| The Fifth Meditation on Creepiness |
[Sep. 15th, 2012|02:30 am]
Scott
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As far as I know there aren't a lot of areas where feminists and pickup artists are natural allies, but I can think of one person they would both despise equally. And he has a special place in my heart.
I can't quite remember his name and Google doesn't help, but let's call him al-Fulani. al-Fulani was a classical Islamic poet. When he was a young man traveling the world, he stopped by an oasis town to gather water for his camel and there he passed by a young woman. They exchanged a Significant Look, but said nothing to one another, and in the morning he left the oasis and never saw her again. But he was so impressed by her beauty that he spent the rest of his life composing poems to and about her, which according to the story I heard became among the most exquisite works of Arabic literature even though Google turns up exactly zero of them and maybe I dreamt this entire thing.
The pickup artists would call this "one-itis" and say he had no "game" since he was obsessing over this one woman instead of "playing the field". The feminists would say he was a "rape-y creep". And actually, they're both right. al-Fulani's behavior was neither a healthy way to satisfy his own needs nor fair to the poor woman he fixated on. Rationally it's stupid and horrible. Rationally Dante was stupid and horrible for fixating on Beatrice, Romeo was stupid and horrible for fixating on Juliet, and pretty much every love affair in literature up until the 20th century when people switched to writing books where antiheros slept with a bunch of women but never felt anything for any of them until finally they Developed Ennui - rationally all those love affairs were stupid and horrible. They assume that romantic attraction by some crazy form of magic.
But sometimes the magic works. The first time future President Lyndon Johnson met Lady Bird he asked her out on a fancy date; she was shocked at the presumptousness but accepted, later saying she felt "drawn to him like a moth to a flame". On that first date, less than twenty-four hours after they met, he proposed marriage to her. When she said 'of course not are you crazy' he started calling her and writing letters to her practically nonstop; ten weeks later she finally agreed. LBJ tried to insist the wedding occur that same day; Lady Bird managed to bargain him down to "tomorrow". They were married the next day and then had a perfect idyllic relationship that lasted the next forty years until LBJ's death.
I am friends with several married people like LBJ. Sometimes both spouses just knew from the moment they saw each other that it was meant to be. Sometimes only one of them did, and certain amounts of pestering and wooing and opinion-changing were necessary. Sometimes those certain amounts were very high. Most of these couples tend to be older people. A few are my age but conservative Christians. A few are neither old nor old-fashioned but just awesome people.
I am also friends with Normal Proper People. If LBJ or his female equivalent tried to propose to them on the first date, they'd scream at him to get the hell away from them, then post about it on a "What Was Your Worst First Date Ever?" thread on Reddit. Then they'd go to a party, get drunk, make out with someone on the couch, realize a few weeks later that they were kind of sort of dating them and might as well continue, and after two to four years of "going steady" they'd get married because that's what you do after dating someone for two to four years. A few years later, they would have an affair with their personal trainer who was younger and better-looking. Plus or minus a marriage and personal trainer affair, these seem to be the majority of the people my age whom I know.
And what got me thinking about this was a comment on that Less Wrong thread that got me thinking about this whole gender thing to begin with. I want to make it clear I am not mocking or criticizing this comment and that it is a perfectly rational way to behave and actually much more rational than the way I am behaving. It says:Actually, I have run into enough guys who treat me like I'm the last woman on earth because I'm a female nerd that I've developed an aversion to anything resembling that type of behavior. I was understanding about their enthusiasm at first, because I want a nerd, too, but it just doesn't work to date someone when they're acting like you're their last chance. They want to move too fast, they create expectations, they become biased and won't hear me when I talk about things that may be incompatibilities. That intensity throws a wrench into the process of getting to know someone. I grok their sense of necessity about being careful in how they present themselves, and I approve of this thread (There are a lot of things I wish I could say to guys - we need to communicate, and I have been wishing for an opportunity to do that), but on the individual level, I am easily spooked by signs of early attachment, overly optimistic probability estimates about us working out, and impatience to see signs of an established connection. I go on the alert for these signs of irrationality if a person treats me "like a celebrity" or similar.
I am pretty sure I have never met this particular woman, but I have certainly been the kind of guy she is talking about. I used to operate through Burning Life-Consuming Crushes, usually initiated in the first few days I met someone, and if I'd had LBJ's courage and awesomeness I would have asked any one of them to marry me and totally gone through with it if they said yes. Oddly enough (or not, if you've read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or the more reputable studies in the same genres) these first impressions were almost always correct, I found these people to be physically and mentally and emotionally compatible with me, I became good friends with most of them, and quite honestly I would probably still marry some of them after a few minutes' thought if they asked me tomorrow.
Eventually I was socialized into the Correct Way To Feel Attraction, which is "Huh, I guess this girl is pretty cute. I'll invite her out, and if she says no, then no big deal because that girl there is pretty cute too." This is what happened with my first girlfriend. She was a wonderful woman and I have nothing whatsoever bad to say about her, but I asked her out kind of knowing that the relationship would be enjoyable and then fizzle out, and sure enough the relationship was enjoyable and then fizzled out. This was probably exactly why she was my first girlfriend: it gave me the non-desperate-looking-ness that helped me seem attractive to her1.
So this seems to be another Rule of Intergender Communication like the two I mentioned in the last post: "Don't come on too strong".
But if women make a policy of excluding guys who show strong feelings for them, then logically they will end up with either guys who have only a vague and temporary preference for them, or Machiavellian liars.
I've tried the Machiavellian liar routine a few times myself. "Oh, hey, you're Jennifer or Jessica or Julia or whatever, right? I appear to have totally by coincidence ended up at this table with you. Anyway, you seem kind of okay. Want to go out to dinner sometime? Saturday's no good because I have things to do that night." Meanwhile in my head I'm going over what we're going to name our children.
It's pretty hard to maintain and it's also really unpleasant and it also makes me feel like a horrible person and it also means that if I ever do get into a relationship with Jennifer or Jessica it will be based on deception and lies and probably continue that way ("It's our six month anniversary! Can I get her the beautiful personalized gift that will make her super-happy and so make me super-happy as a result, or would that be creepy and I should just get her some crappy half-dead flowers instead?"). Even if I pull it off, I will be doing an imperfect simulation of what a guy who really doesn't care much for her could do perfectly, and so I will be strictly inferior to him.
Probably most men know they can't manage it, don't even try, and end up independently re-inventing the courtly love tradition: admiring an unattainable woman from afar and showering her with presents as an expression of their transcendent yet hopeless love. Or, as we moderns call it, being a Nice Guy (TM) and therefore Worse Than Hitler (TM).
So I think these filters work and people who have a policy of rejecting suitors who really deeply desire them in a way that makes them not interchangeable with the next "prospect" to come along - they will, in fact, successfully eliminate suitors who really deeply desire them and consider them non-interchangeable. And then ten years later one night in bed they ask their personal trainer why their husband or wife is so frigid.
I know that the Official Narrative is that you're supposed to not get too obsessed with someone until you've been in a relationship with them a while, and you ask them out when you just have a vague preference for them but later you warm up to them and after a few months or years you're genuinely in love and then you can do all the stuff I want to do immediately like write them sonnets and sestinas and maybe some ruba'iyat.
But the Official Narrative doesn't take into account that actually when I like someone my brain tells me right away and goes into Full Obsession Mode. Maybe there are people who don't work like that. Maybe they're the ones who write Official Narratives, while the rest of us are wasting our time writing sestinas and exquisite works of Arabic literature.
Now, don't get me wrong. I know that True Love is really inconvenient. It might not be requited, and then it would be a huge mess and no one would have any idea what to do, because our culture tells us that True Love Must Always Conquer Everything. If some woman I didn't like expressed True Love for me, it would make me feel guilty and horrible.
And because I'm just as susceptible to the Just World Fallacy as anyone else, I would tell them it wasn't true love at all but just plain Creepiness. And that it makes her a bad person and she should be ashamed of herself and so rejecting her is not only okay but actively heroic. And all my neighbors would support me in this, because we all know that True Love is the most powerful thing in the universe, even more powerful than nuclear weapons, and so we can't just let random people go around having it any more than we would just let random people have the Bomb2.
But when we reach the point where letting it slip that you love someone is pretty much social suicide, that's...not good. I'm trying to imagine what G. K. Chesterton would write if he saw that sentence above - "I know that True Love is really inconvenient" - and then write that, but I'm no G. K. Chesterton and also everything Chesterton wrote was beautiful but totally illogical and I don't want to end up like that anyway.
It may be I'm itching to channel Chesterton because I am saying something illogical. If I had to support all this with an argument developed by my rational side rather than my Islamic-poetry-reading side, it would look something like this:
1. A sudden intuitive obsession with another person as a romantic partner ("True Love") is often accurate, as shown both by data (eg the sort of stuff you see in Blink) and by anecdote (eg LBJ).
2. It is also really really awkward when it happens so3 mainstream modern culture has developed a norm of keeping it inside and punishing people who express it. Most people will specifically avoid anyone who tries to show True Love.
3. Unfortunately, this selects against people who have strong romantic preferences, who are probably also the people who are most likely to make good relationship partners.
4. People are afraid of a social norm that they have to accept anyone who declares True Love for them, and obviously that would be a bad social norm. Declaring True Love should not force the object of affection to reciprocate and maybe should not even count in the person's favor.
5. But it shouldn't count against the person either, and you shouldn't actively penalize the person for looking like they Truly Love you.
6. If you do, you may well end up with a partner who doesn't Truly Love you. Maybe they will come to love you anyway as your relationship blossoms, but it seems less certain they if they did at the start.
But I'm pretty sure that's all motivated thinking. It's definitely not my True Objection. My True Objection is an aesthetic appreciation for the fiery dazzling love that comes out of nowhere. It's a sense of crushing ugliness when I consider the modern culture of "Let's meet for coffee sometime, or not, meh, plenty of fish in the sea, so whatever." It's one of those base-level preferences that can't be CEVed away any more than romance itself could. If you don't share the preference that's fine, but I wish you wouldn't make life so difficult for people who do.
1: Actually, I should expand upon that word "desperation". I've been told it's really non-sexy, because it implies you need this girl to say yes because you're not cool enough to get any other. But another possible explanation is that you don't *want* another and that not all human beings are interchangeable to you. And this really ought to be a point in your favor.
2: Well, sort of. It seems to me that there is a certain kind of self-consciously suave and obviously false True Love which is socially acceptable, typified in a singer crooning "You're the only one for me, baby." I can't put my finger on the difference between that and the al-Fulani type of True Love, but I'm pretty sure it's there and detectable by a third party.
3: I expect there's probably also a signaling explanation for why True Love isn't tolerated. Maybe if anyone were allowed to show True Love, everyone would fake it and there would be an arms race or something? I can't put my finger on it right now, but I bet it's a good one. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's good enough. Banning the expression of True Love seems supervillainish enough that it's hard to imagine what could justify it.
Actually, I think I support a more general Supervillain Test: if a supervillain were plotting a specific social change, would we assemble a band of scrappy yet loveable teenagers with mysterious powers to thwart him? If yes, we should want to thwart the change even if it happens organically as a result of impersonal forces. |
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Scott, I really agree with sirroxton on this. You're using the term Nice Guy (TM) differently than pretty much every other person I've seen using that term. Whenever I see someone using this term, it's not just referring to someone who would really like to get into a relationship with a friend if possible. There's is always, as far as I can tell, the notion of exclusivity included. They are friends ONLY because they want to get into a relationship.
Most definitions I've seen also describe a Nice Guy(TM) as someone who thinks they deserve a relationship, and doesn't take into consideration what the other person wants. This is what I think sirroxton meant when they were talking about 'expectation.' There is also usually an expectation that the Nice Guy(TM) will get bitter and angry when they don't receive what they think they 'earned,' but by this point we are into the fuzzy part of the definition.
I don't know the circumstances of your personal experience. It's possible your ex-friend was burned in the past, and was simply too sensitive on this issue. It's also possible that you were unintentionally sending off signals that you had just been biding your time and weren't interested in ever staying just friends. Nevertheless, I do not think you are using the term correctly or fairly.
I hate to make an Argument From Etymology, but what the heck, I'll do it anyway.
As far as I know, the term "nice guy" was originally coined by men as a complaint against women. Here the complaint was that they were pursuing a girl, and they are genuinely a nice guy, and the girl friendzones them and starts a relationship with some jerk who beats her up and doesn't care about her.
The argument was that there is some tendency in women to prefer people who are mean to her than people who are kind and would actually make good mates.
The feminists did not address whether this tendency in women actually existed. Instead, they subverted the term "nice guy" to mean "a person who pretends to be nice but really is horrible and wants to take advantage of a woman totally for sex while not respecting her."
Now if anyone complains about this supposed female tendency to avoid nice people and go for jerks, the feminists can pattern-match to their definition and say "Ha! You admit it! You're a Nice Guy (TM) and so a horrible person who sees all women as sex objects!" And this makes no sense, but it sure has done a good job of shutting down discussion of whether women do tend to prefer jerks.
Now this is sort of subtle. The feminists would probably argue that if you complain that a woman you were courting went for a jerk instead of you, this proves that you are bitter that your attempt to demand sexual favors in exchange for friendship didn't work.
But if it's true that some women just make horrible decisions about mates and friendzone anyone they know who is decent, then this would be a legitimate complaint - not in the sense of "my right to demand sex from this woman has been violated" but in the sense of "this woman, when making romantic choices, tends to completely ignore her good friends and the people who have demonstrated they love her time and time again, and go for abusive sleazy gangsters." I won't claim that the complaint is completely unmotivated, but certainly I could imagine the woman's mother getting upset over the same tendency ("That nice young man was courting my daughter, and instead she chooses that alcoholic biker.")
The term "Nice Guy" is used to shut down debate on whether in fact some women make horrible romantic choices that specifically avoid nice people who are their friends. It may be that most women do not usually deploy it until a suitor who is their friend specifically makes the bad-romantic-choice-tendency argument. Maybe this is your experience. But in my experience (which admittedly includes very few data points), now that such a convenient term exists at least some women use it as soon as anyone who is their friend expresses any unreciprocated interest in them and it would be easier to turn them down if they could demonize them first.
Even if your experience turns out to be right and mine wrong, I still think it's a horrible term for the original reasons it was created.
Edited at 2012-09-17 08:21 am (UTC)
The term "Nice Guy" is used to shut down debate on whether in fact some women make horrible romantic choices that specifically avoid nice people who are their friends. Correct! You've created a very specific projection of the phenomenon, though, in a way that comes dangerously close to assigning intent. Let me give you another projection. In our scenario, a male is expressing an opinion on a female's romantic selections. Back in '52, Ralph Ellison wrote a seminal novel on racism. It's not really a philosophical work. It describes the experience of being subjected to the expectations of others. The "invisible" protagonist has been "erased" by those expectations. The human brain has enabled the existence of society by making the expectations of others Significant Things(TM). The male expressing an opinion on the female's sexual behavior is an Act(TM). In our scenario, the woman has three responses to the male's signaled expectations: 1) Internalize the expectations. This is the default mode, and it's incredibly easy to do. 2) Outgroup the male. Not a thoughtful approach, but it's the easiest alternative to #1. It is still, however, difficult. 3) Emotional ninja compartmentalization. The female takes on the burden of dealing with the toxic assets, while keeping the discussion rational. Signaling an unreserved willingness to express such opinions is hostile. Because… humans. Or because, regardless of the intent of the male in our scenario, he has to be sensitive to the fact that he's hacking somebody's emotional machinery. I suspect you agree that consent is an appropriate requirement here. I used the term "coregulation" in my original post because it's a meaningful one. It refers to a subset of communication as a form of control, be it unilateral or mutual. Many people enjoy the benefits of this control without being cognizant of what they're doing. You could reasonably argue that somebody who is unaware of this dynamic cannot be guilty of abusing it. A weak counterargument is that this dynamic predicts so much human behavior, that anybody who claims to be a student of human behavior should, by now, be fully cognizant of it. Brains suck, though. Cognitive blindspots prevail. Does this mean you can't have meaningful discussions about mate selection? No! And I would caution against using this kind of hyperbole, as it derails the discussion. If you signal sensitivity and successfully solicit consent to discuss the subject, you can yammer about unfairness to males until the cows come home. This gets back to your "need room to do things wrong" post. Obviously, if the male in our scenario doesn't already understand this dynamic, he's not going to figure it out by meditating on his navel. But an inexperienced female in our scenario has a problem too! She doesn't have the ninja mental skills necessary to handle the male's "bad" behavior, and her only choice is to be controlled or, if she's got the chutzpah, outgroup the male. The promulgation of the Nice Guy(TM) meme creates expectations of the female that improve the odds of avoiding the default result of simply submitting to control.
Thus far, I've focused on the impact and choices of the female in our scenario, and have avoided the question of the male's motivation.
What justified motivation does the man in our scenario have for expressing an opinion of the woman's dating choices?
Injustice! Isn't that an OK motivation? Sort of. "You should be fucking me, not him," is pretty gross and controlling, but, "large subsets of women seem to employ decision strategies that result in decent fellows living out frustratingly sexless existences" seems benign, right? If it's true that is. Is it a sound analysis of female behavior, or is the question more predictive of a non-self-aware proto-human scorning the woman in an effort to improve his self-image? Are these two things mutually exclusive? In good faith, let's assume that only the former is pertinent.
The man in our scenario makes a predictive statement about female decision strategies that we assume is true. It tickles his sense of injustice, and he's wondering what to do about it. You've proposed open discussion of the broader scenario. Seems legit, and not in the sarcastic sense. Increasing awareness is a classic strategy. We'll assume this serves some purpose besides trying to make women feel shame about their choices; maybe it'll promote the creation of protocols that will help friends register as mate options. Only problem is, society is still dealing with the problem of controlling and misogynistic males. Despite the male's intent, the discussion is triggering. The loudest males who agree with his framing will be agreeing for terrible reasons. Men and women who have developed vital pattern filters for navigating today's male population will see him as an ally to controlling males, and they'll be right, despite his best intentions.
There are better solutions: The male could give up on fixing the bigger picture, and go to the effort of being both respectful of boundaries and sexually alluring. It's not trivial, but it's quite possible. He should find spaces where progressive people hang out, where women don't feel put-upon, and give material aid to growing and promoting those spaces. Hopefully his approach doesn't involve deliberately seeking women who haven't developed a gag reflex against having some dude unilaterally jizz OCPD and INTJ rationality all over her motivations until she conforms to his expectations.
Edited at 2012-09-17 10:49 pm (UTC) | |
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