[cw: defense of finding people creepy. moebius, if you read this post, I will Frown.]
I recently finished reading Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. Its thesis is basically that humans have evolved for literally millions of years to be able to tell when other humans are up to Bad Shit. Therefore, when you get a weird feeling you can’t explain that another person is just bad news, that feeling isn’t actually causeless. Your intuition is systemizing information on a level that you don’t have access to. Bad feelings that you don’t have any good reason for are actually the most important kind of bad feeling– they’re the ones that are most likely to be the product of your intuition knowing something that your rational mind doesn’t.
I am pretty sure that his argument is accurate. However, the problem is that your intuition didn’t come from God knowing exactly what the signs of someone being bad news are. It learns from experience and from its surrounding environment. Sometimes it’s a personal quirk: a person might be scared of bald men because his rapist was bald. But sometimes most people share an intuition that a group of people is bad news. Most nonblack people are, on a certain level, scared of black men. Most neurotypicals parse autistic body language as alien and therefore threatening.
One random person finding you scary is just noise. Most people you interact with finding you scary is a Serious Problem.
Some people suggest that the solution is to ignore our intuition. But, as de Becker points out, intuition is an invaluable source of information. As a person read as female and a borderline, I am at tremendous risk of being raped or abused. I don’t want to throw away my best tool to prevent myself from being raped or abused.
Another solution is to consciously memorize what information your intuition is working from. The problem is that that means that, whenever you meet a new person, in the back of your mind, you’d have to have running your Are There Signs That This Person Will Hurt Me module. This is totally doable– many people who are routinely at risk of violence do it– but it’s also tremendously psychologically taxing. It’s harder to form relationships when you’re consciously thinking about whether the person will hurt you, and most people feel worse when they’re regularly thinking about the possibility of violence. In fact, that sort of suspicion is a kind of hyperarousal, which is a symptom of PTSD.
At the same time, I’m not sure that that would solve the problem. Because humans have been working off intuition for our threat assessment for so long, we don’t necessarily have a good model of what, exactly, our intuition is paying attention to. The factors we don’t know are relevant could hurt us. And humans are usually really bad at consciously reasoning with probabilities, even when we’re really good at subconsciously reasoning with probabilities: most people will give wildly wrong estimates about how confident they are in a belief, but they’ll still behave fairly rationally about, say, the risk of a car accident (at least more rationally than they would if they tried to do explicit probabilities).
Another solution is to only trust your intuition when it’s not about a group you know you tend to be afraid of. If someone is black or autistic, one might override their intuition; if someone is white or nonautistic, they might not. The problem here is that black people and autistic people are still sometimes up to Bad Shit; blanket trusting any group of people is a bad idea. On the other hand, perhaps this method could be combined with the conscious-reasoning method: if you are interacting with a group you tend to have inaccurate feelings about, then you should do conscious checks for red flags, but if you’re not, you can rely on your intuition. That could help with both situations.
I am not sure how to help this problem in general. One step might be to have fewer media depictions of Scary Black Men and so on, so that people’s intuitions stop learning that members of those groups are terrifying. Another would be for individuals to have friends who are members of groups they’re scared of (vouched for by other friends, of course) so that they can teach their intuitions that those groups are not actually scary.
It might also be good to attack it from the other angle: instead of making people’s intuitions more accurate, make people feel less bad about being a false positive. For a lot of people, coming off as creepy feels like they’ve done something morally wrong. But, as long as you don’t actually have ill intent, coming off as creepy isn’t morally wrong. In many cases, it is a product of another person’s subconscious racism, ableism, or other -isms; in some cases, it is a personal issue; in some cases, you accidentally did things that made other people feel uncomfortable, and while it is bad to deliberately do things that make other people uncomfortable, it can’t be wrong to make mistakes. People who find you creepy probably don’t want to interact with you, but the fact that they found you creepy doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.
Thing of Things 
A basic problem with intuition is that it’s very valuable when it’s based on experience, preferably your own, but I think people also pick up on who to trust or not trust from the people around them, which is somewhat valuable when those people are reacting from their own experiences.
However, there are major efforts to install imaginary experiences as part of installing prejudices. Notice that when someone wants you to be afraid of or angry at [group], they’ll give you a viscerally affecting story of being attacked by members of that group.
The attack may be real. It may be entirely fictional. It may be a common current risk for you, or it may be rare or have happened a long time ago. Your imagination feeding into your snap reactions isn’t good at telling the difference.
My tentative advice is to work on lowering anxiety and increasing attention to what’s happening currently between you and another person, but I admit this is just what sounds reasonable to me.
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Does de Becker offer solid evidence for these intuitions to be good? These intuitions evolved in lockstep with the ability to deceive, except in an environment where reputational clues were a *lot* better. There was no pressure in the ancestral environment for an intuition so good that it didn’t need those clues, but now we’ve lost them, so we should expect intuition to mostly be wrong.
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[cw: discussion of rape]
IIRC, the representative example de Becker uses is a woman who was raped by stranger who got into her apartment under the pre-tense of “helping” carry her groceries. Her intuition was basically screaming at her that something was “off” about the guy, his insistence, and his word choice – but her feeling was over-ridden by her “politeness”.
He doesn’t offer solid evidence in the form of cited studies. He’s basically just interviewed lots of people as a security expert and put together a lot of anecdotal data. I don’t see how one studies such a subject in a way that’s going to pass an ethics committee.
He makes a very strong statement – every victim he’s ever interviewed the person “knew” something was up. This seems *very much* like confirmation bias, and he seems to interview his subjects in a very “pressing” manner. And it’s probably very comforting to think that we have this mysterious thing that’s always going to warn us of danger. So I was kind of sceptical.
On still another hand, if you feel fear, and you’re alone or whatever, that probably came from somewhere, and it’s generally better to act cautiously at the expense of acting politely or fairly.
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Well, right. Presumably our ancestors mostly lived among their clans and only met strangers maybe a few times a year or whatever. But on the other hand, our brains are pretty plastic, and culture has evolved to run on that wetwear — and this is setting aside the tedious question about if we’ve “evolved” at all in the past few thousand years.
(No I don’t want to argue about lactose intolerance, thanks anyway.)
But we’ve been doing the city thing for a while, here and there, and a life with frequent strangers is not entirely new in human experience. Certainly I’ve always lived in a world rich in strangers. So have my parents. So have all my friends.
I think you underestimate the ability of our social intuitions to adapt.
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One problem is that in the old days, intuition was largely formed through direct experience, or at least from second hand experiences related by people you actually knew.
Today your intuition about what type of person is likely to be dangerous could be formed in large part by watching TV…
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> For a lot of people, coming off as creepy feels like they’ve done something morally wrong.
Perspective of someone who’s on the far side of the bell curve from you in terms of scrupulosity: This is really, really not the main problem. Even if I don’t care at all that people think I’m creepy, people who do will discriminate against me in ways that affect my life, up to and including violence.
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Perhaps a first step would be to not use the same word for setting off someone’s intuitions and for behavior that violates boundaries and is seriously Not Okay
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>For a lot of people, coming off as creepy feels like they’ve done something morally wrong. But, as long as you don’t actually have ill intent, coming off as creepy isn’t morally wrong.
Neither is it morally wrong to express sadness and hurt for potentially having come across as creepy. But CERTAIN PEOPLE are going to be all up in arms about that last one. Because, the narrative goes, it’s a Gross Entitled Man “making things about himself”. Sigh.
(It is generally – and I will fucking die upon this hill, it matters to me – whenever a non-male feminist is about to say that men’s ~~~feelings~~~ are axiomatically too low a priority to even be part of our concern about some situation, they ought to do a check: while the *opportunities* and *expectations* and *centeredness* for men are vaunted by the patriarchy, men aren’t allowed feelings other than anger, ambition and the desire to possess by default.
Therefore, well… I feel a little bad for saying it in such a flippant/trolling way, but (literal) male tears are far more un-patriarchal than the people who say “~~~male tears~~~”. And it is derailing, to cry about how the latter are (ostensibly) crusading on behalf of some enormous issue like women not being safe from sexual violence, while men are ~afraid that women will laugh at them~. This is – to use inappropriate hyperbole – like saying that Africans are afraid of mosquito bites.
Shutting men up when they are too human and want to scream for help is *part of the mechanism whereby patriarchy kills men*.
(fuck, another barely on-topic rant about men’s oppression… I call myself a transfeminist but I feel like many transfeminists would refuse to have me)
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I thought it was pretty on-topic.
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Showing weakness is bad for most people in most circumstances, regardless of gender. To the extent that men are differentially punished for showing weakness in situations where it should be acceptable (e.g. with intimate partners), the double standard is enforced more harshly and often by women than by other men. It seems a little weird to refer to this as “patriarchy”.
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Well there is a flavor of feminism that says “men oppress women and that’s the entire story.”
I don’t think you’ll find many of them around here, of course, but they definitely exist. It’s fair game to talk about them.
“Patriarchy” is an imperfect word, but usually you can tease out what folks are talking about when they use it. But yeah, I have no problem seeing how patriarchy can be enforced by both women and men. It is the “system of gendered oppression that places men in positions of agency and women as the sex class,” or something like that. At least that’s what a radfem would likely say.
But yeah, women can act as tools of the oppressive system, against men who are failing to perform their role. This is not so hard to understand.
“Patriarchy” is a pretty great applause light. I use the word. It works well enough, since “kyriarchy” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But on the other hand, if I want to get technical, I try to use better terms. “Oppositional sexism” is a good one. “Enforced gender roles” is another. “Gender policing” is a third. When I say “patriarchy” I mean that whole ugly system. I expect the listener to get that. It’s feminism 101.
We can talk about how women are supposed to be status markers, and thus women are constrained in their romantic choices. If they fail to their own prescribed role, which involves policing the value of men, then they pay a price. The incentive system is pretty much broken.
Plus some people are just shitty and mean.
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Multi is saying, “Hey feminists, you don’t want to perpetuate The Patriarchy, do you? Then you must add jokes about ‘male tears’ to your list of Bad Things.”
Contrary to popular opinion, “patriarchy” doesn’t mean “men”.
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From my experiences, I notice that men are more active and persistent in enforcing patriarchy, but this is very deeply normalized in society and the male gender role… so men hurt by their gender role but still at least partly attempting to conform to it are less likely to notice the subtler ways in which other men use the (ostensibly) shared gender role against them. Things like the many absurd and horrible mentalities about dating.
However, I also just plain think that feminists are not doing enough for men, and yes, that female feminists should help us get off the ground. Yes, this is extremely Problematic, I agree with the usual rejoinder that it enforces the female gender role of affective labour… but just telling men to throw themselves against a brick wall (which includes, of course, the norms that men tough it out and don’t talk to anyone but closest friends about their feelings and don’t show unattractive weaknesses and insecurities) – that’s no less problematic here.
Everyone has to pitch in a little to do their part – step zero could be detoxifying spaces where men go (which is NOT done through polarizing rhetoric) and softly encouraging men to publicly open up their vulnerabilities and have more honest, more *individualized* conversations – and we should also analyze the ways in which existing discourse about male issues is flawed and burdened by patriarchal ideas/thought patterns.
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Well, my main point was that we live in an adversarial, competitive world, and this is unlikely to change. The primary reason men (or women!) don’t often burst into tears in business meetings is not that we are conforming to an artificial gender role, it’s that we don’t want to show weakness in a situation where weakness would yield a real advantage. Similarly, men talking about dating are in real or potential sexual competition with one another — a competition much more fundamental than any intersex one, and which necessarily takes women’s preferences into account. If women generally prefer the strong silent type, then pressure for men to conform to that ideal is readily explicable. I see no reason to assume the preference is inauthentic, or that it is somehow created by men, as the word “patriarchy” implies.
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@veronica d: If “patriarchy” can mean “enforcement of male gender roles by women” just as easily as it can mean “enforcement of female gender roles by men”, then calling it an “imperfect word” is a significant understatement. It’s well into “deliberately misleading” territory at that point.
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@ stillnotking
Patriarchy isn’t the enforcement, it’s the social system that the enforcement preserves.
Yes, women uphold the patriarchy. Men perpetuate the “women are wonderful” bias. Gay (and “ex-gay”) Christians promote the idea that straight love is morally superior to gay love. Most people uphold the traditions and beliefs of their culture — their behaviour is based on their idea of what’s “normal”, and the culture itself creates incentives for enforcement.
I think they call it “patriarchy” because one of its features is the belief that roles like “head of the household” or “the President” are naturally men’s roles. Whether or not it was “created by men” in some sense is debatable (for instance, you might point out that historical lawmakers and religious leaders, most of whom were men, have had a large influence on our cultural norms).
Do you have a better idea? “The system of unjust, suboptimal ideas and practices related to sex and gender in our culture” is a bit too long and uninspiring, IMO.
Many women prefer the “strong, silent” type in the same way that many men prefer a “lady in the streets” — that is, they want a partner they can trust and rely on, a valuable ally in the physical or social world. When it comes to sex, intimacy and communication, they value other qualities, like passion and openness. And discouraging vulnerability in men can damage those.
However, the original discussion was about “male tears” jokes, which take place neither in business meetings nor in intimate relationships. They’re probably a reaction to the “feminists are evil manhaters” trope, using the good old “agree and amplify” PUA technique — “yes, I’m totally a spectacular misandrist supervillain — in fact, I bathe in male tears every day, mwahaha!” — but that doesn’t make them OK.
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The “male tears” thing is designed to attack a point of sexual vulnerability, much like calling feminists fat, or strident, or hairy. Those buttons aren’t arbitrary; they’re attached to something. Calling that thing “patriarchy” seems like a really terrible word choice, given that it applies to women and men more or less equally. Both sexes enforce their standards on one another, and short of dismantling the standards altogether — a project on par with making people stop caring about hierarchies so anarchy can finally work — I don’t know what the solution is, here. You can channel the current of human nature, but you can’t dam it.
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I’m pretty sure the *male tears* thing is not meant to target men who suffer actual sadness. Nor do I think the feminists mean to target men who actually cry. Instead, they intend to target abusive and entitled redpill types, along with the endlessly aggrieved gamergate crowd, who in the minds of many feminists have weaponized crocodile tears. Thus the *male tears* discourse intends to entirely shut down that line of attack by manipulative men.
I’ll say flatly, there are a metric fuckton of guys like this, and if you’re an online geek feminist operating in Twitter, you’ll encounters these men nearly constantly.
It does not matter if these men are rare. To these women, they are not rare, since as a class they have decided to gang up on and bully these women.
(The failure modes of this cycle are obvious.)
On my twitter feed the other day, this quote appeared:
Which is sadly true.
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“I’m pretty sure the *male tears* thing is not meant to target men who suffer actual sadness.”
Boo fuckin’ hoo.
“I’ll say flatly, there are a metric fuckton of guys like this, and if you’re an online geek feminist operating in Twitter, you’ll encounters these men nearly constantly.”
I do not doubt this. I do not doubt it’s pretty bad for women on Twitter. I feel a lot of sympathy for you, and please, you know I don’t say things lightly, I really do mean this.
What I feel zero sympathy for is your argument. I understand the excuses you give, I just don’t think they at all justify this kind of aggression and its effects on the Men Who Suffer Actual Sadness.
Because, as has been brought up re: the Aaronson thing, it’s not just that these men are reading and listening, it’s that safe, less-patriarchal spaces have a *personal* importance to them. That feminism is, by default, a moral *authority* to them. That they have a stake here, too. (The SJ idea of “Allies” is horrible in many regards, but here it is especially exclusionary.)
(tangential but important illustration: http://invertedgender.tumblr.com/tagged/romanticize-responses )
Your side is capable of hurting certain men over others with the aforementioned kind of discourse and behaviour BECAUSE these men assume that they are safer around your side, BECAUSE they (correctly) feel some shared class interest. This is part of what gets me so much.
(But yes, yes, I know you know, I do not resent or single out you personally.)
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A more precise snapshot of what the Male Tears Discourse actually does:
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“No matter how abusive a male nerd becomes, you’ll never convince him that he is not the victim. ”
But almost all abusers are like that (well, except the ones who are cultural abusers and consider what there doing to be right because tradition. And maybe a few “straw nihilist” types and sociopaths). What value is there in adding “nerd” to that sentence other than to attack nerds for being nerds?
(I will also point out that the sentence remains true whether or not you have male there as well)
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@illuminati initiate — I don’t think that is true. I have encountered many abusive men who think they are some kind of “natural predator,” and their targets are “natural prey.” This gets couched in all kinds of language, but I see many clear variations.
Nerds occupy a particular place under masculinity, and they respond particular ways.
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Veronica:
It’s funny, I’ve heard that same exact quote, only when I heard it, it was “No matter how abusive a female feminist becomes, you’ll never convince her that she’s not the victim.”
I’d like you to consider how sadly true you find it, then consider the light in which people who identify as nerds first and feminists second are likely to take it.
I, for one, find it kind of tragically hilarious. I mean, as far as I can tell, Veronica just gave the nerd population carte blanche to come up with their own rhetorical superweapon to deny space to the endlessly-aggrieved crocodile-tear-crying feminists!
And if the feminists who aren’t endlessly-aggrieved and aren’t engaging in tactical complaint start to get a little upset that they’re being accused of such every time that they’re accused of being a feminist?
Well, it doesn’t matter how abusive, etc., etc.
Wouldn’t it be be better to do your part to stop that cycle before the group of people this aforementioned subset of feminists do what the feminists have been doing for the reason the feminists have been doing it? Is it really that hard to not make excuses for feminists when they’re being as horrifyingly patriarchial as ‘lol male tears’, even if it means that somewhere, on some tumblr, some Gamergator has a rhetorical line open that he wouldn’t otherwise?
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@multiheaded — Put bluntly, women can’t fix this problem for men. Men don’t want our help, at least not the kind of help we can give on our own terms. Nor can you ask us to help men on their terms, since *we know what men want.*
No really. Sorry. I’ve met too many men.
Men have to figure out their own shit. They also have to realize that women are varied — I mean past a basic intellectual agreement to this, but to know it in their bones. Whatever status games they insist on playing — I get it. It’s a storm of terrible. But don’t blame women for getting caught in the vortex as well.
You can’t really step outside of the status games. Neither can we. But you can get strong and smart and figure shit out, rise above, and some women do and some men do, but tons don’t. But don’t lay this shit on women. It ain’t like we’re naturally above the fray.
We gals have better theories, I think. However, nothing is stopping men from reading Serano. In fact, I suggest they do whenever I can.
I can’t force them to read it. Nor do I offer free hugs in the meanwhile. Got my own problems.
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@Robert Liguori — I personally don’t use “male tears” discourse, so telling me to break the cycle misses the point.
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@veronica d: You can’t possibly be obtuse enough to fail to notice that “male tears”, along with “neckbeard”, “basement-dweller”, etc., are deliberate attacks on male sex appeal. The people who use those expressions aren’t saying that their male targets are stupid, or insincere, or manipulative. They’re saying they’re not meeting the standard of attractiveness to women. It’s a straightforward example of gender-role shaming, no less than a man calling a woman a slut or a bitch or a whale.
I’m not going to tell anyone to stop using those expressions, because, well, they work. If you’re looking for an Achilles heel, you could do a lot worse than those, and no doubt a lot of men deserve it. But let’s not kid ourselves as to why they work, or pretend that women don’t do the exact same thing men do in this regard.
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Veronica:
“However, nothing is stopping men from reading Serano.”
…instead of the SJ people pushing some bad, manipulative and guilt-tripping and unsympathetic pieces aimed at men, just because these pieces are good at hitting all the virtue buttons. They can sabotage any trust men might extend to “sympathetic” feminist advice.
For example: see this intensely fucking awful article on feminism and relationships.
http://www.mediacoop.ca/blog/norasamaran/19018
I recently saw it linked – by female feminists, at men – with glowing endorsements. It has many pieces of good advice but a horrible toxic attitude. Starts out really good and ends with gems like:
>Which leads to the next point: if you cause harm, even by accident, and someone calls you on it, and you believe we are all mutually interdependent, ‘i need space’ is not an acceptable response. You can take space to get your head clear so you can listen and know yourself better – but that kind of space is measured in hours, or at most days. If you want ‘space’ measured in months, you’re not taking space, you’re avoiding responsibility…. …Get used to being uncomfortable
>If you find yourself disregarding something she is saying because she is upset as she is saying it, notice that this is sexism.
In other words: JUST BE ABUSED YOU SHIT JUST DO IT.
>Learn to recognize the difference between internal feelings of guilt or shame, and the external messages you are receiving or reality you are observing. Practice this skill in general in your life to be a more responsive radical; the same skill at working through inherited guilt scripts to become responsive, that makes you a better lover and friend to your exes, also makes you more responsive to the violence of colonization, and other structural violence in which most of us are complicit.
Fuck off, you fucking rrrrradical. Check your fucking mental health privilege and then just go away and don’t impose your political awfulness on basic good advice.
Veronica, do you not see how this oh so ~feminist~ toxicity actively works *against* good points about emotional integrity and good communication and showing strength through openness?
Men should absolutely listen to feminist advice about masculinity and heterosexuality, they are able to learn a lot of good attitudes and ways from it. But – and my heart breaks to say this – I do not recommend men to automatically *trust* the advice in proportion to how female feminists endorse it.
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Veronica: I do not want to “lay any shit” on female feminists that they do not already take upon themselves.
Had every feminist under discussion just waved the patriarchy-challenged men under discussion away and told them to read Serano and draw their own conclusions, I’d really be totally fine with it! That’s not what’s going on in “progressive” gender-related spaces, though.
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Also: I would call these things out in far milder, more diplomatic terms, had they not been so REPEATEDLY AND PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVELY defended with claims that a female feminist’s benevolent intent towards men is always magic. Yeah, well, it frankly just lowers male readers’ expectations, I think. Which is obviously a bad thing harmful to everyone.
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Veronica:
“I personally don’t… …so telling me to break the cycle misses the point.”
Why, that’s sweet of you! Maybe you could even go further and say that not ALL feminists, as it were, are personally associated with the specified thing! Wouldn’t that be a helpful addition to the debate, eh?
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I disagree, and calling me obtuse won’t help your case. On the latter two, I agree with you. Terms such as “neckbeard” are indefensible. They are attacks on male appearance, and in general appear combined with a general “fat hopeless loser virgin” discourse. This stuff is terrible and I often speak out against it.
On the other hand, “male tears” appears to target what is perceived as male crocodile tears and privilege denial. Which, I think this is correct often enough. Furthermore, I think women are right to reject their perceived supporting roles in the lives of men. Saying, “Nope, sorry, you’ll get no emotional labor from me” is a fine thing to say in a culture that excepts you to perform emotional labor. “I drink male tears” is an in-your-face way to express the latter thought. You’re not expected to like it.
Different women say “male tears” in different contexts. Personally, I avoid it, as I find it generally unhelpful. I’d rather spell out my meaning in more careful terms. However, I do not reject every use of the phrase.
Certainly when you encounter a feminist who combines “male tears” with “neckbeard” and a cluster of other attacks, then you are correct to reject what she says as unfair. However, that does not fix the full meaning of the term in every use.
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I don’t have a big problem with that article. Which, it’s banal, but all “feminist dating advice for men” is banal. It’s seldom very helpful.
Which, I suppose men should listen to this stuff, but after they’ve got the basic “how to meet a woman and get a relationship going” stuff worked out. You can consider feminist dating advice for men as some added nuance to your basic relationship skills. Certainly much of what this author suggests is pretty basic relationship 201. (Although she is a pretty terrible writer and you can surely find better sources for this info.)
Feminist dating advice for men is utterly useless for the shy, awkward, and dateless.
That article is probably ableist, in the sense it does not consider the struggles of men with weird-brains. But then, this is how it begins:
It doesn’t look like she is targeting this at nerds, nor at weird-brain people. She seems to be aiming at social justice dudes. So it is ableist in the sense that most things written by anyone ever are ableist. It’s ignoring a large set of people.
On the other hand, I don’t think this author should try to write things for nerdy men with weird brains. She would almost certainly fuck it up.
#####
tl;dr The article is kinda banal, but it doesn’t support your point that feminists are somehow boundlessly terrible to nerdy men.
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@multiheaded — I can summarize a lot by saying this: Feminism should do a better job at understanding and caring about nerdy men with weird brains. However, such men are not the *primary responsibility* of feminists. We can care, but up to a point. Plus, given the levels or rampant sexism in nerd-space, geek feminists are operating in a pretty toxic environment. We’re dealing with a lot of hard shit nearly all the time. So thus we may not have many cycles to spare for “poor, sad men.”
Yeah, that’s dismissive of real pain. I get that. But there is a long tradition where women lack any agency *except* being support systems for men. We’re done with that, nor are we going to wade into 4chan and find the sad men who need our help, as if our help would be welcome. Sorry guys, but nope. Fix your own shit.
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[comment is in progress, apologies if i somehow post it prematurely]
@veronica: I’m pretty sure the *male tears* thing is not meant to target men who suffer actual sadness. [. . .] Instead, they intend to target abusive and entitled redpill types, along with the endlessly aggrieved gamergate crowd, who in the minds of many feminists have weaponized crocodile tears.
This is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of men who are abusive and entitled, and also genuinely miserable. To take an extreme example (cw for googlers: everything. everything), I’m pretty sure that Marjan Šiklić[1] really does hate his life. He’s still an incredibly horrible person who has turned his back not only on decency-for-decency’s sake, but also on anything that would actually improve his life but would require him to be an even slightly decent human being.
And, you know, I don’t give a fuck about him. Because he is a terrible human being. But.
But there are other men who are sad about the same things he’s sad about, and who aren’t horrible human beings. And the meme that exists in practice, around a lot of the feminist web—which people justify on the basis of the existence of Marjan and folks like him—isn’t “It’s okay to mock men who have difficulties finding romance and/or sex and are sad as a result, provided that they have explicitly rejected advice that would actually help them achieve their ends in favor of ranting about how modern women are ‘insane sexual receptacles’.” It’s just “”It’s okay to mock men who have difficulties finding romance and/or sex and are sad as a result.”
Put bluntly, women can’t fix this problem for men. [. . .] Furthermore, I think women are right to reject their perceived supporting roles in the lives of men. Saying, “Nope, sorry, you’ll get no emotional labor from me” is a fine thing to say in a culture that excepts you to perform emotional labor. [. . .] But there is a long tradition where women lack any agency *except* being support systems for men. We’re done with that, nor are we going to wade into 4chan and find the sad men who need our help, as if our help would be welcome. Sorry guys, but nope. Fix your own shit.
So, there’s this thing that I’ve noticed that you do, repeatedly. It goes like this:
And that’s fucked.
Because no one is asking you to drain their abscesses, they’re asking you to stop hitting them, or defending other people who do.
None of us are demanding that you fix 4chan’s problems, or anybody else’s. We are demanding that you not (non-selectively[2]) add to them by calling people creeps or mocking “~~~male tears~~~,” or by letting other women (or men) get away with doing so without saying “yo woman, not cool.”
Men don’t want our help, at least not the kind of help we can give on our own terms. Nor can you ask us to help men on their terms, since *we know what men want.*
Now there’s a lovely blanket statement.
You can’t really step outside of the status games. Neither can we.
No, but you can refuse to play. But you’ve already made it quite clear that you won’t, even when that means stepping on people who’ve done nothing to you.
@multiheaded:Veronica: I do not want to “lay any shit” on female feminists that they do not already take upon themselves.
Had every feminist under discussion just waved the patriarchy-challenged men under discussion away and told them to read Serano and draw their own conclusions, I’d really be totally fine with it! That’s not what’s going on in “progressive” gender-related spaces, though.
*fistbump*
[1] a.k.a. coconut, Goverments Get Girlfriends/GovernmentsGetGfs, CoAlphaAntiModernistIncelBlogger/caamib, thatincelblogger, and probably several others as well.
[2] Again, I don’t give a fuck about the real assholes. If you can find a way to hurt them and only them, then fire free. But that’s not what’s going on here.
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Err, I meant to remove that “in progress” note when I finished the comment, and then forgot. It is in fact complete. My apologies.
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Actually, multiheaded kinda did. Here:
I think this is balderdash and runs into the giant brick wall of how these men treat women. But more, we have in fact tried to help, some of us. There are a metric fuckton of “feminist advice to hurting men” articles, and they generally seem pretty ineffective. Which makes me think that the help these men want is not what we can give.
So, that sucks I guess. Maybe if we invent robot waifu.
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1. To expand on Multiheaded’s point where she said:
…instead of the SJ people pushing some bad, manipulative and guilt-tripping and unsympathetic pieces aimed at men, just because these pieces are good at hitting all the virtue buttons.
It’s worth remembering in addition that it is pretty hard to get out of this stuff without explicit contradiction. Now I haven’t read “Excluded”, so I’m uninformed about its particular content, but I can say that more generally a lot of non-terrible feminism generally fails to address the problem because it doesn’t explicitly contradict the terrible sort. The result is like what I described in point 1 here: The restrictions just pile up, as you continue to try to hit the ever-narrowing-but-never-quite-zero target. The contradiction might be there in fact, of course, but you shy away from deriving it. But in general, it’s frequently the case someone thinks wrong thing Q, you can’t get them out of it by telling them some P that implies not Q; then they’ll just think Q and P and shy away from deriving the contradiction. You have to explicitly tell them not Q.
2. In reponse to this:
It doesn’t look like she is targeting this at nerds, nor at weird-brain people. She seems to be aiming at social justice dudes.
OK, but what about the quite substantial intersection of nerds and social justice dudes? What about, like, the entire subculture I consider or used to consider home?
This whole recent “feminism vs. nerds” thing seems pretty odd to me. I’m with the various people saying that feminism and nerdism seem to pretty naturally go together. I mean, let’s look at some commonalities:
* The idea that most people are biased, following their intuitions and common sense; but I know better than them, following reason
* The idea that most people bind themselves by social constructs, but I see through them (Robert Anton Wilson: “Guns are real. Blue uniforms are real. Cops are social fiction.”)
* The idea of judging people based on competence and relevant qualities rather than appearance and irrelevant ones, whether that’s race and sex or appearance and social niceties
* And of course there’s science fiction — if you are seriously considering a society that includes aliens, racism and sexism seem pretty silly. (I seem to recall a comment of Eliezer’s to this effect, though I can’t find it at the moment.)
And you can call this a terrible elitist form of feminism if you want, but, *shrug*.
I mean, basically what I’m describing here is… well, ScienceBlogs. (Or Freethought Blogs, these days, I guess.) PZ Myers. RationalWiki. That’s where I’m coming from.
Or, for examples that are less terrible than being stung by millions of wasps, how about just visiting the math department at the nearest big university? I’d be pretty surprised if you found much misogyny or anti-feminism there. (As for institutional sexism in the form of tenure clocks and such, that’s another matter…) When the whole thing with Scott Aaronson blew up and there were a whole lot of really nasty anti-feminist comments on his blog, frequently from regulars, I was honestly surprised. I don’t expect to see that sort of thing from math people! Maybe this only works if you’re in a liberal area, I don’t know. But I basically grew up in the shadow of the academy, and it was feminist nerds everywhere. And some of them are reasonable, and some of them are not so reasonable… and some of them are doublethinking and terrified.
I mean, I guess maybe it’s a matter of whether you grew up in the shadow of the academy or the shadow of the comic shop? Because I’ll admit when I’ve ventured into the latter I’ve seen more of that sort of thing. But those are not the only subgroups of nerds out there. And when people talk about the “rampant sexism in nerd-space”, considering the groups of nerds that I’m used to, that’s pretty much foreign to me; I’ve seen decidedly more casual sexism among non-nerds. When you talk about “nerds”, you seem to have a pretty distinct group in mind that’s pretty different from the group I am used to dealing with and usually have in mind (or Scott Aaronson has in mind, it would seem).
Regardless, the recent anti-nerd stuff, even if intended to target misogynist nerds, ends up being far broader — that’s part of where the “doublethinking and terrified” category comes from. You’d think they be concerned that they’re hurting people on their own side. Which brings me to my third point…
3. This is similar to things Osberend has already posted while I was writing this, but, oh well.
My response to the claim that “men need to figure out their own shit” is basically the same as before. But to be shorter and more relevant:
A. Saying “you need to actively help us” would be unreasonable; but not the many calls to stop actively making things worse.
B. Saying you need to anticipate our problems in advance might be unreasonable, as might be saying that you need to seek us out and learn of our problems; but frequently you don’t need to anticipate or seek us out, because we are actively petitioning you in response.
C. It’s entirely correct to point out that you’re not the source of most of our problems, but it would be nice to take responsibility for the cases where you are.
(Note: In all of the above, “you” is feminism-at-large, not you personally.)
If not caring about men means not actively helping them or not seeking out their problems, great! Virtue of narrowness! Out of scope! Not your problem! If it means riding roughshod over whatever because whatever, then you can’t claim “Not my problem”.
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What about them?
Look, the article would be better if the author was more insightful, had knowledge more broad. But that is not the point. I’m not saying, “Hey! This is a great article!” I am saying it does not show the hostility that multi said it did.
If you say, “But look, feminists just don’t get how hard it is for autistic and near-autistic men.”
Well, duh.
I don’t disagree about that. Consistent social justice requires that we care about autistic and near-autistic men.
Put it this way: I’m not defending fucking Jezebel or Marcotte. I am ABSOLUTELY not defending the “fat loser virgin neckbeard” discourse. Not at all. Nor am I really defending “male tears” as a general rhetorical strategy. However, I was saying this: how you all were analyzing the discourse was wrong, at least for many instances where I’ve seen the term used.
Consider this exchange:
Gamergater: You terrible SJWs have put me on TheBlockBot! This is an affront to my free speech and shows what cowards you are. Grrrrr!
Feminist: I find nourishment in your male tears.
Which really, I wouldn’t want to try to have a conversation with boundlessly aggrieved gamergate guy. Blah. Do not want. (Which is why I subscribe to TheBlockBot. I don’t see that guy.)
Anyway, this has a rhetorical function much like “Shut the fuck up asshole” or “Whatever you say dickweed. Go away.”
These are not admirable things, but they are products of genuine frustration with some really terrible men.
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Sniffnoy:
“But in general, it’s frequently the case someone thinks wrong thing Q, you can’t get them out of it by telling them some P that implies not Q; then they’ll just think Q and P and shy away from deriving the contradiction. You have to explicitly tell them not Q.”
Absolutely. The rest of your comment is really on point as well.
All of this crap is why I have not been eager to announce how I can be personally… yeah, very creeped out by the way men can AT ALL approach strange women in a particular way (trust me, I’ve had both stereotypically “male” and stereotypically “nerd” and stereotypically “trans” trouble and distress interacting with men in a homosocial context… I don’t need the added sexual overtones to appreciate women’s discomfort). To the point of where I personally, given An Ideal United All-Inclusive Feminism Right Now, would say that men should not initiate personal contact with strange women PERIOD; arranged relationships are coming back through automation, use that, dudes!
*But* I simultaneously believe that, right now, this sort of policy would be intensely horrible and against all my ethics on a meta level. And so I appreciated (e.g.) Ozy telling shy dorky men to be less overwhelmingly concerned about potentially causing distress to a woman. Even though, let me tell you, personally I involuntarily cringed and shivered a little when reading this. If I magically had a cis woman’s body right now (which would be nice), I would fully expect to find unwanted male attention highly undesirable. But the higher-level principles of equality, justice and inclusivity (not to mention moral integrity) seem like a higher priority to me, one that can be hampered by – I’m not going to phrase this kindly – feminist opportunism.
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It’s amusing how the social justice community so blithely talks over women who disagree with them.
You also don’t see the not-boundlessly-aggrieved gamergate person. You also don’t see any neutral third parties who listen to gamergaters. Which reduces your experience of gamergaters to the cherry-picked examples the social justice community selects to frame their narrative. Hmm, what was that quote again…
Thing is, it is useful to criticize such people, but when you fixate on such people at the exclusion of the more thoughtful members of a movement, you do truth a disservice.
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@InferentialDistance — You’re not helping.
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Of course not. I’m your ideological enemy. Why would I want to help your position?
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A little bit of context to help people make informed decisions about the BlockBot. They had a recent little problem (UK libel law is a strange beast), and the ownership is going to be passed to Lynn Magic of CollectQT. From their website: to be recruited in their collective, you need to provide a “cultural resume” which, among others, shows that you know that “allies are toxic, minions are useful”.
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Yeah, Lynn is a character. She also said she’ll never work for any company run by men. So there is that.
(She seems serious about that. Some folks were trying to get her into an internship at {my employer}, but she would have none of it.)
Her vision for TBB seems to be a *service* where subscribers can select among various block list thingies, which would bring it more in line with the “blocktogether” thing, but with more ability to organize the blockers and block lists. The idea is this: those who administer the service would *not* be those who organize the block lists. Which seems a positive good.
If the TERFs want to set up there own little blocking fiefdom on the thing, and then block we terrible trans folks, well fine. If a bunch of Gamergaters want to avoid the pathetic bleating of the terrible SJWs, they can set up their own block list. Or not. Free choice.
Sounds like a pretty good product. Users won’t need to deal with Lynn much at all if they don’t want to.
I rather like her personally. She can be a bomb thrower, but we get along.
I’d love to write some software for the thing, but my employer has this really strict “any software you write belongs to us” rule — which, it’s a pretty golden collar they make me wear.
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Veronica:
>but my employer has this really strict “any software you write belongs to us” rule
Holy fucking shit.
*smh*
Capitalism eh?
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Sniffnoy et al: so…. a good summary of my views on the apparent competition between handling [feminist exclusion and sexism against men] vs. [unfair burdens on female feminists and sexist demands on women to perform emotional and affective labour]…
..would be “No taxation without representation”.
*le american troll face of liberty*
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“>but my employer has this really strict “any software you write belongs to us” rule”
Really? I would think that would be one of those things companies say but can’t legally enforce, like sports broadcasts saying any accounts or written descriptions of the game without consent of [league] are prohibited.
I mean, I guess they could fire you or something, but take the code? I’m skeptical they could defend such a requirement in court if it came to that.
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Any software I write during my term of employment is my employer’s intellectual property. If I wrote for an open source project, then I would operating in bad faith. I doubt my employer would actually sue for the property — since that would shed tons of good will — but it would be something to fire me over.
I can get waivers on this with “public good” arguments. That goes up the management chain. I could plausibly make such a request for a project such as TheBlockBot. I’ve so far not tried it.
I’m very well paid. I get to write amazing software used by millions of people worldwide. I don’t complain much about my pretty golden collar.
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It still creeps me out, the exact same way employers policing private social media accounts does. Signing over a part of one’s life, 24/7, with no negotiation possible…
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(I mean, I’ve seen the absolute bottom of corporate culture – from beneath it, employed through a temp agency where not even your supervisor is paid enough to bother making demands of you – and this colors my view. I cannot quite visualize myself as a valued employee doing something meaningful and have no idea what that feels like.)
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Well, “valued employee” is one of those things — I mean, I’m one of a few tens-of-thousands of software engineers. I’m sure they’d survive my loss. On the other hand, I like the work. They treat me really well. We get free food and lots of cool special stuff and meet lots of cool people, and being a “software engineer at company X” get me past a lot of doors. It’s a fuckton of free status.
And status is pretty great stuff. I highly recommend it.
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Best I can do to substitute for it right now is drink beer and tumbl… 😦
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Look, the article would be better if the author was more insightful, had knowledge more broad. But that is not the point. I’m not saying, “Hey! This is a great article!” I am saying it does not show the hostility that multi said it did.
Oh, OK. Sorry; I thought you were claiming that since it is aimed at leftist feminists, nerds are unlikely to read it as something they should listen to, and therefore it won’t have negative effects on them. In that case yes that whole rant was mostly irrelevant. (Though I’d kind of had that stored up for a while, as I do think you have generally ignored in the past the existence of the whole “RationalWiki contingent” or more generally the whole subculture of Blue-aligned nerds, so my mistake provided an excuse to post that. 🙂 )
Unrelatedly, I feel like I should object to your general characterization of nerds as “near-autistic”. Now, there is one definite upside to this: It’s not using the word “nerd”! The word “nerd” is kind of a problem because it’s ambiguous and I’ll admit I’ve probably equivocated on it a bunch. That is to say, there are two broad things the word refers to:
1. Nerds in the more usual sense — people with technical interests or who like comic books or anime and such, or who are socially awkward, aren’t well-groomed, etc.
2. “Nerds” in the Robin Hanson / Michael Vassar / Razib Khan sense — people with a focus on explicit beliefs and reduced compartmentalization, people who bite bullets, and who also are frequently drawn to simple principles.
Now obviously these are correlated — in particular, sense 2 nerds tend heavily to be sense 1 nerds, even if the reverse doesn’t hold; hence the choice of the word “nerd” for sense 2 in the first place. Note also that sense 2 can be broken down further into:
2a. Nerdism in general, including Hindu fundamentalists and whoever
2b. The particular form of nerdism I’m more familiar with, which includes e.g. a focus on truth and a belief in extreme honesty (and also bluntness); not a mere disregard for social niceties, but often an active disdain for them as being somehow wrong. (Obviously there are more and less extreme versions of this.) (2a might not empirically be that separate from 2b, but I would have no way of knowing, so I’m breaking it down.)
We can also break down sense 1 futher — in particular, we can separate out the subcultural aspects (let’s call that 1a) from the more personal aspects (let’s call that 1b; of course, 1b is getting pretty close to 2) but I mostly don’t care.
Usually when I talk about “nerds” I’m talking about sense 2, generally sense 2b because that’s what I’m most familiar with — in particular, when I’m talking about “feminism hurting nerds”, I basically always mean 2 or 2b. My rant above was an exception, that was about sense 1a — although again the correlation should be kept in mind; indeed, I’d say that basically all sense-2 nerds I know are also sense-1 nerds.
Anyway, my point was, using the word “nerd” for this, and talking about nerds and feminism, I’ve noticed tends to derail discussion; because the person using it means sense-2 nerds and feminism, and then other people take it to mean sense-1 nerds and feminism, and the point gets entirely lost. (Pretty sure I’ve made comments about this before, but digging them up doesn’t seem worth the trouble at the moment.) Even Ozy did this: The whole Scott Aaronson thing was, as I understand it, essentially about nerds in sense 2b, and indeed I get the impression he generally uses the word in that sense; but Ozy’s post on the matter mostly dealt with nerds in sense 1.
So, using a word other than “nerd” for sense 2 may be helpful here; and I think it’s clear why we might want to avoid Robin Hanson’s term “smart sincere syndrome” (a substantial fraction of us are self-congratulatory enough already, myself probably included 😛 ). And I get the impression that’s what you’re essentially doing when you talk about “near-autistic” people; but while there certainly are some similarities, and it is at least a different word than “nerd”, the overall accuracy of that characterization is unclear, and — well, it just seems like the sort of thing that’s going to cause more problems than it solves. I think largely because my initial reaction is to say “Hey, I am not ‘near-autistic!'” And I might then think “Well, maybe I kind of am; and I know what she means, anyway”, but a lot of people are going to get stuck at that first one.
I’m not sure what a good drop-in replacement would be. There was a long thing I was planning on writing about some of this (that I had hoped to link in the next open thread, should those ever return 😛 ), and for that I was planning on writing “pnerd” for 2a and “knerd” for 2b; but those are obvious throwaway terms, not fit for general use (like “good” or “admissible” in math). I mean, I personally like the connotations of “nerd”, but it seems like the confusion just isn’t worth it…
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P.S. Veronica, here’s a great example of “taxation without representation” expected by female feminists of ~~~allies~~~ (ugh I hate that fucking concept so much!!!)
(ugh, that moderator person… she is the absolute worst, as you can see)
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@Sniffnoy — I meant “near autistic” *not* as a code for nerds, which actually I’m rather impatient with the constant conflation of neuro-diveristy and nerd-hood, but instead I meant *literally* people who were marginally autistic.
That is, people like me, who clearly have cognitive difficulties, but maybe not so much they can get a diagnosis.
This is common enough in nerd-space, but it is not the same thing.
Regarding nerds in general, it seems a pretty diverse lot of people, and I would be hesitant to generalize too much.
Which is to say, the label “nerd” seems to cover: Larry Page, Scott Aaronson, Dylan Klebold, Linux Torvalds, Laurie Penny, Porpentine, Julie Pagano, weev, and so on and so on.
(Please don’t try to psychoanalyze the order in which I produced this list. I’m sure it would reveal something about myself I don’t want to know.)
Plus, you know, pretty much all of us here. Plus tons of folks on 4chan. Plus tons of folks who FUCKING HATE 4chan. Plus there are tons of “nerd heavy” hobby spaces, such as the cosplay kids, and the furries, and tons of kinksters, but not all!, and tons of crunchy folks who play WWII miniatures games in their garage, and the “indie RPG” set, and the video game fans, the comics fans, the software geeks, and the folks who build and collect model trains. And more. Tons of nerd-hood is expressed in these spaces.
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OK, but then my point is that there’s a level of specificity that I want to hit when I’m talking about such things. The affected group is (generally) broader than just people who are near-autistic, but generally (narrower) than nerds in sense 1. (I don’t want to claim that these are actually totally ordered, just maybe approximately so.) I think nerds in sense 2, especially sense 2b, is a useful notion, and I think it has a lot to do with who’s affected in the ways I’ve complained about. So I guess my message to you is “OK but it’s broader than that”, while my message to those who keep making it about nerds in sense 1 is “No, too broad, you have lost the point”.
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Ugh. Some misplaced parentheses there. That should read “(generally) narrower”, not “generally (narrower)”.
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@veronica:
This is fine, except for one thing.
Apart from identifying men as the (disposable) outgroup, what is the function of the word “male” in that reply?
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I mean I mostly agree, but this also sounds very weird to me bc I come from an OldFeminist culture that took “actual male tears help fight the patriarchy” as a given, saying “LOL male tears” hadn’t been invented yet and it’d never have occurred to anyone to, AND “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them” was also taken as a given.
Singer: Then-famous football player.
OldFeminism, I miss you. :old: 😦
………so this type of attempt to change the culture in the US (which is the only place I’m qualified to talk about)…didn’t work as intended.
But lot of people aren’t even aware of what and how the attempt even really was.
I don’t want it to be forgotten.
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So, on reread I realize how horribly written this is. My brain is asleep tonight.
I hope the meaning is still clear from context and the name of the video (“It’s Alright to Cry”), but to put it more clearly:
OldFeminism tried to support males in expressing a full range of emotions, including crying. Because OldFeminism thought giving that support was part of “fighting the patriarchy.”
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It wasn’t without effect. I grew up during this cultural push. There was no way that I could have been taught not to feel ashamed when I cried. I was a small, nerdy kid who read a lot of books. I was athletic in a lot of ways, but just plain skinnier and smaller than other kids (eventually grew out of it), so I took a lot if hard hits in early grade school. It’s impossible for a child not to feel ashamed for crying when his peers are literally shaming him, and I learned to never cry very swiftly. Faster, in fact, than my peers who were bigger and not bullied.
By third grade I could take some serious blows on the playground and just get back up, where other more popular kids in similar circumstances would dissolve into tears. I remember seeing a much more popular kid going to see the nurse because he was sobbing big great gulping sobs after getting knocked down, and I remember exchanging glances with the other nerds. “He’s crying over that! Is this the first time he’s been through this?” It was a weird kind of machismo- He’s crying because someone knocked him down by accident and he skinned his knee; worse things have been done to me on purpose and I suck it up.
I remember feeling sympathy for the kid, and realizing that if I expressed solidarity, it would make him feel worse, like he was like me. Childhood, man. Not great times.
Eventually, through the magic of puberty, that all ended.
Anyway, thanks in part to literally that video, I never once believed that my peers were right to shame me or others for crying. I always believed that what they were doing was wrong. I couldn’t choose to not live in that cultural context, or to not care about how people though of me based on the values around me. But I could reject them, personally.
And that was a meaningful difference.
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@Patrick:
“It was a weird kind of machismo- He’s crying because someone knocked him down by accident and he skinned his knee; worse things have been done to me on purpose and I suck it up.”
I had a similar experience with a different issue. (BTW, when I told someone the story of that experience to try to illustrate the issue, the person said that that could not ever be an actual issue, therefore what I claimed must not have actually happened.)
So anyway, yeah. When you’ve been given to understand that the “only reason you even mind” is that “there’s something wrong with you” or “you’re weak”…then seeing a more favored child complain hugely over something far milder…teaches you like nothing else can that your hurt is real. That it’s *not* your fault for minding. That what’s happening to you really *is* bad.
I’m glad to know the video did help. Thanks for taking the time to say so.
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What happened of OldFeminsm? (I miss it too.) I don’t understand why it seems to have gone away and been replaced with this… other thing using the same name.
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@veronica d: OK, I agree there is an element of ironic privilege denial a la “first world problems” to the “male tears” thing, but I refuse to accept it’s a coincidence that it attacks men on a major axis of masculine sexual vulnerability, i.e. the idea that a man is weak or a crybaby. If nothing else, maybe you’ll accept from a man that I read it that way; isn’t that how the lived-experience thing works?
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Wasn’t “white tears” a thing before “male tears” was? Is “white tears” attacking white people on a major axis of white sexual vulnerability?
(To be clear: my position is that “male tears” is probably motivated by the same impulse that gives birth to “white tears” and “cis tears” and “straight tears” and so on, but “male tears” is inappropriate in a way that the others are not, because cultural context.)
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It seems to have been — this is the earliest “white tears” reference I could find, from 2007. But the word “thug” existed before its use as a racist dog-whistle, too, which is, I think, what you’re saying.
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People who find you creepy probably don’t want to interact with you, but the fact that they found you creepy doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.
This seems… really unhelpful. Maybe some people’s problem is that many people think there’s something off about them and don’t want to interact with them, and thus they suffer from self-esteem issues. But the bigger problem would seem to just be that many people think there’s something off about them and don’t want to interact with them. You can not feel like a bad person at all and still be horribly isolated and lonely.
(I’ve never been called creepy, and my self-esteem is fine, but my social life is definitely less than ideal for other reasons. I feel reasonably confident extrapolating from my own sense of under-socialization and loneliness.)
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And the italics should have stopped after “interact with them.”
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I don’t think the solution is ignoring your intuition, exactly, but rather addressing it in situationally appropriate ways. For instance, you might not go into a dark alley with someone you flag as creepy, but there’s no reason not to be courteous to them in a lower-stakes setting. I think too many people view this issue as all or nothing: either you’re 100% trusting or 100% hostile. You can very much keep your guard up with someone while still treating them like a person and not making them feel too othered.
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+1
Yep. I can find the dude in the corner reading comics a bit creepy — actually I personally don’t, but never mind; it’s a thing that happens — but it’s kinda out of line to say some mean-ass shit to that guy. He hasn’t done anything.
If he gets up when you get up, if he heads toward the restroom as you head toward the restroom — yeah your spidey sense will be rightfully aroused, BUT STILL! Maybe his bladder schedule matches yours.
So keep yourself safe. Bring your friend along. Wait till he comes out. Whatever. But verbally abusing him is way out of bounds.
Unless he says some gross shit to you or follows you around in weird ways or whatever. If he does shit like that, provide stern correction.
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I agree with pretty much everything that’s been said so far, but I think there’s an additional point that needs to be made:
A lot of the discussion of issues about “creepiness,” particularly from the feminist/pro-saying-“creep” side, conflates several things:
1. Perceiving people as “creepy,” and not automatically rejecting that perception as unfair bullshit.
2. Treating that perception as reliable and/or politically unquestionable, and not examing what triggered it, nor rejecting it as unfair bullshit ever.
3. Acting on that (unrejected) perception in order to avoid physically dangerous situations.
4. Acting on that (unrejected) perception when there is no physical danger, out of a lack of a desire to socialize with or be nice to “creeps.”
5. Calling people creeps to their face.
6. Calling people creeps to other people.
This conflation is then used to argue that (1) and (3) are vitally necessary for self-protection (this is where de Becker comes in), and therefore (2) and (4)-(6) are all justified as well, and if you deny that they are, it means you’re on the side of the predators. This is false.
(1) is fine, but (2) is bad. (3) is complicated, but assuming that it’s universally fine doesn’t actually alter the moral status of any of the others. (4) is also complicated, but is very often bullshit, and almost universally so when it comes to treating people poorly, as opposed to just not interacting with them at all. (5) and (6) are, in general, vicious. There are edge cases where that might not be true, but they’re just that: edge cases.
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This is one of the more toxic ideas I’ve seen in SJ circles. Peoples intuitions are not biased free. So telling people to just trust their intuitions or that their intuitions are valid by default is a terrible idea.
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A million percent this. And it will,of course, be selectively enforced. Nobody is going to step up to defend the intuition of those who call people sluts to denote ‘sexual biohazard’. Not that they should, it’s just equally stupid when this logic is applied elsewhere.
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I actually feel like both sides of the discussion tend to conflate these things. The anti-creep side tends to conflate the more legitimate uses of creep with 5 & 6, and sometimes also with 4, in order to argue that 1 & 3 are, by extension, always unfair and based on bullying (or, that, I guess, calling someone creepy is always motivated by implicit bias, and never a result of that person’s actual behavior. See: “but if the person doing that thing had been young and hot, you clearly would have been fine with it!”).
And I think that, on the pro-creep side, you have some people who like to have a socially acceptable excuse to rag on people, and also some people who want to go about their days without being harassed, and thus want the ability to opt out of social situations that seem likely to lead to harassment before, you know, the harassment gets really bad. And on the anti-creep side, you have people that are worried about group #1 bullying them, and also people who want it to never be socially acceptable to call someone creepy, because this makes it easier for them to violate people’s boundaries.
Anyway, the debate is polarized because both sides tend, I think, to judge their opponents by the least sympathetic members of the opposing group, and consequently everyone digs their heels in and makes their position more extreme.
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I actually feel like both sides of the discussion tend to conflate these things.
Sure. I think (and correct me if you think that I’m wrong) that I do a pretty good job of keeping them distinct, but I certainly recognize that I have co-belligerents who don’t. As well as some folks that I wouldn’t even regard as co-belligerents.
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Spot-on re: #4. A friend once told me that being rejected socially, as hard as it may be, is still better than being raped, the message being that any measure of hostility to others is justified as long as it protects you from violation. Which makes sense in some scenarios, sure, but come on. Talking to a lonely stranger for a few minutes, in a public place, is not going to get you assaulted.
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Oh I could go on a long time about the strange men in public who think I owe them my attention.
Which, nope.
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You don’t owe anyone attention, certainly. But if you choose to ignore someone (which is your right), don’t hedge it with “I’ll get raped otherwise”. Not wanting to talk is one thing, but presenting it as necessary harm avoidance is grasping, in my opinion.
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There are many unpleasant things that fall short of rape.
And *ignore* an entitled man! Ha! As if!
Resting bitch face works most of the time, but for some men that won’t stop them. Even headphones cannot stop the most persistent creeps.
These men really dislike it when you try to ignore them. It gets super personal very fast.
I encounter a really awful version of this guy maybe once every two to three months. I assume (certain types of) pretty cis girls must get it every few days.
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“There are many unpleasant things that fall short of rape.” That’s my whole point: rape is probably the least likely outcome of such an interaction, so to position such a dynamic as a choice between outright hostility and certain rape is ridiculous.
I personally haven’t experienced much of the type of interaction you mention. Then again, my Asperger’s does give me sort of a shield of oblivion against such things, so maybe it happens all the time and I have no idea. What I mostly experience is genuinely lonely people, usually mentally challenged or otherwise marginalized, trying to strike up a few minutes of conversation. Even when I read these people as creepy (and it happens often), I like to give them at least a smile. It brightens their day a little and costs me nothing.
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Yeah, I could *also* tell lots of stories about my interactions with homeless people and aggressive panhandlers, which some of them can be pretty creepy. I get older guys who make crude sexual advances, not cuz they think I’ll accept, but more I think cuz they see trans women as pretty much public property. Likewise the young tweaker guys can get pretty scary.
But yeah, I get some of the folks that you mention, who just want someone to listen. Being a purple-haired, visibly transgender woman kinda makes me an oddball magnet.
But that isn’t what I’m talking about here. The men I am talking about here want to fuck me. And they hate women.
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This reminds of some research I have been reading on reducing implicit bias. Like this:
http://tinyurl.com/poj3jws
Basically almost everyone has some implicit bias of some kind. But since it can be learned it can also be unlearned. So if your a person with negative unconscious bias’s about specific groups of people. There are at least some scientifically supported ways to reduce this bias. Some of these are obvious such as befriending members of these groups. Other ways include:
1. Imagining non stereotypical members of outgroups – If you have a bias that some groups of people are inherently more threatening than others then imagining non-treating members of this group helps to reduce implicit bias
2. Individuation – rather than being “color-blind” or going the opposite extreme and being race obsessed try learning about the individual person. Understanding people as individuals makes it harder judge people based on implicit bias.
3. Perspective Taking – Taking on other peoples perspectives also reduces unconscious bias.
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“But, as long as you don’t actually have ill intent, coming off as creepy isn’t morally wrong”
I mean, many loudly derided instances of coming across as a creep fit into this category. Even situations where it’s totally appropriate to use the label in a derogatory “fuck you dude” manner. For example if I ask somebody I don’t know to make out on the subway. I feel that’s being immoral despite
1. it being okay to ask this question in other context. I think it’s fine at parties.
2. therefore the question not being an unreasonable thing to ask a general stranger.
and therefore 3. it’s not acceptability, including to some extent on a moral level once you know the injunction being a response of a moral imperative not to make people uncomfortable.
I do think I have an obligation not to make people unreasonably uncomfortable or threatened in certain ways. I am morally obligated not to hold a gun while walking around because it makes people feel threatened even if I have no ill intent.
I obviously agree this is not a reasonable injunction in the case of blackness or autism or being gay or trans. But I think these are the exceptions and, in general the injunction exist for reasonable (intentionally ill defined) things.
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Seems like the general solution here is “mindfulness”. Being aware of your intuitions means you’re less apt to be ruled by them.
Unfortunately for the mindfulness program (but perhaps fortunately in general), our intuitions are way more complicated than just “fear group X”. While I would probably find a black man wearing gang colors and an angry expression more threatening than his white counterpart, I would not find a black man wearing a business suit in my office building threatening at all. Also, threat responses often occur in situations where snap judgments are required. So it seems like we just have to acknowledge that any possible solution will be a partial one.
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Re comments in general- Gavin de Becker is writing, rather explicitly, against the following:
1. Woman meets man, and is creeped out on an intuitional level
2. But man does nothing overtly threatening that she can identify as justifying her feeling
3. Woman feels bad that she has typecast man as a creep
4. Woman declines to act on creepy feeling and continues to associate with man
5. Woman moves man from “creep” to “non creep” based on his lack of overt threat and her guilt over thinking mean things about him
6. Man, who really was a threat the whole time and was counting on her thinking this way because that’s what we’ve socialized women to do, victimizes her.
So,
1. Telling people that they should feel bad about all of the poor people sorted into “creep” unnecessarily would be pathological in the author’s view, because it is the cause of (3), a key step in the process, and
2. Telling people to address this by thinking hard and identifying actual reasons to sort someone into “creep” or “non creep” would also be pathological in the author’s view, because that’s just number (2) in the process. He doesn’t believe your conscious thoughts are capable of identifying all the subtle ways that someone can indicate “threat” to your subconscious.
I’m inclined to agree with de Becker. But then, I have a decidedly un-social-justice view of the world, so the plight of people who [claim they] just can’t interact with others without creeping them out doesn’t bother me much. I treat this issue the same way I treat most other forms of micro aggressions. With apathy.
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This is very true in my experience. Women’s intuitions about threats are pretty saavy when they’re in Alert Mode but get lax when they’re in a more comfortable situation.
A good example: if I smile at a cute girl on the subway at night she’ll move further away and keep me in the corner of her eye from then on, because I’m a big guy and even though I don’t have any bad intentions meeting a cute guy isn’t worth risking getting hurt. But if I were to meet the same girl an hour earlier that evening at a mixer, being a large stranger showing sexual interest would have very nearly the opposite effect. If anything the threat is greater in the second scenario but because of the context her normal intuitions have been disarmed.
Now obviously you can’t and shouldn’t live your life under seige but the problem with intuitions about danger aren’t that they keep girls from meeting tall guys on the subway but that they don’t accurately evaluate threats in more intimate settings when women are in fact at greater risk.
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>Telling people to address this by thinking hard and identifying actual reasons to sort >someone into “creep” or “non creep” would also be pathological in the author’s >view, because that’s just number (2) in the process.
This sets off my expected probability conservation violation-dar. If not acting creepy over time does not decrease the expected probability of you coming to harm, then acting creepy cannot raise it.
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As it turns out, I can not line width.
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It’s social advice for actual people in a specific cultural context, not a lecture on Bayes. Taking statements not intended to be context free universals and reading them as such is literally a fallacy.
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Another solution is just to *get experience*. I ride the subway with black people every day, and of course the majority of then are just going about their business, and then a small number are really scary and dangerous.
Okay, so I grew up suburban girl and I don’t know shit about “the big city,” so my first few months on the subway are like constant terror.
But now, geeze louise if I got afraid every time some black dude got on the train —
On the other hand, I’ve seen some shit. I think I can kinda tell.
I’m totally not creeped out by autistic people cuz I’m around them all the time.
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I don’t understand this at all, and that’s not a rhetorical question — what would be the purpose of training intuitions like that?
Like, what are you trying to optimize for? Presumably you want a set of heuristics that will do best on the tradeoff for quality of people / effort — you’re willing to put in more effort to avoid seriously low-quality (i.e. dangerous) people or to find seriously high-quality people (see: people who spend lots of time optimizing their dating site profiles) — but it sounds like that’s not what you want at all, and instead you’re looking to develop objective (i.e. decontextualized / God’s-eye view) heuristics.
Different sets of heuristics are good for different things, of course — there’s the set you use for deciding whether to try to avoid a random interaction, the set you use for deciding whether to continue interacting with someone semiregularly, the set you use for evaluating potential romantic/sexual partners… but what’s the use of trying to expand the last two? If scarcity, that means you’re probably in a thede far from the norm, so it would be better to focus your efforts on finding more people in that thede or other ones close to it, and only start worrying about whether you’re dismissing too many people outside it if you can’t do that.
People who aren’t explicitly claiming epistemic rationality shouldn’t be held to that standard, especially in a field where people confuse objective (this person is probably dangerous in general) and subjective (the benefits of my interacting with this person don’t outweigh the costs and risks) judgments.
(Of course, you shouldn’t let the media write your heuristics for you, but that’s just basic epistemic hygiene. Trust what you’ve seen, and trust what other people report to the extent that you think you can trust them, but never trust Hollywood.)
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> Another would be for individuals to have friends who are members of groups they’re scared of (vouched for by other friends, of course) so that they can teach their intuitions that those groups are not actually scary.
Anecdotal counterexample: I generally feel a bit anxious around other Russians I don’t personally know (unless they’re very obviously signal friendliness, which culturally isn’t a typical expression) when I signal (clothes, makeup) femininity, under the assumption that they’re silently judging me (ironically, I assume that, especially if that happens anywhere near children, they probably read me as creepy). This is despite Russians constituting roughly 40% of my total social circles (rightmost cluster here – http://imgur.com/9rQhTis – and around 100 more of those who only have vk.com rather than facebook accounts), and 5~10% of my active offline social circles. That isn’t helped by having only minor experience of actually being judged, and understanding that living around SF is a huge selection bias, that has to significantly skew the distribution of opinions on gender policing.
Also, rather than just experiencing minor anxiety, my subconsciousness is scared shitless of homeless people, and I suspect making friends isn’t particularly plausible (if even possible) here.
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I am confused. First you claim intuition is a good thing, as it may protect you from bad things; then you say that intuition may (wrongly) prejudice you against black people; then you say a solution is media not portraying blacks committing crimes.
The problem is of course that black crime is already UNDERrepresented in US media. The chance that a random black guy will rape you ARE larger that chance a random white guy will rape you (in both cases, that chances are actually very low, but so will be with chances of any random guy doing bad things to you).
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“The problem is of course that black crime is already UNDERrepresented in US media.”
84 percent of white people murdered in America die at the hands of other whites. I’d be very surprised if this rate was higher across crime-themed media. The people who suffer most from black crime are black themselves.
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Well, technically true, but:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6
Seems than abotu half of murderers are black. What is the ratio black murderers/white murders in TV series and movies? I am located in Poland, so my exposuer to american media is lower and selective, but I am of impression that vast majority of murderers are white in those movies and series.
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One of my main issues with “creepiness” is that there seems to be a pretty positive correlation between “things people say are creepy” and “stereotypical portrayal of mental illnesses in the media.” I wonder if people’s intuitions in regards to creepiness are shaped more by the media than by reality, and need adjustment for this reason. I also wonder if these intuitions result in greater stigmatization and suffering for people who are mentally ill.
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There are however some choices we make that can influence the probability of people finding us creepy. I think we can all agree that there are some actions (or inactions) one is morally obligated to take so as to not cause people unease.
– Stand a reasonable distance away from people except on crowded transit when you should look up or down silently.
– If you find yourself walking behind a woman who is alone at night, speed up to pass her and avoid appearing to be following her.
– Don’t block people from moving or box them in.
There are other things that increase the chance of causing unease that I strongly suspect one does not have an obligation to perform:
– Refrain from wearing a (non-toothbrush) moustache
– Refrain from wearing a fedora.
I’m curious: has come up with a good clear line to draw between the two besides “be reasonable”?
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“Refrain from wearing a fedora.”
Hi friend, how’s 2011 been treating you?
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(looks at avatar)
aaahhh sorry did not catch the irony
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Frown. Frown. Frown. 🙂
See… my problem is that I’m not sure that a word that means “a person who gives me weird unsafe feelings” will ever not end up being used as an ableist slur. Neurotypicals tend to find visible neurodivergence somewhere between off-putting and terrifying. This is true even when the person clearly poses no threat or, in fact, when the neurotypicals have obvious power over the neurodivergent person (for instance, many special ed classrooms). In my darker moments, I worry that that is inherent in the way they’re wired and that the only solution is separatism (with all the flaws that implies).
But… they really need a word for that thing, and autistic people could be dangerous and it’s not safe to turn it off entirely.
(To be clear, I’m not in the group that finds autistic people creepy. Going into spaces dominated by autistics, cousins, and chill neurotypicals feels like taking off a load I didn’t know I was carrying.)
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“Going into spaces dominated by autistics, cousins, and chill neurotypicals feels like taking off a load I didn’t know I was carrying.”
Omfg you don’t even know.
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I have actually had a few female friends tell me that they felt safe around me in a way they rarely did with other men. One has told me that interacting with me felt much like interacting with a gay man, not because I lived up to any gay stereotypes or because I was conversant in the topics she would talk about with her gay friends, but simply because of the total absence of any of the little indicators of sexual interest she would usually pick up on from straight men, and this would put her at ease. Obviously this probably has more to do with my near-asexuality than with my autism (although I would not know how to signal sexual interest nonverbally even if I wanted to).
Apologies if this is hijacking the topic, but this is the sort of thing that makes (or made) me despair. If unconscious indicators of attraction are enough to make people uneasy, how is it at all possible to be a good person?
I mean, I guess the first-approximation answer is that you just shouldn’t worry about this, that this is not your fault, and that so long as you haven’t done anything “dishonorable” (to use osberend’s word) it’s their problem (or perhaps the patriarchy’s), not yours; and that you are not responsible for responding to people’s unexpressed thoughts, only to their actual actions.
But on the other hand there are a number of situations where we *do* generally say you should explicitly check with people about things even if they haven’t done anything to express any reservation. So I don’t know, I don’t have an answer here. It bugs me.
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Exactly.
(But, Ozy, you’ve implied you specifically want to go out of your way to exclude my difference from “non-neurotypical”/”neurodivergent”–which you’d *have* to go out of your way to do because a literal interpretation of either term would include us–and yet *our difference too* causes that effect. It’s not even just us who think so; everyone who studies us thinks so too. I don’t want to get into a huge argument about this issue, especially here where it’s off-topic…but I *do have that experience*.)
@moebius:
This effect can lead to problems for men who are not asexual but don’t know how to signal sexual interest nonverbally. Women “feel safe” and “let down their guard” only to suddenly find he does feel sexual interest after all. This is at the very least surprising, and is often also frightening / tends to trigger the “he almost got away with it!!!” version of “the creeps.” He wasn’t intentionally hiding it, but it feels that way to her. He wasn’t intentionally trying to “trick her into letting her guard down”…but it feels that way to her.
The old-fashioned, pre-second-wave-feminism way of handling this was to advise young women to always assume any man who chose to interact with them was doing so out of sexual interest…and we all know the problems with that.
@sniffnoy:
“Uneasy” is an imprecise word here. It would be more accurate to say it just makes them “on guard in the same way they normally always have to be around men.” Even “on guard” can be an exaggeration…just…”prepared to react to an advance.”
So the “safe” feeling that can come from a man *not* giving off those signals is a special *extra safe* feeling.
But that’s why, if it turns out a man actually did feel attraction and just wasn’t showing it, it can be so frightening. Because it’s like having been “lulled into a false sense of security.”
Like… :looking for analogy:
Have you or someone you know been painfully trained that if you’re in a room with someone, they will assume you’re listening and might suddenly start talking to you, so you’d *better* be listening?
If you have…then you know what it’s like to be in a room with someone, vs. in a room alone. With someone…you just have to be prepared to react, that’s all. You might not really exactly *mind*…but it is a type of “being on guard.”
So then what if you have a friend who, you learn, you can trust *not* to just start talking to you just because you were both in the same room? Well…you could say that being in the room with them is now as “safe” as being alone.
So then what if one day they *did* just up and start talking to you and got mad when you didn’t hear them?
And…
What if, *at the same time*, the rigidly enforced social rule was that the only way for you to ever talk to anyone was if *they* started talking to *you*?
Maybe sometimes you’d want some conversation, and that’s why you’d go into the room when someone was there–you’d *want* them to start talking to you. OTOH, maybe sometimes you’d just need an item from that room, but really not want to talk to anyone or even pull yourself out of your thoughts, so you’d hope no one was there. But if someone was…and you really needed the item…you’d still have to go in.
And that person would have no way of knowing which of those reasons was why you came into the room. Though they could try to guess.
And what if you just *wanted* the item? A lot?
Maybe it’s (say) a signed copy of /Going Postal/. Are you allowed to love /Going Postal/? Are you allowed to go into the room to get the signed copy? Or to put it another way: Should you risk it?
Don’t you know that by doing so, you’re opening yourself up to conversation? Maybe the other person really likes /Going Postal/ too, ever think of that? Who do you think you are, ignoring them like that? If you didn’t want to even talk to anyone why did you go into the room?!?
😉
Anyway, sniffnoy, this dynamic is not the fault of any individual caught up in it, so my advice to any individual who is…is don’t waste energy feeling guilty. Just make sure to behave “honorably” and that’s enough.
We need to be able to discuss the existence of this dynamic. Don’t let discussion of its existence throw you off and make you despair of ever being a good person.
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@moebius:
you seem to apply a static utilitarianist perspective to (some of) your choices if I understand what you posted correctly.
Now if you want to consider a long-term perspective, and assuming you are correct in how much disutility you could cause (in doubt here, the use of ‘creep’ and similar against nerds is IME driven more often by disgust and not by fear).
In the long-term, seeing people behaving strangely and never hurting anyone is going to be a net positive, most importantly for the calibration of the creep-o-meters by the women using the term because they feel threatened. It’s going to suck for everyone in the short-term (especially for the ones actually at risk of aggression), and it is harder to put good numbers on it if one needs those to convince oneself.
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@Lizardbreath: (Note: No pressure to respond immediately, just getting my thoughts out there. Also, thanks for the explanation; even if it mostly leaves me with a new set of questions, that’s still progress of a sort.)
Women “feel safe” and “let down their guard” only to suddenly find he does feel sexual interest after all. This is at the very least surprising, and is often also frightening / tends to trigger the “he almost got away with it!!!” version of “the creeps.”
In this context, what is the “it” that it feels like the man “almost got away with?”
Even “on guard” can be an exaggeration…just…”prepared to react to an advance.”
Again, I’m a little confused by what “prepared to react” means; for me, it’s hard to think of that in terms other than (a) being ready to physically act (run, fight, etc.) or (b) bracing to remain functional despite anticipated panic attack triggers. Neither of those seems like a necessary preparation for a (typical, obviously there are exceptions) romantic or sexual advance, so perhaps I’m missing something?
So then what if one day they *did* just up and start talking to you and got mad when you didn’t hear them?
Wouldn’t the analogy to a man expressing/revealing interest just be the person in the room starting talking to you, without the getting mad part?
What if, *at the same time*, the rigidly enforced social rule was that the only way for you to ever talk to anyone was if *they* started talking to *you*?
That would be awful, but why would anyone adhere to such a rule, unless the enforcement involves literal beatings? The only people whose friendship you risk losing are, after all, people who think that terminating a friendship over a violation of arbitary rules is a reasonable thing to do.
Anyway, sniffnoy, this dynamic is not the fault of any individual caught up in it, so my advice to any individual who is…is don’t waste energy feeling guilty. Just make sure to behave “honorably” and that’s enough.
We need to be able to discuss the existence of this dynamic. Don’t let discussion of its existence throw you off and make you despair of ever being a good person.
These two paragraphs, I applaud wholeheartedly.
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@ osberend
1. You have to be able to instantly produce a response that at once gives zero false hope (or else it will be ineffective) and doesn’t hurt his feelings even the slightest bit (he’s done nothing wrong, after all — you don’t want to be an evil bitch who hurts an innocent man just for expressing interest, do you?).
Go on, try to think of ways to dissuade someone who wants to keep hoping, while minimizing the amount of distress they might feel. You have 0.5 seconds. Good luck.
2. Remember how I said that you can’t expect direct communication? That includes sexual advances. As a result, you have to scrutinize his every word and action, looking for this hidden meaning.
If you manage to detect it before it’s too late, go to point 1. If you fail, you have been “leading him on” (bitch!) and his next step, such as groping, will come as a complete surprise to you. At best, it will be extremely awkward, and it’s all your fault.
Of course, you can develop your own indirect tactics, such as finding a way to mention your boyfriend. However, it’s not guaranteed to work (look up “boyfriend destroyers”), and it still requires effort.
3. It is unlikely that you’ll have to run or fight. But not impossible. So, you have to run another background process to detect signs of danger early enough.
Also, when an asexual person is treating you kindly and respectfully, there’s a higher probability that they are being sincere, rather than wearing a mask to get into your pants.
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Nita: I think you are mixing contexts here. Moebius’s comment was about a friendly context, whereas your comment seems to assume a considerably less familiar context. At least, I’m hoping you don’t have to be worried about your friends groping you…
Also, when an asexual person is treating you kindly and respectfully, there’s a higher probability that they are being sincere, rather than wearing a mask to get into your pants.
…I am tempted to rant on this point beginning with “As if we are not all acutely frigging aware of that! And what the hell sort of incentives do you think that creates??”, but it wouldn’t actually add anything new and relevant, so I won’t. 😛
Lizardbreath: OK, so, I think Osberend wrote a better response to your comment than I was going to, or at least to the first part of it. As for your analogy, well, it’s pretty complicated and I think I’d need to take some time if I wanted to get a full handle on it, which I haven’t done. But OK, that could at least be a useful intuition pump. The feeling of “I want to do X but there would be people there and I might have to talk to them” is something at least I’m pretty familiar with!
But — and this is where I have to ask you whether I’m carrying the analogy too far, or whether this still makes sense, since I don’t know just what you were thinking — barring a few exceptional situations, that’s much more a “people I know but don’t often encounter” problem, not a “people I routinely deal with” problem.
Also, this is kind of nitpicking, but this bit is not exactly the strongest:
What if, *at the same time*, the rigidly enforced social rule was that the only way for you to ever talk to anyone was if *they* started talking to *you*?
Like, OK, it’s clear what this maps to, and… this is not a rigidly enforced social rule? At least, not where I am, as best as I can tell. That said, this isn’t exactly the most material objection, seeing as I think what you’re saying still goes through if we weaken this hypothesis to “other people strongly expect that you abide by a norm whereby you will never initiate a conversation, and that therefore they are required to do so if they want to talk to you, even if neither of you actually supports such a norm”, which is much more realistic.
Anyway, looking some more, I can’t help but notice these bits:
So then what if one day they *did* just up and start talking to you and got mad when you didn’t hear them?
Who do you think you are, ignoring them like that? If you didn’t want to even talk to anyone why did you go into the room?!?
…and seeing these make me think my note above about this being a “people I know but don’t often encounter” problem was not off-track at all, but actually really important. When I read this sort of thing I can’t help but think, friends don’t act like that! I mean, geez, certainly I’ve stayed in any number of conversations I didn’t want to, but that’s, like, failure to internalize actual responses; excluding maybe one pretty eccentric person, I don’t think I get anything like hostile responses to (the situation-appropriate equivalent of) “Sorry, just came by to get the book, can’t talk right now, thank you though” at any frequency worth taking note of. And if someone I know actually got mad at me for “leading them on” — at least, without substantially better reason than what’s described above — I think I’d quickly downgrade my estimation of their reasonableness, you know? And, I mean, hell, I’ve been friends with some people who are, uh, really not good people, but the reason that’s been possible is because at least they were friendly to me!
Anyway, I wanted to expand on some of Osberend’s questions:
In this context, what is the “it” that it feels like the man “almost got away with?”
This, I think, is a really important question. I don’t really have an intuition for this. I mean, especially given that nothing can happen without your cooperation, I just don’t really see how “getting away with something” is possible. There is, I guess, the possibility of what you might call “asymmetric gain” — where one person wants to [do thing] because they’re attracted to the other, while the other person just wants to [do thing] because they just like [thing]; I get the impression that a number of people regard this as the first person “getting away with something”. But I just can’t see a problem here, if everybody gains.
And to return to the bit about letting down one’s guard — I mean, some possible analogies spring to mind, but I’m not sure they work. Making conversation before bringing up an uncomfortable topic? No, there if you want to “catch me off guard”, the better way would be to spring it immediately. Making conversation before making a request? But that’s pretty normal, we don’t regard that as any kind of violation. Anyway, if I wanted to avoid someone asking me for something, I’d avoid the person entirely, I wouldn’t engage in conversation in the first place. Or maybe that’s exactly your point? 🙂 But again, this falls under what I said above about me having failed to internalize actual responses; avoiding requests from my friends isn’t actually warranted.
Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going with this, but maybe hopefully you’ve got a better idea of where my confusion lies.
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@ Sniffnoy
I tried to make it as general as possible. And “groping” describes how it would feel to the surprised recipient. The “groper” would intend to deliver a sexy caress, reasonably appropriate after the extended nonverbal flirtation he sincerely believes has happened.
Now, with friends specifically, there are two ways to avoid this anxiety:
(a) “I know this person well enough to be certain they aren’t interested”,
(b) “I know this person well enough to catch and handle any interest painlessly”.
If the man expresses no sexuality whatsoever, (a) is the natural choice. In fact, (b) is not really an option, because you never have the chance to observe his sexual behavior or calibrate your response.
So, I think that’s where a lot of the unease with “sudden sexuality” comes from. If you have you been so wrong about this person’s interest in you, how well do you know them at all? How should you interact with them? And if they care about you, why would they put you in such a stressful situation?
And what the hell sort of incentives do you think that creates??
Bad ones, obviously 🙂
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I tried to make it as general as possible. And “groping” describes how it would feel to the surprised recipient. The “groper” would intend to deliver a sexy caress, reasonably appropriate after the extended nonverbal flirtation he sincerely believes has happened.
Ah! That makes sense then, thanks.
Now, with friends specifically, there are two ways to avoid this anxiety:
(a) “I know this person well enough to be certain they aren’t interested”,
(b) “I know this person well enough to catch and handle any interest painlessly”.
If the man expresses no sexuality whatsoever, (a) is the natural choice. In fact, (b) is not really an option, because you never have the chance to observe his sexual behavior or calibrate your response.
Hm — my own inclination is to just treat this like someone who goes too far, in well, a lot of other similar situations; the example that comes most easily to my mind — which is not really similar in intent obviously but is in certain aspects of the pattern of interaction — is being deliberately annoying. I’ve said before that I’m not sure that we really need a special ethics here, and this to me seems like another case of that — it seems pretty similar to anything that involves people pushing on each other in such a way; maybe I’m trying to annoy someone, and I drum on their head, and they really seriously don’t like that! But I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem where someone was afraid to tell me to stop drumming on their head, and it seems to me that the appropriate manner to tell someone to stop is kind of similar in both cases. (And I guess being a loveable pest rather than just an asshole also requires a similar sort of social calibration!) There are are probably better analogues than this one, but this is the one that first came to my mind.
But OK — all this maybe helps with my problem, but it doesn’t help with your problem! Like, I can say that’s how I’d respond, and that that it’s what I’d expect as an appropriate response, but it’s still meaningless to say that it’s a generally appropriate response if people don’t accept it as one. So, I guess, yay feminism for telling people that this is a totally unreasonable thing to get mad at people about? I just wish they would say, y’know, *that*, along with the various reasons for that statement, rather than things with way stronger implications…
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>”It might also be good to attack it from the other angle: instead of making people’s intuitions more accurate, make people feel less bad about being a false positive. For a lot of people, coming off as creepy feels like they’ve done something morally wrong. But, as long as you don’t actually have ill intent, coming off as creepy isn’t morally wrong. In many cases, it is a product of another person’s subconscious racism, ableism, or other -isms; in some cases, it is a personal issue; in some cases, you accidentally did things that made other people feel uncomfortable, and while it is bad to deliberately do things that make other people uncomfortable, it can’t be wrong to make mistakes. People who find you creepy probably don’t want to interact with you, but the fact that they found you creepy doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”
This passage gave me a visceral negative reaction, because it actually does matter, when people use “creep” as a moral judgment, and write blog posts about that, and conflate “you made someone uncomfortable once” with “you are a bad person”.
The race example is really good; it shows that we shouldn’t condemn people for using their intuitions, but we sure as hell shouldn’t let them get away with using their intuitions as moral judgments.
So, yeah. Telling people “Don’t be very offended if someone calls you a creep” doesn’t really work when people actually do mean it as a moral judgment, and say so specifically, and conflate the type you’re describing “this person made me uncomfortable” with “this person is bad”. People are free to use their intuition to keep themselves safe, to whatever standard they please, but we really need to separate that from the word for “I seriously believe this person is unsafe and am judging them”.
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(Another Bayesian update in the direction of weirdbrains.)
How has no one yet discussed this in terms of false positives and base rates?
Suppose that your creep-dar fires whenever you’re interacting with a dangerous person. But it also fires for people with unusual body language. Then, the question is, when it fires, is it because of real danger, or is it a false positive? This is very much determined by the base rate of dangerous people that you might run into vs. the base rate of non-dangerous weirdos.
Your creep-dar probably triggers a high rate of false positives. In the EEA, early warnings for danger kept you alive, while false positives were really not so bad. The other side of it is this: if everyone’s creep-dar is similarly calibrated, then people who trigger false positives in a large enough proportion of the population will be in a very unpleasant position; If you regularly trigger people’s danger sense, you won’t really be able to make the most of society.
This is Molochian; The best choice for your own safety is to avoid people who trigger your creep-dar, despite the high likelihood of false positives. But if everyone does this, then society treats innocent people who trigger false positives very poorly.
How we can avoid this pitfall, I don’t know. But it doesn’t seem sensible to me to claim that, because creep-dar has some true positives, we can ignore the social cost of the false positives. In medicine we use secondary tests to confirm. I’d love to hear a suggestion for a plausible secondary test.
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Another solution, independent of secondary tests, is what the one I proposed above: Avoid putting yourself in high-risk situations with people who weird you out, fine, but don’t call them creeps (either to their faces or to other people) and don’t avoid interacting with them in low-risk situations, unless they’ve actually done something clearly wrong.
The only real secondary test that I can think of is to try to figure out what someone is doing that creeps you out and, if it’s actually innocuous, control for it. Of course, a willingness to keep interacting with someone in low-stakes situations certainly facilitates that.
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Honestly, I think the only real approach is vigorous autism activism, let people know that the weird guy in the corner reading comics is not a threat, and that bullying weird people sucks.
This is possible. For example, engaging with social justice activism on behalf of homeless people has made me far more patient with them, as I understand they face more day to day threats than I do. This doesn’t mean I’m completely safe among the homeless. They can be unpredictable, and I have had bad experiences. But my point is, *I’m more patient*. I try.
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And as I’ve said a billion times, there are a ton of difficulties for women besides *actual violence*, since quite a few men seem happy to induce a general sense of menace, but who won’t go so far as risking criminal arrest.
But thing is, this sense of menace is *designed* to look exactly like men who will really hurt you. Also keep in mind that part of their goal is to suck up your time and attention for their petty ego games. Plenty of men like to keep you chatting far past any hope you’ll go home with them. Also a little humiliation on the side seems to give them boners. Furthermore, when it becomes clear you are rejecting them, the stakes are raised and often the mask comes off. Most won’t do anything criminal, but they understand this fear and will play to it. For example, they might follow you off the subway car, not to do anything, but because they know it scares you and they know there is not much you can do — after all, there is no law against getting off the subway car at the same time as a woman.
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I’ll add, if a woman snaps at you, I’m sorry. I understand that sucks. But *you do not know what has recently happened to her*. You don’t know how long ago was her last humiliating, fear-ridden encounter with a horrible man, nor how you might pattern match to that guy. If she says “Go away you fucking creep,” just go away. I’m sorry. It sucks. But JUST GO AWAY.
Such a woman might be a shitty bully. On the other hand, she might be at her wits end dealing with men. You don’t know. So leave her alone.
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“Honestly, I think the only real approach is vigorous autism activism, let people know that the weird guy in the corner reading comics is not a threat, and that bullying weird people sucks.”
I just want to note that there are a lot of shy, weird, socially awkward people who aren’t on the spectrum. They may be socially anxious and inexperienced, or had an unusual upbringing, or whatever.
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@LTP — True, but this is indeed a spectrum.
Thing is, the people who are *not* autistic can presumably *learn to get this stuff right*. I mean, for the most part, right?
Much of this discourse is about people who cannot help but be awkward. Such people have a legitimate claim to disability.
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@ Veronica, yes, they can learn, but presumably they’ll make lots of mistakes along the way, no? In that sense they should be given as much compassion as people on the spectrum as long as they seem earnest about improving.
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Well, isn’t this a bit like cutaways in sidewalks? If the world is made a friendlier place for the autistic guy in the corner reading the comics, then that’s going to have positive benefits for every weird person reading comics in the corner. It’s not like people always state (or always even know) if they’re on the spectrum.
Even if the change is intended to benefit autistic folks, in the end it’ll benefit all weird people who like to sit in corners reading comics and not hurting anyone else. And – speaking as a weird asexual socially anxious guy who has never been diagnosed and likes sitting in corners reading comics – I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. 🙂
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Reblogged this on Autism Candles.
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