defined largely by 'things they like, do, and are willing to spend money on.
Speaking of Schrodinger's Rapist, the comic Robot Hugs did a really good piece on the whole thing: http://www.robot-hugs.com/risky-date/
It has everything! Risk assessment, people being offended by other's risk assessment, compassion fatigue, victim blaming!
BTW, the author is genderqueer and goes by "they"
Wow, that really is an excellent piece!
I really love that piece.
That is really nicely done!
I struggle to understand why people do not get basic threat assessment. I mean, how many people really want to give their address to someone they met online, jump in that person's car and be driven to an unknown address? It seems to me that no one, male or female, would do that until they met the other person face to face?
But. . .but. . .BiSian. . .I know I'm a really nice guy who would never do those horrible things! Why can't you just take my word for it? Is it the white van with no rear windows and the words "free candy" spray painted on it? Its the Charles Manson poster in the background of my profile pic, isn't it? I just respect him as an artist!
It’s profiling, I tell you~!
10/10.
Should be required Social Interaction 101 for anyone even thinking about dating.
I don't know if it will be possible to have this conversation or not. But let's give it a shot.
There is something inside of some men that makes them identify with male aggressors in intergender violence, but not male aggressors in intragender violence. It's not the same as secondary trauma, it's more like a secondary guilt. But I'll acknowledge that there's real pain there, even if it frequently gets expressed in inappropriate ways.
So what can help?
I'm going to draw a few boundaries here: "Women should be more X" is not an acceptable answer. Neither is "Feminists should stop Y." What can these men and the people that care about them do to solve this problem?
I think you underestimate the appeal of being able to commit violence and justify it in general. The appeal of action flicks, where we’re supposed to identify with men inflicting righteous violence on other men. The fact that people think Fight Club is a positive message. The number of westerners who signing up for ISIS. I do think it feeds from a general sense of disconnection and ennui in society in general, but I don’t know how to fix those things without risking breaking something else even worse.
Okay, but if we have a group of men who specifically have this problem with violence against women and not men, then that's a different problem that what you're talking about.
I think we teach men to empathize with other males, but teach women to empathize with, well, everyone. It goes along with the "every kid will read about a male protagonist, but some boys don't want to read about a female one" idea. I would hazard a guess that's why Harry Potter is male while Rowling isn't. So in these two scenarios, with violence against women, they are more likely to empathize with the guy, but with male violence against other men, they can empathize with the victim.
As usual, I'm going to be riffing the first thing that comes to mind a lot, so this may not be entirely coherent. . .
Well, the questions is either a positive association or a negative one. That is either the guys identify with the victims of violence against males and the aggressors of violence against women by males (more or less your phrasing) OR they identify with the victims of violence against males but fail to identify with the victims of violence against women. Its a fairly subtle line but, I think it may be an important one.
Guys like Aaronson tend to see themselves as the victim – of bullies, of attractive women etc. So given a situation with a victim whose plight they are familiar with themselves (see negative association below), they're inclined to relate unless the victim is from a class that they perceive as having victimized them. Then its a righteous turning of the tables. This is sort of where PUA come from. Women think they can play games with men with their gatekeeping and their sexy sexiness and their. . .(gag) control over the dating arena. . .fine, we'll learn to play the game better. This kind of guy isn't going to identify with, say, honor killings in India but present him an (again gag) Average Frustrated Chump who flips his shit and goes on a killing spree and you'll get "well of course I don't condone murder but I get how he feels". Because at that point the killer is a fellow member of his "oppressed" class who took things too far rather than some inscrutable nutbag like that ginger guy at the Batman movie. Its the same thing you see with right wing anti-government types saying "well of course I don't think Ted Kaczynski should have mailed bombs but have you read his manifesto? It makes a lot of sense."
This also means that they're not going to identify with, for example, the guy who approaches someone on the bus and flips his shit when he gets turned down. That's just not something that happens with any frequency in their world because they can;t imagine anyone they can identify with doing it. So yeah, the occasional guy might sometimes rarely be a werido in that situation but I wouldn't, so why should I be punished for his behavior?
On the other side, you've got the negative association. A lot of guys really have no idea what life as a woman is like. How could you possibly have frequent problems on the bus? I never see them. Most guys wouldn't rape someone, so how could you possibly have found yourself in that position if you didn't fuck up somewhere along the line? No one's ever been sexually harassed that I've heard of. How can it b a really real thing if it never happens around me? I see all these attractive women with guys that fit some value of not like me, so why would nerdy girls (who, let's remember, just have to take off their glasses and let their hair down to be gorgeous) ever have trouble with dating?
Now what do we do about it? Give me another hour or two to let my own read on these guys settle in and maybe I'll have something useful.
I think that you've hit on something really important by bringing up "secondary guilt." People often care more about the guilt of their ingroup than the pain of members of outgroups. Similar to your example: white people who watched 12 Years a Slave and identified more with Edison Epps than with Solomon Northrupp.
I think that they way out of this is to emphasize to ourselves and to others that none of us carry guilt for being members of groups which benefit from systems of structural oppression, except to the extent to which we perpetuate those systems of oppression through either cruelty or inaction.
In my own life, I've found that the best way to deal with secondary guilt is by thinking historically about present-day social problems, and remembering that even if the past people who helped create those problems are my ancestors or like me in some ultimately very superficial way, they're not me, and, in all the ways that matter most, they're fundamentally unlike me. For example, on the issue of race: I never managed a slave plantation or forced people to travel west on the Trail of Tears, and past white people's sins don't stain my soul. I definitely would be culpable if I said or did racist things to black people or Native Americans, or failed to support them in their struggles today, but that moral failing would be purely my own, and I could address it as such. Purging that guilt has helped me to be a better ally and, even more importantly, a better friend.
When I was in college, I decided to major in Philosophy. I did this because I like writing and interpreting writing, and I had a strong sense that picking this field to learn in would help get me closer to the root or core of understanding many of the kinds of topics I'm interested in.
In the handful of introductory classes I needed to take, there was so much anger, frustration, weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and above all else, *misunderstanding* of the material we were going over.
It sounded, and felt, a lot like this on-going dialogue about nerds and male privilege. And I think the similarity comes down to the fact that most people, even supposedly-universally-above-average-intelligence-nerds, have no idea how to think critically, or at least, no idea how to think critically about things that are so normal to them, that they barely even think about them at all.
Re-examining your life and your gender, with a disciplined understanding of how to evaluate and appropriately filter information so that you know what is and isn't true feels like a complete upending of the entire universe, but only if you've never really critically re-examined anything.
It sure as hell doesn't feel like that big of a deal once you've kinda dealt with the fact that there's no absolutely certain, deductively demonstrable reason to think that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that your brain isn't stuck in jar hooked up to a computer simulation. Not that you need to grapple with these things to be able to think critically about gender stuff, but they do an incredible job of putting things in to perspective and acclimatising yourself to not being perfectly comfortable with the status quo of the world.
The other aspect of this, which DNL has done a really commendable job of trying to be at the forefront of, is the way the definition of the word "privilege" is expanding for a mass audience. We are moving away from the word privilege in its vernacular sense ( a privileged person as someone who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth), toward a formal sense (a way of describing inequities in society at large that accounts both for good things in life that everyone ought to have, but only some do, as well as those hardships that many groups of people must contend with nobody ought to live with).
And I want to be clear: this isn't some new thing that tumblr invented; this concept has a long history in activist circles as well as the fields of sociology and ethnic studies. We're in the middle of a fairly common word being (who remembers being 16 years old and being told that driving was a privilege) being shifted in how it is regularly used a mass audience. It would be an exciting thing to be a part of, if it wasn't so acrimonious.
I wish nerds were better at thinking about these kinds of things, instead of immediately reacting. Maybe privilege might still be a little too jargon-y. It might be more effective and humanizing to say something like "There's people right now that have to work real hard to put up with stuff you'll never even have to think about, man.", especially when guys (I'm one) talk to other guys about this topic. Then again, that might be assuming too much that you're talking to somebody open-minded enough to have a modicum of sympathy and empathy, which a lot of nerdy guys seem to have distressingly little of in these kinds of conversations.
If you really believe that “privilege” is just a completely neutral term for any advantages someone has in life, I’d like to see you do one thing. Go to any feminist blog on the planet (that hasn’t been given advanced notice, natch), use the term “female privilege”, and observe the reaction.
The fact that nobody has ever taken that challenge up says pretty clearly what the real usage means. And that people are pretty well aware of that.
There is an objective reason for that, though, and it's that "female privilege", like "misandry", is something that's almsot exclusively used in feminist spaces in an attempt to make women shut up. It's never a "yes, it sucks, and women have it harder, but we can examine the different gender roles in a way that points out how men have it harder as well.
Also, every single example I have seen of female privilege (and hey, feel free to prove me wrong) comes as a direct result of a larger problem.
It reads like, "Blind people are privileged because they never have to deal with that awful squinty moment when you first turn their lights on in the morning."
Or: dementia patients are privileged because no one calls them on their bullshit.
Or: people without hands are privileged because they don't get hangnails.
Pretty much every experience of "female privilege" to me, boils down to, "Society thinks you're a resource to be cherished and protected, rather than an adult who is capable of making her own choices and mistakes," or "Society thinks your real place is much more 'raising babies' than 'making a living out in the world with other adults.'"
Meanwhile, telling someone that they’re living life on easy mode is a totally neutral tactic, and totally engages further conversation. It can’t be that the real use for the term is generally something along the lines of “STFU and accept that you have it so good that your concerns don’t matter”.
(Also, you forgot “female privilege because you can’t walk out the door without being offered sex”. That’s the basis for like 90% of the claims that I’ve seen.)
…dude, that article is one of the least aggressive and most sugar-coated tactics I've ever seen, and protip — I first got the "privilege" talk in the concept of race, where I was the "aggressor", and I never felt like it was an attack on me personally. This, incidentally, is WHY "female privilege" pisses feminists off, by the way. Because people introduce it as "it's not all bad" and then it rolls over to "there's no such thing as male privilege, so acknowledge my pain, stop whining, and play good nurturing woman the way you're meant to."
But hey — good job of advocacy for your POV there. One more piece of data to add to my, "Men who invoke female privilege really just think there's no advantage offered by being male" file.
"female privilege because you can't walk out the door without being offered sex"
…
Are you really referring to street harassment as "being offered sex?"
The hell is wrong with you, man?
Have you ever read one of those female privilege checklist screeds? Most of the points do indeed focus on sex/romance.
If you think I’m personally trying to raise that as a serious point, it’d take some serious lack of awareness to say “privilege as a term is overwhelmingly used to shut down conversation – and you females live lives packed with unearned privilege”. Give me a little more credit than that.
Correct me if I am wrong, but those female privilege screeds are created by men and usually are rife with benevolent sexism such as this http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/20… ?
I get why benevolent sexism is a problem, and I don't think it should be ignored. At the same time, though, it certainly feels like a rationalization or a dodge to avoid nuance in one's narrative some of the times it is used.. There's often an implication that if you do away with sexism towards women, women's advantages due to benevolent sexism will disappear, and men's disadvantages, too. I'm not convinced that's the case, though. I made a similar point on the forums recently, IIRC.
But also, even if the advantages are a part of a system where women have less power, I still think it is important (and more consistent with their beliefs) for feminist women to be aware of these advantages.
I think you're right, for those things that are actually advantages. For example, being told I should be grateful women don't die on the job at the same rates as men is exactly the same as being told I should be grateful for the occupational segregation that keeps the vast majority of women in a small minority of low-status, low-paying fields. Maybe it could be seen as a silver lining, but I'm not sure that's what you mean by an advantage – and in any case it would disappear if feminists got what we want, namely fair access to all fields of work. I think it might be helpful to take factors like that into account when thinking about this issue.
Just for the record I dont think this is a productive space to figure out what might be some real advantages. Maybe in the forums when I am a little more computer accessible.
Sure, I'd love to have that conversation.
I wouldn't claim that benevolent sexism will just disappear when hostile sexism disappears. I think we should actively work against benevolent sexism.
That being said, I find it fairly frustrating that the only aspects of benevolent sexism that men tend to focus on are asking others out on dates, paying for those dates, and opening doors. I think we should challenge those stereotypes, but benevolent sexism also means that working class women have difficulty accessing well-paid unionized jobs and that those who wish to pursue military careers have limited options. It also means that women who are business executives will have their intuition and people skills praised, rather than their daring or their ability to be logical. It also means that even incredibly ambitious and successful women will have their appearance or their fondness for baking noted when profiled, and that they'll have to answer questions about how they balance their family life.
Beyond all that, in a world where both hostile and benevolent sexism still exist, it means that women who defy stereotypes and who join the military or who are prone to being logical at work or who decline to offer men as much emotional support as they'd like or who don't have any softening characteristics like a love of baking are going to be punished for not meeting those benevolent stereotypes in a multitude of ways. There is more to benevolent sexism than who pays for dinner.
Again, are you still trying to conflate harassment with "being offered sex?"
You do understand the difference, right?
What happens to women when they're harassed, when guys come up to them on the streets and proposition them, overtly or otherwise ISN'T "being offered sex."
It is not: "hey, would you like to have sex?"
It is (if it's anything at all and not just idle harassment): "Hey, I would like to use your body for my gratification, because it pleases me."
And like reboot says, most of that "oh, here's how women benefit romantically" is a lot of benevolent sexism crap about false chivalry and what-not. "Oh, women don't have to pay/women can expect…."
Junk that actually makes dating harder for men or women who are honestly just looking for a partnership of equals.
I think he's saying "dudes who talk about female privilege conflate harassment with being offered sex," not saying he believes it himself.
Ah, yeah, I should've know better. Wisp and I don't always agree, but he's not actually an a-hole. Sorry, man.
I think you are mistaking me for nonA in this instance. I'm pretty sure you were responding to him, not me.
Yeah, where are these polite offerings of sex? I don't think that "why don't you suck me off while we watch Harry Potter" is quite what you mean. That is a real OKC message I've gotten.
Whoops, meant to reply to nonA
Wait, you mean "nice boots. Want to fuck?" isn't a valid pickup line? All those years those goths were lying to me!
While not ideal, at least it is inviting me to a mutual activity, rather than suggesting I do something for the other person, or telling me what the other person is going to do to me!
OK, so here's a funny thing that occurred to me and you gave me the perfect opening to say it.
If I say "you're privileged. You eat three meals a day and a bunch of starving kids in Haiti are lucky to get one meal made literally of a mud pie. If you're living comfortably, you should maybe consider giving back and helping feed hungry people. You have a power that will let you make sure a child does not go hungry and gets an education," most people will agree with the premise. They may not actually donate but the overall idea that it is moral to use your excess power (and money is always the best superpower) to help others is believed by basically everyone.
If I say "you're privileged. People respect your word more for being a guy. If you're in a position of some respect and you see someone being blown off because of their gender, you should use that power and insist that they deserve a voice, too," all of a sudden the response is "no I don't! Its not fair of you to say I have the power!"
When I was taking a multicultural counseling class, we had a whole section of it to talk about the steps people (generally white people) go through in the process of recognizing privilege. There's a lot of resistance, and it takes awhile for some people to get over that. I think a lot of it has to do with guilt, as well as wanting to feel like our accomplishments are our own, and not something we were given by society.
Good article. Trouble is, it may not be clear enough, and I think is kind of sweeping away what might still be a real social issue. Nerds who happen to be white, male, cis, or straight (and especially all of these) are comparatively not underdogs, but that doesn't mean that their nerdiness is totally an individual, personal issue…that there are not stereotypes abounding in society that may constrain them. (Not to compare it to misogyny or racism, only to say that is isn't a neutral issue like wearing a certain colour of shirt. It also bears mentioning that a nerd does not need to identify as a nerd, they just need to be treated like one.)
It may be a matter of definition. I don't really mean "gamer", or "geek", or "techie" here…which to me implies being into certain hobbies or professions. I don't think nerds have "won" just because there are a lot of comic book movies out there…maybe comic book geeks have.
People (distressingly) seem to talk about nerdniess as if it were a matter of *culture*. No doubt for a lot of self-identified nerds this is all there is to it. But I think it is also a vibe associated with an umbrella of personality types which may or may not be maladjusted. Liking Batman is totally optional!!!
When I think of a nerd I think (bluntly) of someone who isn't quite autistic but is sort of close to it…they may be intellectual but lack social skills and may have tics that invite ridicule (through no fault of their own; a lack of coordination that registers as being "sick" which can easily lead to dehumanization). They don't need to be "hopeless with women", or (as I'm sure you'll agree) male or straight at all.
I totally agree that the bullied can easily become bullies, that many nerds have serious psychological issues that they need to work on, and absolutely, the idea of the white male nerd as the ultimate underdog (just because they are a nerd and for no other reason) is both untrue and cheapens some of the major social problems out there today. But again, privileged though they may be, is their nerdiness really of no consequence at all? Can't that intersect with other issues – and not just under the label of "anxiety"? Didn't that anxiety end up in their minds for a reason?
I hope I can be given clarification or rebuttal if I have misunderstood anything (if you or anyone with insight into this is still checking the page for replies, of course). It really was a good article. Misogyny and entitlement should be fought everywhere they appear, but I think we can still admit that people who seem "off" are socially stigmatized, and that this *is* an issue too which can be fought and countered. I don't think the existence of one problem needs to erase the other. (Though I do agree many privileged people, nerds and otherwise, could do with an expanded sense of perspective. Myself included definitely!)
Only the muscular, highly social geeks succeed in life.
Elon Musk knows how to network; Bill Gates knows how to market; Steve Jobs knew how to talk to audiences; Bill Nye the Science Guy is fashionable; Neil deGrasse Tyson is a goddamn science commuincator, and Mark Zuckerberg was the captain of his high school fencing team. None of them are overweight or have a neckbeard.
And let's face it, with privilege comes responsibility too. It takes a lot of hard work, and thinking of yourself as "talented" isn't going to motivate you.
I used to be the most dedicated tumblr user. Everyday, when I would talk about my problems regarding this, I would get spammed with thousands of messages from feminists screaming meaningless phrases like "fat!" "fedora!" "neckbeard!" "brony!" ect.
I LOVE this website. It's not perfect (who IS perfect, right?) but it brings up some really spectacular points. I like this article in particular being the eldest girl in a family of 5: 4 girls and one boy, with the boy being the youngest. I see my sisters having to deal with these things often and it breaks my heart. I hope that they will all find strong mates and be able to do what they want with their lives.
Keep up the writing! Where ever you went to school did a wonderful job with you!