It is commonly believed that assholes get more dates than people who aren’t assholes. The evidence generally presented for this claim is that disagreeable people tend to have more sexual partners. Of course, that is confounded: perhaps disagreeable people are constantly getting dumped, or perhaps they’re prone to cheating on their partners.
In a polyamorous context, neither of these limitations apply. We can look at the number of romantic partners a person currently has, which is a much better measure of their sexual success. Non-assholes would not be unfairly penalized in the sexual success sweepstakes because no one wanted to break up with them and they aren’t willing to cheat. Conversely, if the result held even in a polyamorous population, it would be definitely true that nice guys finish last.
The primary limitation of this study, of course, is that poly people are weird, and facts about their romantic success may not generalize to monogamous people.
The Methods
There were 440 responses. Of these, 27 were deleted for being monogamous, single but preferring monogamy, or aromantic-asexual, leaving us with 413 responses.
I used several different ways of operationalizing assholery. I used the Ten Item Personality Measure, which measures the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Disagreeableness is the trait of being untrusting, selfish, cold, and uncooperative. In retrospect, while I was using the shortest inventories for each I could find to avoid burdening my respondents, I should have used a more detailed Big Five instrument. The TIPI caused the most complaints among my respondents, and I am afraid that I lost some accuracy in measurement by using such a short instrument.
I also used the Dark Triad of Personality instrument. The Dark Triad of Personality measures three personality traits: machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. People high in machiavellianism manipulate, exploit, and deceive others. People high in narcissism are proud, egotistical, and unlikely to empathize with others. People high in psychopathy are impulsive, selfish, remorseless, and prone to antisocial behavior.
Finally, I used the Conflict Tactics Scale, which measures abusiveness. While the Conflict Tactics Scale has often been criticized by feminist researchers, it is the easiest method I am aware of to measure abusiveness. The Conflict Tactics Scale was the only one I edited (I changed some wording to make it be poly-inclusive, and I do not think this is likely to have a significant effect on the results). There were many critiques from respondents that the Conflict Tactics Scale did not make it sufficiently clear that questions about hitting your partner and forcing them into sex excluded doing so as part of kink play. While all respondents who complained understood what was meant and excluded kink, it is possible that some respondents did not.
I operationalized “number of romantic partners” two different ways. First, I asked for your number of romantic partners, then I asked for the number of romantic partners you see on at least a weekly basis. The second checks that these effects are not just a product of non-assholes not liking to break up with people.
The Results
By far the largest effect was shown for extroversion. Extroversion is the Big Five personality trait associated with being outgoing, assertive, warm, active, and excitement-seeking. The correlation between extroversion and number of partners had a p-value of 0.000003, which is the sort of p-value one generally associates with physics more than psychology. The correlation between extroversion and regular partners was a measly .0004, perhaps suggesting that extroverts have more partners they see rarely. In both cases, the effect was small to medium, with an r-value of 0.22 for the former and 0.17 for the latter.
Openness to new experience is the Big Five personality trait associated with creativity, imagination, intellect, perceptiveness, aesthetics, and interest in fantasy. Total number of romantic partners was correlated with openness to new experience, with a p-value of 0.006; however, the correlation with regular romantic partners only trended to significance (p-value = .06). In both cases the effect size was small (.13 and .09, respectively).
Machiavellianism was not correlated with number of total romantic partners, but it was negatively correlated with number of regular romantic partners (p-values 0.15 and .02, respectively). The effect size was small (.06, .11, respectively).
Narcissism was correlated with number of total romantic partners significantly and trended towards significance with regards to number of regular romantic partners (p-values .001, .06). In both cases, the effect size was small (.15, .09).
Abusiveness was negatively correlated with number of total romantic partners, but not significantly correlated with number of regular romantic partners (.03, .13). The effect size was small (.10, .07).
No other correlations were significant. (I left out correlations that were trending towards significance if the result for the other kind of partners was not significant.)
The Results, For Straight Men
Most complaints of the form “people want to date assholes” are actually “straight women want to date assholes and thus nice straight men are left in the cold.” Therefore, I analyzed the subgroup straight men.
Extroversion trended towards significance with number of total romantic partners and was significantly correlated with number of regular romantic partners (.08, .03). The effect sizes were small (.15, .18).
Narcissism was significant for both number of total romantic partners and number of regular romantic partners (.03, .01). In both cases, the effect size was small to moderate (.20, .22).
No other correlations were significant. (I left out correlations that were trending towards significance if the result for the other kind of partners was not significant.)
Discussion
By far the largest effect was extroversion. This seems like a pretty obvious conclusion for me: extroverts typically meet more people and ask more people out, which means that they are likely to get more romantic partners. I think it’s kind of weird that extroversion seems to be less important for straight men than for the general population, given that there is a strong social norm that men ask women out. Perhaps this is an artifact of my odd sample: the social norm might be less strong in an environment where many men are too shy to ask anyone out.
Openness to new experience appears to be an attractive personality trait for people in general (although perhaps not for straight men), although the effect size is fairly small, so I don’t think this is actionable advice. It is possible that this is an artifact of narcissism being correlated with openness.
With the exception of narcissism, all measures of assholery appear to be either uncorrelated with or weakly negatively correlated with romantic success. The p-values are high enough and correlation coefficients low enough for most measures of assholery that I am comfortable saying that assholery is just uncorrelated with romantic success. That is, an attractive asshole has no more and no fewer partners than an attractive nice guy.
That seems to me to explain the anecdotal data: if assholery is uncorrelated with romantic success, then there will be plenty of examples of assholes who are absurdly romantically successful and nice people who are not. People will probably ignore the examples of romantically successful nice people and romantically unsuccessful assholes, because those fit in better with our intuition about how things should work.
It seems very probable to me that assholes and non-assholes tend to date different people. For instance, maybe disagreeable people tend to prefer dating other disagreeable people. And it is commonly observed that some people (of all genders) seem to have broken pickers and consistently date people who treat them like shit.
Narcissism is, interestingly, correlated with a higher level of romantic success. It’s important to note that there is no gender difference here: narcissism is an advantage both for straight men and for the general population. It is possible that narcissists are more prone to consider an edge case (perhaps someone they’ve been dating for a few weeks, or someone they only see once every few months) to be a partner; however, that wouldn’t explain why for straight men there’s a slightly stronger correlation for regular romantic partners than for total romantic partners. Narcissism is correlated with extroversion, which might explain the data; perhaps narcissists put themselves out there more. It is also possible that, for some reason, narcissism is a romantically attractive trait: perhaps narcissists put more effort into their appearance, perhaps they talk up their good traits more, or perhaps people simply find egotism to be charming.
Thing of Things 
Is narcissism correlated/related to – whatever the general term of Big Name Fan is? (‘locally famous people’ I guess). Known presenters in kink communities, bigger bloggers in internet circles, etc. Like, the kind of people who have groupies and stuff/basically prominence.
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I don’t know. In my experience, locally famous people seem to have an ordinary distribution of narcissism/non-narcissism.
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Was there any effect from age? ISTM most of the complaints along these lines are coming from young straight men, like high school and college age, referring to their female peers.
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I did not collect people’s ages.
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I thin in general among at least then figure out they really are asshole andst straight folks is there’s an inclination for women to be attracted to assholes and sleep with them and dump them. Off they go to their next conquest. Part of the reason I think this is that the social norm in of what constitutes a real man are in fact the values displayed by asshole s. Therefore the lady thinks she’s got a real man and then finds out otherwise. These guys aren’t real men to hang with. Unless you’re screwed up in the head too.
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I wonder what you’d see if you asked people about their partners’ personality traits and not (only) their own.
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Ozy, can you share what the overall distribution of assholes/non-assholes on various measures was like? I guess in particular I’m curious about how much of your sample was abusive, so I can have a sense of how common that is in social circles like mine (which I think your survey may approximate better than the general population).
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45% have ever insulted, shouted at, sworn at, or yelled at a partner during a disagreement. 6% have ever given someone a bruise, sprain, cut, or felt pain during a disagreement. 11% have pushed, shoved, or slapped a partner. 2% have punched, kicked, or beat up a partner. 3% have destroyed something belonging to a partner or threatened to hit a partner. 1% have used force to coerce someone into sex. 3% have insisted on sex or sex without a condom without using force. None have sent a partner to the doctor.
If you are interested, I can figure out the quartiles of CTS score. (Note that this is not a great measurement of abusiveness– most notably, people sometimes hit their partners in self-defense. But better measures are hard for me to do with zero budget.)
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At the risk of opening a terrifying can of worms, was there a particular difference between genders in those numbers?
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I wouldn’t be surprised if there was, I’ve never been in a relationship with a woman who hasn’t tried to slap or hit me at some point. If I felt any of them had been making an effort to actually hurt me I might be more bothered but given the difference in strength on an individual level it would be like getting deeply upset about a toddler hitting me.
when it’s intrinsically less threatening there’s less social barriers against it.
of course that sucks for the minority of people in relationships with women physically stronger than themselves or on a similar physical level since they then end up with someone who hasn’t been significant trained by society to not hit who’s stronger than them.
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@ Murphy
Do you mean slapping or hitting out of anger / frustration / spite, against your wishes? Not during a fun pillow fight or something along those lines?
If so… That sounds pretty bad.
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“45% have ever insulted, shouted at, sworn at, or yelled at a partner during a disagreement”
This seems really low to me. I can remember shouting at a partner exactly once, and I cringe every time I think of it. But I personally swear in general conversation pretty much as punctuation, so the chance that I might have never sworn at a partner during a disagreement seems vanishingly unlikely. And “insulted” is so broad as to border on meaningless. (I assume “yelled” means the same as “shouted”.)
This seems like an incredibly low bar for abuse. If someone screams at their partner in every argument, that sounds like bad news. But people do tend to raise their voice when sufficiently angry. And people shout because the other person is shouting at them. Swearing feels almost irrelevant, unless you specifically mean epithets like “bitch” or “arsehole”. Saying “you’re being really fucking unfair” in a row doesn’t exactly make someone a bad person, surely?
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The Conflict Tactics Scale is, well, a scale. There’s no “abusive”/”not abusive” cutoff, at least as I was using it. If you say you have ever sworn at a partner, then you get one more point, on a scale with a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 72 points; the more often you do it, the more points you get. It does seem true to me that, all things equal, a person who swears at their partner every time they disagree is more likely to be abusive than a person who never swears at their partner at all.
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Oh, got you, that makes perfect sense. I think I took your comment out of context there and thought you were listing things that automatically make people awful partners.
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Do you have enough data to determine whether extroversion screens off openness, or to determine whether openness screens off narcissism?
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Interesting data, thanks for doing this survey.
I don’t expect it to be the whole story, but one thing that has stood out to me is that some of the sexually successful “assholes” I know would probably score as nice guys on your survey because the whole asshole shtick is just play for them. Er, that might be oversimplifying a bit, but I definitely would not expect any straight forward correlation between this type of “asshole” and abusive behavior.
The interesting part is that the women these people date see it as play, but not everyone does and it’s not always easy to tell from the outside. I’ve had a “nice guy” friend of mine ask me why I was being so mean to a female friend of mine after a perfectly friendly conversation. It caught me by surprise at first, but looking back at it, both my behavior and her response was *identical* to that of an asshole being a jerk to a girl. The only difference is that she saw it as counter-signalling and he did not.
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This lines up with my experience well.
I play the stereotypical asshole because it gets better results (Tested and honed over years as a stripper when my rent cheque was dependent on my effectiveness), but definitely showed up as one of the ‘nice guys’ on this survey. This is definitely one of the limitations of self reported data.
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That doesn’t seem like a flaw at all? Distinguishing actual assholes from people whose flirting can be misinterpreted by third-party observers (often due to the observers’ own issues) helps us understand what’s really going on.
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@Nita
Well, it may be possible that Ozy misinterpreted the claim that “assholes get more dates” and thus didn’t research the actual claim.
It can both be true that people who play assholes get more dates and that people who are inherently assholes don’t.
It can also be true that many people who complain that “assholes get more dates” are talking about those who play the role of asshole or can’t even see the difference between those that play assholes and those that are inherently assholes. A good argument can even be made that playing an asshole makes you one, albeit an ‘asshole light.’
If so, Ozy’s research doesn’t prove the complainers incorrect, although it can offer them an avenue to achieve dating success (act like an asshole in so far that is necessary to attract women). However, some men may not want to act like that. Those men seem to have adopted the mainstream feminist beliefs, which tends to call this kind of behavior ‘toxic.’
However, if abandoning this kind of behavior leads to poor romantic success, because women on average prefer play-acting assholes, then the complaint seems valid that female dating behavior ‘punishes’ the men who court women in ‘non-toxic’ ways.
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could you clarify what you mean by “playing the stereotypical asshole?”
Because a lot of the time this seems to mean “friendly teasing” which I think does work quite well in the context of approaching strangers. It’s an inherently socially tense situation and being able to diffuse that tension is a valuable skill.
There are also more predatory and manipulative tactics which are likely to work on young/insecure/drunk women but I hope you don’t mean that kind of thing, given that you said you were only playing an asshole.
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It is striking how many people say “Ozy did not research what ‘girls like assholes’ really means, it actually means X” and how different the Xs are from each other. Illusion of transparency is a bitch.
I did not include assholish play-flirting because there is not a psychological instrument that measures assholish play-flirting, as far as I am aware.
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@Daisy “could you clarify what you mean by “playing the stereotypical asshole?”
Because a lot of the time this seems to mean “friendly teasing” […]There are also more predatory and manipulative tactics which are likely to work on young/insecure/drunk women”
“Friendly teasing” is definitely a big part of what I’m referring to, but it goes much much further than that, including into stuff that looks externally identical to abusive behavior. The incident I was referring to above, for example, was basically some combination of berating/insulting/swearing at my friend while giving no indication that it was “a joke”. No wink, no smirk, no laugh. I was even feeling the typical emotions that normally cause such behavior, although to a lesser extent than would normally be inferred by that kind of behavior.
Even if you’re normally able to notice “friendly teasing”, you wouldn’t be able to see this as a good thing unless you had background information about why I was doing it and what I knew that she knew about why I was doing it and how she would interpret it.
@Ozy “I did not include assholish play-flirting because there is not a psychological instrument that measures assholish play-flirting, as far as I am aware.”
I bet between the questions “do you self-identify as an asshole, with respect to dating?” and “would your partners describe you as an asshole?”, you’d catch a lot of it.
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Ozy,
‘When all you have is a hammer…’
I understand that you may not have the tools to answer the question that I am asking, but that doesn’t make it a bad question to ask.
I’m also not saying that your research is worthless, but rather, that one should be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions. More specifically, one should not assume that the people who say ‘assholes get more dates’ are using your definition of ‘asshole’ and are thus proven wrong by your findings.
But your research is definitely worthwhile for raising this issue, which you can take into debates. So you can ask the people who say ‘assholes get more dates’ how they define ‘asshole.’ My expectation is that they will generally say ‘acts like an asshole during dating’ rather than ‘beats up women.’
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Oh, I certainly don’t mean to imply that I’m not (Now) an asshole. Just that this survey didn’t pick it up because I’m not the sort who yells, swears, breaks shit, hits people, or ignores consent.
The situation was that I’d picked up a job as a dancer at a local seedy club because I couldn’t otherwise make tuition. I was so far behind on payments that the school was threatening to expel me if I couldn’t come up with some cash, so I was… seriously motivated to make this work. In the beginning my stage performances were competitive thanks to other physical abilities, but I had a hard time closing on private dances and repeat customers, which are the most substantial income streams.
So I started taking tips from the other dancers and doing pickup research like it was my job. The other guys thought the problem was that I was being far too nice. And that turned out to match with my success rates when I started tweaking my set.
I’m not talking violence or verbal abuse. I’m talking about dumb bullshit that we all wish wouldn’t work, with a core of signalling that they are completely disposable. Preselection games were the core of it, and making sure that you are visibly getting hit on by other girls in the area is the central part that creates leverage for everything else. It enables freeze outs, if the current repeat patron is slow on the uptake, you can say “You’re right, we should take it slow tonight”, and then be seen kissing another patron a few minutes later. The vibe of implied “It’s cool! If you don’t want to, I can go find someone else!” doesn’t get picked up by this survey’s, or most peoples’ metrics of abusive behaviour (Most people know this as “The way attractive women naturally act to get what they want”), but I feel is a massive dick move when applied to someone who is clearly smitten.
Doubly so when they bring me a nice home cooked meal to the club and I thank them, eat it in front of them, then ask if their friend is single.
The lighthearted teasing is definitely an integral bit, along with classical negs like offering gum, fixing their hair, and telling them they should go ask one of the other dancers out. But when I push that game so hard that they end up in tears after I tell them “C’mon, you’re not in love with me, that’s a terrible idea. Here, that guy looks way better for you. I’ll introduce you guys because I’m going to be busy later tonight”, I just wish that they’d look at me and say “You’re right, that is a terrible idea. What was I thinking? I’m out”.
They don’t though. For a long time I played a game when I had enough clients that I was stable enough to eat, pay rent and stay in school, where I would see how far I could push and string them along before they would leave. It made me so sad to see how long they would hold on, ignoring all good sense and repeated warnings from their friends Firstly because I was sad to see them putting themselves through it, and secondly because girls I was nice to never treated me as well as these ones did. The phrase “Fuck! You make me so mad, but I just want you so much” appeared frequently.
The biggest reason I think I’m an asshole is that after seeing this dynamic play out again and again, I definitely have a hard time respecting women as rational agents, because doing so seems to be so strongly selected against. And honestly, that bothers me a lot. I want to think of women as equals, operating within a commendable moral framework. But the examples I see in my lived experience are a whole lot of flailing and gnashing of teeth while actively seeking out and choosing whoever treats them as most disposable.
Now flash forward to my personal life many years later and I’m in a strange place. I’ll end up together with long term partners that I’d attracted by being an asshole. Eventually I’ll want to give up the act and start respecting them as human beings, at which point they start pushing boundaries and treating me really badly (Example, one ex after disappearing one night we were scheduled to meet up, explained “My ex boyfriend came back into town unexpectedly. I knew that if I went over to his place you would understand, he would have been so mad if I didn’t. You’re so great that way”.) So I feel like I have to keep a certain level of shenanigans up defensively. Honestly, I’d prefer not to have to bother with being a jerk, and just be good to someone and have it returned. At this point, it feels like I have to choose one or the other.
TL:DR I’m an asshole because I don’t respect women anymore and sometimes/often make them cry by acting as if they were disposable I do so because historically they treat me quite well when I do, and rather poorly if I don’t. If you want a certain kind of behavior, select for it.
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Thanks for the detailed story, No one.
The first sentence explains the second. They enjoy the dramatic experience, it feels intense or “romantic” to them. And when you stop running the emotional roller-coaster, they take matters in their own hands (as your true equals, in a way :)).
There are lots of different people in the world, and they want different things from relationships. Unfortunately, it sounds like this strategy is the only one you have really developed (because you needed money), so you tend to fall back on it and attract the same type of person each time.
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Oh yes, this is the typical response I hear from everyone and their dog. But seriously, I’ve tested just about every ‘strategy’ you can think of, both within professional contexts and outside them. It’s not that I can’t make other methods work, it’s that they don’t work *as well*. Nice and respectful methods are perfectly serviceable, but they’re vulnerable to being undermined and outcompeted by other men playing the “Romantic” emotional rollercoaster strategy.
In my particular situation this is a bigger deal than it otherwise would be, being that I currently spend most of my time living in a city with one of the most brutally mismatched ratios of available men to available women in north America, so competition here is absolutely ruthless. When I head out to the coast it’s a whole different ball game.
I find it really easy for people with no skin in the game to argue the “lots of different people” card, but while completely true, it misses the point that the distribution of the desires of those ‘lots of different people’ fall along relatively narrow and predictable lines. Demography is a way bigger part of the system than most people give credit to, so there’s a big difference between “Lots of different people – ~40% select for emotional rollercoasters over respectful relationships” and “Lots of different people – 90%+ select for emotional rollercoasters over respectful relationships”.
Now, I can’t assert the actual distribution any better than you can, but making bets on the outcomes of my social circle’s romantic adventures has left me up almost $600 (With 7 wins out of 9) over the past two years. And when there’s a dispute worth betting on I’m very seldom taking the optimistic side. So I’m reasonably confident in my clarity of assessment.
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The addendum that I forgot to add explicitly earlier:
The reason I disagree that this is a matter of my only having a single strategy and attracting the same kinds of people is that the predictive accuracy of this model works just as well for people I’m not personally involved with.
And for adding value to this comment section, I’ve been thinking of other possible questions for surveys like this that might cut closer to the heart of the matter than the current DV and abuse related ones.
“To the best of your knowledge,what percentage of their previous partners is your current partner on amicable terms with?”
(none all)
“Do your past partners and current partner get along well with authority figures?”
(Not at all very well)
“Have any of your previous partners been arrested/convicted?”
(None All)
“When my partner gets angry or emotional, it is usually over something reasonable”
(Almost never Almost always)
“On a scale of 1 to 10, how would your close friends rate the behavior of your previous partners?”
(110)
“Do you think most *Gender you are interested in* are trustworthy and make good choices?” (Not at all Yes, very”)
Because this is for the poly crowd:
How well do your past or current partners get along with their same sex metamores?
(Mortal Kombat like Timberlake and Sandberg.)
It’s a shame we don’t have paired couples or poly groups to link together. Because I think comparing questions like “How often does your partner make you angry/sad enough to yell or cry” with *their partner’s* relative success gets us a lot closer to the right ballpark.
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I didn’t know how else to respond to your story, because using jealously to either attract or “punish” a romantic partner is so far outside the realm of my experience. Seriously. I’ve never done it, I’ve never had it done to me, I’ve never seen anyone do it. In my experience, jealousy tends to be corrosive and detrimental to romantic feelings.
So, my actual first reaction was, “Where do you even find these people?!”
That said, I do enjoy playfulness, including playful “arrogance”. And I do prefer feeling that both me and my partner have freely chosen to be together — as opposed to having been chained together by Fate or desperation. I want fun and excitement in addition to respect (which is, of course, essential).
I’ve been with my primary partner for over a decade. I’m on good terms with my ex-secondaries. If I had a partner who regularly made me want to yell or cry, I would consider that a serious problem.
It seems like a lot of people, including most women, don’t even realize that healthy and exciting relationships are possible, and/or don’t have the emotional skills to make them happen
It matters on the population level, but you, as an individual, won’t be dating the median woman. Your partners will match general trends only if you select them by random sampling. What “most men” are like is very important to me in the context of politics, safety, workplace relations etc., but not when it comes to relationships.
Well, could that be a major factor behind the problem? Due to the gender ratio, the women in your area have run out of reasonable selection criteria and have resorted to leaning too hard on estimated desirability?
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@Nita
I want to point out that your response fits in a pattern I’ve noticed where claims that most women are socialized into certain negative behavior are dismissed automatically; and it is assumed that this is just an inherent trait of a small minority of women (some women like X, others like Y).
Yet people generally have little issue with accepting that most men are socialized into certain negative behaviors.
I believe that there is a gender bias in these assessments, which places women on a pedestal compared to men and makes people blind to some ways in which women are socially conditioned in ways that harm men.
Of course, ‘No one’ merely has anecdotal evidence, so you can still question how representative his experiences are, but I would argue that this should not lead to automatic dismissal, but as a data point that calls for a look at proper studies. One such study may be this one, which does seem to suggest that women tend to be attracted to men who signal that the woman is ‘disposable’ (as ‘No one’ put it).
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@Nita
BTW. I do assume that the examples that ‘No one’ gave were outliers on a spectrum and that if women tend to have this socialization, it is far more subtle for the majority of women.
That you fail to notice this can just as easily mean that you consider a limited amount of this to be normal and perhaps call it playful “arrogance.” Have you considered the possibility that what you consider playful “arrogance” can by some men be seen as unpleasant role-playing that they engage in because they see it as the only viable route to a relationship, even though they feel that it is a toxic pattern that forces them to act differently from how they want to?
Let me compare it to another example: many men and women have fully internalized the notion that men need to be stoic/’man up.’ They casually reap the upsides of this and dismiss the downsides, never questioning whether the downsides outweigh the upsides. A person who has not internalized this, will look at these people with horror: why don’t they see that there are very different rules for each gender? Why don’t the people who reap the benefits recognize the sacrifices made for them? Why am I forced to conform to this?
I would suggest that we need to allow for the possibility that ‘No one’ may actually be the one who is the outside observer, while you have internalized certain gendered norms as normal. Assuming that both of us accept that other people may have internalized harmful behavior, it seems reasonable to suggest that we ourselves are not immune to this either.
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@Nita: Parts of your story sound incredible to me. And I really wish I lived in your world more.
I’m most amazed that you’ve been involved in Poly relationships, and presumably a poly community for over a decade, and have never even *seen* anyone use jealousy as a tool to attract or punish a partner. From this perspective, I have trouble parsing this as anything but a blind spot, but am willing to take your word on your experience, and say that yours sounds like a very nice and healthy community dynamic that I’d like to see more of in general.
To answer “Where do you even find these people?”:
Lots of places, spread over 6 cities I’ve lived in for more than 6 months each, with social circles ranging from club patrons, to my peers at university, to travelers I meet while couchsurfing, to my current circle of mostly festival/Burningman people, amateur circus arts students, and tradesmen. I know it’s really tempting to try to discount this as a local phenomenon, just part of my selection criteria, or to write these people off as rare emotional defectives, but this ends up being a drawn out “Sane women of the gaps” situation that leaves very few people standing.
I can’t say for sure what goes through my partners’ heads, but I would bet quite a bit that the idea that we’re chained together through ‘fate or desperation’ isn’t it. As far as I can tell, people are just really, really terrible at understanding their own decision making criteria, and really, really good at justifying their choices post facto. This goes double for when their drives run in ways that would cause cognitive dissonance with established social narratives. No one wants to believe they’re being swayed by jealousy or bad behaviour, but studies keep showing that preselection effects continue to work like magic, and people scoring highly on dark triad traits get ahead.
So I think if you asked them, they’d just say “I really like him. He makes me mad sometimes, but he’s pretty great.”, or at the more pathological end “I’m just worried that he’ll lose interest in me if I *x, y or z*” (Which is something I hear on occasion).
I’m genuinely happy that your relationships manage to avoid anything like this. And if the followup to “If my partner regularly made my yell or cry, I would think it was a big problem” is “And consequently he is immensely successful, with hundreds of previous partners a lineup of prospective new ones that stretches around the block”, then I’d consider it a great data point that would make me rethink my worldview.
I’m with you that healthy and exciting relationships are possible, but I think in this case the supply of people who have the skills to operate in them lags far behind the demand. Which leaves us in a prisoner’s dilemma wherein one partner bringing sane and healthy to the table frequently does not have it returned, which is often worse for them than playing the game in the first place. As people around here have said: If you don’t like social signalling and monkey games, the worst thing you can do is to just stop playing them. This just ensures that you lose. Forever.
Further, you’re correct that no one is dating the median partner, but this ignores the equilibrium of competition in a given area. For additional background, the population in the city I live in right now skews very far to the overabundance of *men*. In a city of just over 800,000, the census ratio is 1.11:1, with another ~80,000 transient workers (Almost entirely male between 18 and 50) from other parts of the country, leading to a total ratio of around 1.3 – 1.4 men: 1 woman aged 18-50. The other city I stay in as often as possible (And will be moving to full time as soon as my work is finished here), swings the other way by about 1:1.12. The behaviour patterns are like night and day. It’s hard to even communicate the demographic effect to people who remain in a single community for long periods, because to them, “That’s just how it is everywhere”. The women here are inundated with choice and have more options than they want. The trouble is that when everything is on offer, *Romantic emotional rollercoaster* tends to win out over everything else, leading to predictable long term results.
By survey statistics, women here are less satisfied with their partners than in other areas of the country and perceive their dating pool to be of lower quality. From this angle, the only thing holding them down is their own poor choices because these same guys make out like bandits when they travel. Even leaving me out of this equation, I watch my honest, hard working friends get toyed with and thrown away in favour of welders with money to burn, ridiculous lifted trucks, and terrible alcoholic rages. You get what you select.
Stories from city 1 read like scenes from a Roosh novella to the point where I routinely thank every power that exists that I’m only a tourist here. City 2 is downright relaxing to be in by comparison. My takehome is that people are a *lot* more prone to influence from local power dynamics than they think, and asshole behaviour serves as a force multiplier. If things *just work*, chances are you might be on the sweet side of one of those power differentials.
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@Aapje:
I want to point out that your response fits in a pattern I’ve noticed where claims that most women are socialized into certain negative behavior are dismissed automatically; and it is assumed that this is just an inherent trait of a small minority of women (some women like X, others like Y).
I see plenty of this kind of criticism, actually, although the examples that come to mind usually focus on how it holds women back and/or is annoying rather than that it seriously hurts others: women should be more comfortable with being single rather than being in a bad relationship, women should not do uptalk, vocal fry, overapologize, or say “just”, women should be more willing to negotiate salaries… These are generally assumed to be due to socialization when I’ve seen them discussed.
@No One:
Like Nita, my first reaction was that this behavior pattern sounded alien to me. But I can easily imagine it coming from my husband’s coworkers at his previous job, who tended to have a lot of other self-destructive behavior patterns, both the women and the men [e.g. heavy drinking and frequent unplanned pregnancies]. It may be that you just have to choose between quality and quantity of partners in your strategy. I hope that you haven’t practiced one strategy so long that you have trouble switching to the other; the middle zone might be worse than either extreme. Given that the gender disparity you gave was something like 1.4:1 and you believe that was causing the difference in dating cultures in the two cities, I would guess that the disparity in what works wouldn’t require something as extreme as 90% of women you’ve encountered to find “asshole” behavior appealing.
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I’m interested in the self destructive behaviour patterns you mention here.
I mean, I personally don’t drink very much and am careful enough that I’ve never had to deal with an unexpected pregnancy or surprise infection, with similar patterns for drugs, health, and most other things I can think of fitting the ‘self destructive’ label. The behaviours I’m talking about exhibiting sound definitively partner destructive. Essentially I’m probing for ideas of ways I could be sabotaging myself here that I’ve overlooked.
(The closest thing I can identify to ‘self destruction’ is that I work way too much right now. I’m sprinting for that whole financial-independence-and-retirement-at-35 thing, and it’s a grind sometimes)
It’s sweet of you to hope that I’m not locked into a given mode of interaction with partners, and I can assure you that you won’t need to worry. Interestingly, Quality and Quantity tradeoffs aren’t even an issue here, with the original point being that you get better treatment after you sleep with their friends. Partner quality right now is quite high. Current partner quantity is singular, though this might have more to do with working 90 hour weeks out in the frozen wasteland. So for the moment, a mixed/nice strategy is the only option, because I have no time to play games. It’s holding strong so far, but I’m entirely resigned to the possibility of some badass moving in, playing defect, and going for the steal (Which wouldn’t be without precedent at all, as that’s not far off of how I ended up partnered here in the first place. It’s the circle of life).
***
I went to google to find the old articles I’d read where authors are quick to buy into the idea of imbalanced sex ratios being really crappy for the over represented side, so long as that side is women. Couldn’t find the ones I’d seen before, but it looks like vice has picked up the slack and written roughly six trillion of them, mostly centering on lopsided university cohorts and why that makes men awful (But, I mean, Vice, right?).
But in doing so, I stumbled into something neat for Ozy and the Bay area crew with regard to the “If you think the game is fair, you’re probably on top by a sizable margin.” idea.
http://visualizing.nyc/bay-area-zip-codes-singles-map/
As with any link from a blog comment, save your sanity and be sure to skip the comment section.
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@closetpuritan
I think that there is a big difference between criticism of self-destructive behavior vs destructive behavior. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone deny that the former is possible, but there are a substantial number of people who believe that women (collectively) cannot hurt men (collectively).
I would argue that this is because many people misunderstand the gender role dynamic and believe that it gives men control over women, rather than the actual truth: that it gives women more access to some tools of power (like shaming or getting help after giving signs of being a damsel in distress) and men more access to other tools of power (like access to formal positions of power or violence).
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@No One:
Hard to know if you’re being self-destructive from here; your romantic strategy could be self-destructive if it’s a case where you’re sacrificing your long-term goals (a partner who will treat you well without you playing mind games) because of short-term unpleasantness (longer periods single, higher risk of being dumped for someone else)… it sounds like from what you write later it may no longer be an issue, though.
Interestingly, Quality and Quantity tradeoffs aren’t even an issue here, with the original point being that you get better treatment after you sleep with their friends.
I think we’re using “quality” to mean different things here. The reason I interpreted it as a tradeoff was because it sounded like you disliked having to keep doing the asshole routine (it sounds exhausting to me, in addition to the guilt-inducing aspects). A partner who acts like an asshole to you if you stop acting like an asshole to them is, to me, a low-quality partner.
Partner quality right now is quite high. Current partner quantity is singular, though this might have more to do with working 90 hour weeks out in the frozen wasteland. So for the moment, a mixed/nice strategy is the only option, because I have no time to play games.
If I’m reading you right it sounds like you have what you’re looking for now, so good for you.
Thinking about it, I do know of one relationship that sort of followed the pattern of “hang around with another woman to make her jealous”–the woman in question was repeatedly having plans blown off by the man in order to help out his ex-girlfriend. The man was dumped fairly quickly. The fact that AFAICT the woman did not suspect the man of doing anything besides helping his girlfriend, and AFAICT it was done not as a strategy but because he believed the ex-girlfriend needed help, means it’s not as strong a counterexample as it could be, though.
@Aapje:
I guess we did not communicate well on what your original claim was, then–thanks for clarifying. I’m not sure right away if I agree with your restated claim, but it would make sense given that women are still somewhat seen as more childlike as well as more likely to be victims… there are advantages and disadvantages to that, and we may disagree on whether the advantages balance out the disadvantages, but we agree that it is not uniformly better for men. I do not see greater equality between the sexes in this case as a zero-sum game, but rather a win-win.
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Aside from the one shining moment of clarity in realizing that the trouble isn’t with efficacy, but is a matter of effort and exhaustion, I think there are miscommunications everywhere else. But on that point you nailed the exhaustion part. Not so much the guilt, because due to not knowing what people want, I can happily give them what they choose without remorse.
What I’d like is for everyone to put their gamey weapons down and be straight with one another (Whether that means either admitting that we’re attracted to what we currently call ‘poor treatment’ and seeking it out officially, or by actually maintaining good boundaries and not accepting it from anyone. Both of those are great to me). What I would not like is for only myself to be in a situation of not being able to use my gamey weapons, which is the situation in which I currently find myself. Picture an iterated prisoner’s dilemma wherein one party is limited to playing cooperate when they would rather play tit-for-tat.
The longterm goal in this vein is to partner with someone I respect, specifically here in the sense that they don’t respond to this kind of bad behaviour from anyone. I’m not sure that I agree that a lingering risk of ‘being dumped’ is a “short term unpleasantness”. I think it would be more accurately classified as an existential risk to the stability of the relationship. So I suppose it’s as short term as the expected length of the pairing.
Finally, I’m amazed at how completely backwards I’ve managed to communicate what I do if it pattern matches to that example story. It seems to me that conspicuously prioritizing giving resources to a former girlfriend whom you are not sleeping with, over spending time with your current partner is the exact opposite of conspicuously demonstrating that *other women* are willing to give their resources to you (usually by showing a willingness to sleep with you). The value demonstrations between these two cases move in exactly opposite directions. The example pattern matches much more closely to “Guy is seen being nice, is dumped”.
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@closetpuritan
IMO, one of the most damaging parts of gender advocacy (both feminist and MRA variants) is that much importance is placed on the answer to the question which gender is worse off, which is:
1. unanswerable, due to being both an apple to oranges comparison as well as having greatly disparate impact to different individuals. Some people are perfect fits with their gender roles and/or get mostly the benefits and some people are the opposite. Both female feminists and male progressive MRAs tend to dislike their gender roles far more than the average person (or else they wouldn’t have become gender advocates). In many cases, the genders have the opposite problems, which seems like ‘problems I wish I had’ to the other side. It’s easy to take benefits for granted that you never lacked and not to see how much pain it causes not to have it. For example, women who get (sexually) approached by guys far too much to their liking tend to have great trouble empathizing with the male plight of getting turned down a lot. They just see the benefit of the male role: getting to initiate sexual encounters means that they don’t happen when you are not in ‘dating mode.’ But they often fail to really understand how much mental impact getting tons of rejections can have for some people and how hard the male role can be to master sufficiently. Similarly, men who dislike having to initiate tend to underestimate how unpleasant it can be to be approached when you are really not in the mood. This ‘natural’ lack of empathy with the other gender then results in a downward spiral, as it pushes men who feel very harmed by their gender roles out of feminism, which they feel undervalues the harm they suffer. Women who feel less harmed are also pushed out. The opposite is true for MRAs, where women who feel very harmed by their gender roles are pushed out and men who are not as aggrieved. So you get two bubbles who each dislike one gender role far more than the average person, while blaming the other bubble for considering their grievances far too important.
2. used to legitimize focusing most or all of the effort on the gender which is (subjectively) considered worse off. Given the issues I described under point 1, the result is considered extremely unfair by the other side.
One major step to reducing this poisonous dynamic is to forget about who is worse overall and focus on specific issues. My experience is that it is far easier to find common ground this way.
The issue is that many gender advocates don’t have ‘greater equality’ as a terminal value, but rather: fix my issues. It is very easy to then advocate greater inequality and/or making things worse for the other gender, when that is to the advantage of their own gender.
‘Greater equality’ is a very strong social norm/virtue among progressives, which means that people feel that they cannot disagree without being evil. So when their actual terminal values are different, you get cognitive dissonance, which tends to be resolved with a false equivalence: addressing my issues = greater equality.
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@No one:
OK, I guess I can see how I was reading your strategy more as “You are low-value” rather than “I am high-value”. Ditching your plans with someone indicates that you they are low-value to you, but not that you are high-value to other women necessarily. Theoretically if it still results in someone seeing their relative power in the dating scene as lower than yours the result shouldn’t be different, but maybe it doesn’t work that way in practice. I would still say my example is “fails to demonstrate [that you are in high demand romantically]” rather than “demonstrates the opposite”.
Anyway, that’s still the closest example I can come up with to your manipulation techniques, from my social circle.
The reason I thought of “risk of being dumped” as short-term was because I would think as you get to know someone and stay with them longer and they have opportunities to resist other people’s manipulation techniques, without using manipulation techniques yourself, you become more confident that they are not vulnerable to the manipulation techniques. But maybe you personally don’t/wouldn’t feel that way.
@Aapje:
One major step to reducing this poisonous dynamic is to forget about who is worse overall and focus on specific issues. My experience is that it is far easier to find common ground this way.
So, you agree that how I set that aside in my previous comment was a good way to go? Or do you see that comment as not doing that? If the latter, I don’t think the two “sides” will ever have much success coming together, because we’re too sensitive to a lack of complete agreement on who has it worse for even “let’s agree to disagree and focus on common ground” to be effective.
The issue is that many gender advocates don’t have ‘greater equality’ as a terminal value, but rather: fix my issues.
Well, many isn’t most, so not sure how much we disagree, but I would say that most do have ‘greater equality’ as a terminal value, but feel that ‘fix my issues’ [work on the problems I feel are most important] is part of the near-term road to getting at least closer to greater equality. Part of what makes this so intractable, at least when looking at feminists and MRAs, is that one side doesn’t just disagree on which problems are most important, but sees the other side’s efforts as actively making things worse. It would be much easier if it was more a case of “OK, I see this as a fairly minor problem, but if that’s your passion, go work on that while we work on the bigger problem”, rather than “I must stop your efforts because you are making things worse”.
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@closetpuritan
Well, you implied that I think that men are worse off and that it’s productive to agree to disagree on this point. I wanted to point out that the question is a mind-killer: it makes you reason on an abstract level where there is no objective truth and thus people cannot help but end up with an answer that reflects their own biases.
I’ve never seen a positive outcome when people pick a gender that they believe is most oppressed. The best case scenario is that they don’t use the answer as part of their argument.
Well, one of the reasons that I cannot call myself a feminist is that there seems to be widespread consensus on this point among (90+% of) feminists, where they feel that it is disqualifying to not answer this question as ‘women have it worse’ (refusing to answer is not even acceptable). Unprovable claims that may not be disbelieved are dogma. Dogma is poison because the combination of weak evidence for a claim and yet the claim being considered crucial, automatically leads people to artificially produce strong evidence (using various fallacies, such as cherry picking). The critics will then point out the fallacies, which then requires even more elaborate rationalizations to defend this rhetorical structure, until you have a convoluted system that is broken, but is so elaborate that any critic can be ‘defeated’ by simply throwing up fallacy after fallacy, until the critic gives up or is presented with a fallacy that he or she doesn’t know how to clearly dismantle.
At the moment, I think that there is no room for a coming together and that we first need parallel advocacy, where people who have beliefs similar to mine get a voice in the mainstream and thereby destroy the legitimacy of various feminist fallacies. Then your side will be discredited so much that the only solution is to abandon the dogma and rebuild the theoretical frameworks based on fact. If your side does that well enough, you may be able to ‘defeat’ my side, although that is fine, because we would still have won by making you into an actual egalitarian movement.
Aargh, didn’t close a blockquote properly.
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@closetpuritan
To be fair, I’d say it’s a pretty fine distinction, and isn’t entirely wrong either. When it comes to conveying “I am high value” vs “You are low value”, the latter really isn’t as much of a detriment as it should be, but the former is completely, non-negotiably mandatory. This is why the Weeknd can *Only call you when it’s half past five* (key quote: “I just fucked two bitches ‘fore I saw you. You ‘gon have to do this at my tempo”) and be loved for it, while this would be a harder sell for Joe Janitor after he gets home from the late shift pushing a mop.
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Man, if I saw people tending to demonstrate resistance or immunity to manipulation tactics over time, I would be completely overjoyed. But you’re right, I virtually never see it happen. At this point with partners I address it as “You know, not to put too fine a point on this, but if I notice you responding well to this kind of behaviour from other people, I’m likely to start doing it myself.”
Most people just aren’t receptive to the idea that these tactics could work on them at all, and the pushback can be strong. One of the best cases so far is my current partner, who is way more self aware than normal. I noticed that the other guy she was dating when we got together was running textbook PUA plays and she was falling straight for them. I told her about them, at which point she got really angry that I would think the other guy would ever do something like that, and (even worse!) that she would fall for it. So I got her a copy of an old Mystery Method book, told her “Check out the section on freezeouts, boyfriend destroyers, and push-pull. Read as much of this as you can stand. Call me on it if you ever see me doing any of this.”. It wasn’t until she caught him using lines from the book verbatim that she started to realize what was going on.
So the illustrative question here is: What would have happened if the guy hadn’t left himself wide open with one of the biggest rookie mistakes possible?
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@No One:
I was thinking less of “learning over time not to be manipulated” and more “demonstrating over time that one is not easily manipulated”… though I would think that people would learn over time, after a few relationships at least, even if not during one relationship. I’m tempted to chalk this type of behavior up to naive youth, but it doesn’t sound like you’re in quite that young a crowd.
I was thinking of the behaviors you’re talking about as cheap/easily faked signals, but actually, it seems like it should be hard to fake being high value (able to have your pick of partners) in an environment where men are overrepresented. I don’t know, maybe you’re just that attractive and charming compared to the other available guys. I’ve wondered if the most attractive women actually tend to get attention from worse-quality-in-all-but-looks guys because of the shallowness factor; maybe you are getting worse-quality-in-all-but-looks women. Or maybe if this behavior was prevalent in my social circle it would work just as well and it’s just luck that it’s not prevalent–but you seem not to be vulnerable to it, so is resistance to it really that rare? Or maybe it’s similar to the idea that if you look at anyone who’s ever gone to prison, the recidivism rate will look low, but if you look at everyone who started a prison term in the last week and follow them, the recidivism rate will look high–by mostly looking at available women (whether ‘available’ means ‘single’ or ‘steal-able’), you get an oversample of people who are vulnerable to these tactics. I don’t know, it will probably have to remain a mystery.
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I think one of the things that leads people onto a dangerous path is the idea that there’s a general IQ liked factor that makes one better at detecting manipulation. And the idea that above a certain threshold people just don’t have to worry about it. But I don’t think that’s the case at all. This stuff is more like if we were going to watch a stage magician and saying “Well, you’re smart though, he shouldn’t be able to trick you.”. You either know the tricks and can watch for them, or you don’t and they do their work subconsciously. The advertising parallels are close, and the first response every good advertiser has when someone says “Ads don’t work on me” is “Of course they don’t, you’re much too smart for that”, and then smiling inwardly as they’ve been given a license to spit game to a receptive audience that’ll never see it coming.
In this respect, manipulation is like advertising further in that if you’re watching it, it’s affecting you. The only defense is to install an ad blocker and turn it off completely. If you try to listen to it and not be swayed, your behaviour is still being altered. I try not to make exceptions for myself in this. I’m pretty meticulous about avoiding advertising, and can take my own advice well enough to realize that I’m vulnerable to just about any manipulation tactic I don’t recognize, and probably a bunch that I should.
For the record, I’m in my early thirties now, and this stuff just works more strongly than ever. Women of my cohort are starting to see the dropping off of interest that comes from leaving the 18-22 bubble. Sad to say, it’s dicks winning all the way down.
In terms of local difficulty, you’re absolutely correct. It is ridiculously hard to signal value here, and functionally impossible to signal freedom of choice. The girls definitely aren’t stupid, and they know they’re in demand. So you can still get outsized mileage from low hanging fruit (Like having a pink hair tie around your gear shift, or having a bowl in your front hall where you put all the jewelry that girls ‘accidentally’ leave around your house.), but even local scene celebrities don’t do much better than I do.
I mean, it’s very probable that super attractive women get more attention from good looking but otherwise terrible guys, mostly because they get more attention from everyone across the board. So I can sympathize that they’re going to have to get really good at sifting through lots of offers because bad selection is really the only thing (Not otherwise illegal) that can hurt them. And as far as outsized amounts of attention goes, they’re still allowed to size up and approach interesting prospective partners themselves.
And again, if we must bring it back to the idea that I’m just selecting badly, I’ll reiterate that the bulk of these observations come from women that I’m not with. As there are way more opportunities to observe the patterns of female friends, partners of male friends, and women in the local social circle, than there are data points that I’ve personally hooked up with.
I feel like the prison example went a little over my head, though it sounds interesting. I mean, I can understand how you’d classify someone as ‘not single’, but I’m not sure how you’d classify them as ‘not stealable’ without knowledge of the future. I think I get part of what you mean in that by focusing on the ones who have chosen terribly and making a sample group up of them after the fact, then you’ll end up with a concentrated value of exactly what you were selecting for.
As for mysteries. They’re a good place to start asking questions, but lousy as end points. Leaving them mysterious isn’t my style at all.
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@No One:
Well, leaving things a mystery isn’t really my style either, which is why I’ve persisted in trying to unravel this for this long, but I’m not optimistic that I’m going to figure it out through internet comment dialog at this point.
It’s interesting that you mention advertising, though, because although in some ways advertising will always work (advertising a particular food will at least be as effective as mentioning a particular food in making people feel like eating that food), in other ways you do get less vulnerable to it with experience–probably at this point you can tell just from looking at an ad that it’s chum and you shouldn’t click on it, without having to check what part of the page it’s on.
This is the article that I read on prison recidivism rates if you’re interested.
The “stealable”/”not stealable” part is not possible to know until after you know if the manipulation tactics have worked, yes. Basically, what I was getting at was, it’s circular, if you look at women who can be stolen because of tactics to manipulate perceived status/”game”, then 100% of them were vulnerable to such tactics. (Well, maybe not 100%, maybe some of them were getting ready to leave anyway and were just looking for the next opportunity.) Basically, it’s similar to how Ozy in the OP wanted to try to control for overrepresentation of assholes in the dating pool. It seems possible that in an environment where women are underrepresented, women not prone to frequent partner-switching (because they’re less easily manipulated?) would quickly leave the single population and stay unavailable, and their partners would also be discouraged from switching partners because it would be hard to find another one given the scarcity of women, further contributing to their underrepresentation in the population of single women.
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True say Closetpuritan, a comment thread alone isn’t going to unravel any tough mysteries of society. And honestly, giving the silent audience a little bit of exposure to some of these tactics so they hopefully might recognize them in their own lives, no matter how small that hope may be, is good enough for me.
With regard to advertising, I know it feels as though experience makes one less prone to it, but as far as any research I’ve seen, effectiveness of advertising dollars definitely doesn’t diminish with the age and media savvy of the target audience. It certainly requires different approaches for different stages of life (Cartoon characters and comic sans for children, tits for teenagers, fear of inadequacy for adult women, ego stroking for adult men, and a sympathetic ear listening to their concerns for oldies), but each group is highly susceptible at every step of the way.
Oh man! I wish we could even approach defining and measuring “Single Women” that way. Suffice to say it’s incredibly low, especially once you get above the 50th percentile in quality. There is no such thing here as a women who wants a partner and doesn’t have one. This is only partial hyperbole, in that I’m sure they must exist, but of my entire social circle, even considering at any point of time in the past year, I can think of exactly one (Who is very nice, but to put it delicately, far, far below the 50th percentile) who has at some point been single. All the remainder, even with substantial partner switching, have without exception had other partners on the go (Either openly or on the downlow, depending on poly or not) before releasing the first. That’s just life here, and it makes for a dynamic the local guys know that you either steal, or go without. It’s pretty toxic all around, especially in that the guys who end up in relationships are disproportionately the ones who are willing to fuck someone who they know has an unsuspecting partner.
Your observations in the final paragraph are spot on with the dynamic. Although from here the major determinant of long term partnering seems to be active mate guarding, rather than lack of manipulation. You’re right that the typical male strategy here is to find a partner and lock them down to the point where it gets silly. One of the longest term pairings I know between two locally famous friends (Think circus community, both are frequently included in “People are awesome” videos for prop manipulation), and the lengths the guy has to go through to keep things tight are just incredible. I’ve been at a party and hung with them until he had to leave to sleep in prep for an early work shift. He had said all his goodbyes and was getting into his car when he saw that if he took off, it would leave his me and his gf alone. Couldn’t happen, so he changed his plans for the night and stayed out with us until 2 am to chaperone. I’m definitely pretty threatening to other guys (And in this case, I’m not even interested in his gf), and I know he’d love it if his girlfriend wouldn’t flirt, but what could he even say without coming off as a controlling dick?
Either way, too many stories, not enough time. In any event, I see now what you’re saying with the prison study. And if you’re trying to gauge ‘number of women who will be single for any period of time’ as a binary “single” or “not single” then it’s totally on point. Though in this case, I think the time spent in state is an important difference to measure, because a woman who becomes single for one day every 3 years and one who is single for months at a time contribute very differently to the floating amount of single women at any given moment, which I think is the figure we’re actually after here.
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@No One:
Well, I suppose it depends on your definition of “works”. I have seen countless ads for Weight Watchers and Special K, for example, and they’re targeted at my demographic broadly speaking, but I’ve never spent one thin dime on those products. My reaction might be a defensive one at this point–an eyeroll or even yelling at the TV, so it’s not “no reaction”–but it’s not the reaction the advertisers are hoping for, either. Similarly, your tactics might “work” in the sense that your perceived desirability gets higher (or even just “work” in provoking a defensive reaction of “Gah, the pink hair tie trick again, really?”), but that doesn’t make it inevitable that any action will be taken in response to that.
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@closetpuritan
One of the ways that the ads work is by making a certain brand the default. So it’s not so much that people are pushed to lose weight (societal pressure to do so is probably sufficient to create huge demand), but rather, that Weight Watchers and Special K are on the short-list of options for people to achieve that goal.
As for the transparency of the pink hair tie trick, I suspect that there is an optimum level of ‘player,’ where it is a negative to be considered too bad at it (as most people enjoy flirting and smoothness in interaction), but also too good at it (due the risk to be cheated on). In an environment where women are scarce, the latter risk is much less, so women probably prefer more ‘smooth operators.’
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@closetpuritan
Exactly what Aapje said.
At the risk of being overly pointed here: You’re right. I guess advertising just doesn’t work on some people, and you’re one of the smart or lucky ones who’ve developed strategies to render yourself immune. I’m not sure how common this trait is though, because Kellogs and Weight watchers’ financial teams still seem to find it productive to spend millions on advertising campaigns marketing to your demographic. So either your peers don’t fare as well, or the big multinationals are just shoveling money into the furnaces.
The only reason a pink hair tie would be effective is within the context of it clashing so hard against the rest of my identity that the default assumption is “He would never do that in a million years”, which leaves the most probable history to be “Another girl was in his car and left it there”. It’s ambiguous, invites speculation and intrigue, and if pressed, is trivially easy to explain away with “Oh, hey, I didn’t even notice that. How long as it been there? Huh.”. If the expectation ever shifts to “Yeah, he does stuff like that”, then it loses a lot of effect and becomes standard hipster-esque ironic use. Honestly, the idea that someone would see that in my car, and immediately Sherlock Holmes their way to “This is a smooth operator who is intentionally manipulating my emotions with his choice of car knickknacks” is so low, by virtue of sounding absolutely bugfuck insane, that I can’t imagine it ever happening (barring a massive cultural shift wherein everyone started doing it.)
Aapje is again absolutely correct in that high competition, winner-take-all environments emphasize the long tails of high risk/high reward tactics. So if you have a game that has misaligned incentives, they get massively exaggerated in those environments. If you take the modern Tour de France as an example, wherein every athlete knows that if he dopes aggressively and gets caught he will be banned and lose, but if he doesn’t dope at all he loses just as certainly, then your winners will all be cheating, even though your cheaters will not all be winners.
You can chart the value calculation relatively simply for a system with multiple prizes and a given rate of cheating detection. Presuming that cheaters score higher than honest players while still competing normally within their league, then so long as the total number of prizes is high enough to trickle down to a proportion of the honest players greater than the proportion that will be caught if they cheat, then our equilibrium tends towards honest play.
If you want to cut doping in the Tour de France, you either need to give a ton of equal prizes (Which defeats the purpose of the competition entirely), or invest heavily in the detection of cheaters, and punish defectors harshly. Likewise with assholes in the dating population.
They won’t though because, as with sport, you get enough audience members saying “Fuck it, I just want to see the most exciting show possible. I don’t care if some dude has to juice for 12 years before his heart explodes in his chest, I want to see 140 mph fastballs, 380 pound defensive tackles, and if a flaming nascar racer crashes into the stands at 300 mph, it sucks to be them!”. Essentially, you can’t rally support to eliminate something that the audience is actually seeking.
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@No One:
Again with the misunderstandings (and also Aapje). I think it takes a really uncharitable read of what I just said to think I was saying that I, and a few other lucky people, are just really smart and naturally invulnerable to advertising. (And yes, Aapje, negative reactions like you describe are exactly what I was talking with the example reactions I described. They’re imperfect–but as likely to overshoot the compensating-for-advertising effect as undershoot it.)
Advertising makes people as a group more likely to buy something in a given time frame, but it will not make every person in the group buy that thing. You’re generally exploiting the people who are “ready to buy” or close to it–people who are in some way more receptive to the messages. The question is, why are so many people “ready to buy”–why are so many of the women at least passively looking for a “better model”?
PUA tactics are not magical anti-free-will reality fields. Even if they work as well as really good advertising, AT BEST they should only be effective enough to convince women that you are more attractive than you at first seemed. Most people I’ve observed don’t go chasing down every attractive person just because they’re slightly more attractive than the current partner. There’s a step missing between “convincing someone that you’re more attractive” and “getting them to decide to abandon their current relationship”–unless they were already getting ready to abandon their current relationship.
Honestly, the idea that someone would see that in my car, and immediately Sherlock Holmes their way to “This is a smooth operator who is intentionally manipulating my emotions with his choice of car knickknacks” is so low, by virtue of sounding absolutely bugfuck insane, that I can’t imagine it ever happening (barring a massive cultural shift wherein everyone started doing it.)
They wouldn’t have to figure it out immediately in any case, and I’m not sure that suspecting it’s true would be much less effective than being sure that it’s true, but… you just explained to me how you did this. It’s really that out there for someone to at least suspect that that’s the reason?
@Aapje:
Taking what you say at face value, the problem is a vocabulary problem–I called the people I was talking about by the wrong name. I apologize for getting the name wrong, but this doesn’t really remove the problem, it just means that there are fewer MRAs and more “alt-right”/”traditionalist” out there.
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@No one
I am highly suspicious of claims by people that they are not affected by advertising, as it works in many different ways and on many levels. Even with awareness, you cannot really prevent things like familiarization effects, where you value the known more than the unknown. At most you can develop anti-preferences, but in itself that is an irrational antipathy that you can use to imperfectly cancel out some of the irrational sympathies that advertising generates, where you will invariably over- or undershoot.
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@Aapje
Absolutely, as am I.
I think “Even with awareness” does even more of the lifting here than it seems at first blush when one takes into account covert product placement, sponsorships for unrelated cool stuff (Like the redbull airforce and Stratos jumps), every sporting event with emblazoned logos that you aren’t even paying attention to, and broad social changes that don’t even need to target you, because they’ve already hit a critical mass of your peers. (Has anyone reading ever paid for bottled water? This was unheard of up until a few decades ago. How about a Diamond for a wedding ring?)
Anyway, I agree with just about everything you’ve said here and everywhere else, but have been making an effort not to engage too much because I suspect that any praise from me (By virtue of talking about a particularly offensive facet of my personality in the first person using an obvious throwaway account) would lead to you being considered guilty by association. I think you have a lot of important things to say, and are one of the more articulate speakers for the position, so the last thing I want to do is make people less receptive.
With regards to irrational antipathies, the neat dynamic we often see is that to a huge extent, the magnitude of emotional stimulation is what counts, with the direction being less important. Think of die-hard, vocal PC/Mac fans who hate the other team enough to go on forums trashing their inferior hardware, until the day their work sticks them with a workstation of the opposing flavour, and within a few weeks they swear they’ll never go back. It both bugs the hell out of me, and makes me laugh really hard, that this example reads so much like the plot of every romantic comedy produced in the last 30 years. Point being, that intentionally counter-hating something is still giving it even more space in your mind. This works just as well for products as for people.
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@Closetpuritan
Yes, I’m aware that this would be an uncharitable reading, which is why the statement was so tongue in cheek in referencing the fact that I said several comments ago that whenever anyone points out that they aren’t affected, the only answer is “Of course you’re not!” And then carrying on, because once you butt up against someone’s identity, the conversation never goes anywhere good if you keep pushing. I don’t actually think you considering yourself immune.
So, in the case of “Ready to buy”, I think the states are less binary, and much more common than this line of argument gives credit. Everyone, save for people in states of Harley Quinnesque obsession have certain criteria under which they will leave their current partner. The fact that people have grown up with absolutely wacky ideas about how relationships work (Limiting myself to only the most flagrant transgressors that I doubt anyone will dispute: Thank you very much Disney, Romantic Comedies, and Porn), means that virtually everyone has a lot of room between where they perceive their current relationship, and what they think a good relationship looks like.
And here is where supernormal stimulus kicks in (Reference just in case anyone isn’t familiar with the concept: things that look more like something than the real thing and outcompete it. Like birds who will kick their eggs out of nests to try to hatch a big, shiny, smooth, light bulb. Or lipstick pink lips, blushed cheeks, impossibly perfect made-up skin, and fake tits more perfectly shaped than nature can create). One aspect of PUA shenanigans is being able to present an image of a partner or relationship that seems more real than the real thing. If you want to get into “Boyfriend destroyers”, this is the theory you go on. Emphasize the normal cracks present in every relationship and imply that they’re abnormal, and then obliquely present yourself as the alternative without being caught doing so. Everyone who is aware that society and ‘the media’ sets up unrealistic expectations in people should recognize immediately what a colossal security flaw this is. (And in my case, “Selling Fantasy” was literally my job as a dancer, so I’ve studied the tropes and narratives quite thoroughly) So you’re right, it’s not magic, but in the same sense that those birds incubating light bulbs while their eggs shatter on the ground isn’t magic. By the standards of this argument, I don’t think there are many who are completely “Unready to buy”.
And so, the final truth bomb as to why people aren’t going to figure this out: Because PUA is a constantly adapting system, and when done well is indistinguishable from a normal, hot guy. “Natural” hot guys do all this stuff too, they just either aren’t aware, or aren’t honest about it. And the key is that women support them when they do it. Do you think for one second that hipster pricks with waxed mustaches and Hitler youth haircuts claiming superiority because they knew this band before they were cool don’t know what they’re doing? How about every hollywood celebrity? (Tom Cruise hangs out with Neil Strauss, this stuff isn’t secret). Aside from me telling you explicitly that I’m doing it intentionally (from behind an anonymous internet handle), everything I’m doing is indistinguishable from being one of those fun, attractive guys who just happen to clean up (And you don’t notice are acting atrociously because they can get away with it). The cost of successfully catching the kind of tricks I’m telling you about is an unsustainable rate of false positives held against the people they’re most attracted to. Sure, you could presume everyone with a man bun is trying to manipulate you, and everyone with a well fitted peacoat, every guy with suspiciously nice shoes, everyone who teases people the way you tease a little sister, every guy who has other girls visibly interested in him, anyone who talks about astrology or yoga or spirituality or travel (I’m just mentioning specifically things explicitly in the PUA cannon right now). That’s a lot of shadows to jump at just to catch me intentionally putting a hair tie on my gearshift.
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@closetpuritan
I’d like to make it clear that when I said ‘I am highly suspicious of claims by people that they are not affected by advertising,’ I wasn’t accusing you of making such a claim.
I consider such beliefs extremely seductive to even very intelligent people, because for many topics, a high level of awareness can make you very resistant to manipulation, but far less so for marketing because some marketing methods target core human weaknesses. Some of those weaknesses cannot effectively be eliminated, because they are very useful to compensate for our limited processing power (basically: a heuristic). So I thought it worth going on a little tangent for whomever is reading this.
@No one
The PUA movement seems to have a similar problem as the MRA movement: their public image reflects the worst of the worst, rather than the average or the best. I think that the best types of seduction education are little different from teaching people to be more effective presenters by telling them to make eye contact, adapt to human processing limitations by not cramming the slides with information and not mumbling. Those are also things that some people do naturally and others don’t; but where the latter group can (usually) be taught more effective behavior.
IMO, it is extremely unfortunate that there is such a strong stigma of men who cannot figure this out themselves, because the vilification of dating education results in a cycle where nasty PUAs get most attention, which is actually advertising for them. It seems that quite a few men seek help with feminism, get disaffected and then seek out the people who get vilified. IMHO, it would be wiser to identify part of PUA that are good and direct people to them. Perhaps things like this or this.
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@Aapje:
Well, all that about the “good PUAs” may be true, but No One does not seem to be among their number based on his description of his behavior.
@No One:
I’m getting a little cognitive dissonance with those things that you’re listing as supposedly attractive, though I realize that that isn’t the point. Still, leaving my personal feelings about the “man bun” hairstyle aside, I would hardly categorize any hairstyle or article of clothing as a manipulation technique, let alone a supernormal stimulus. The man is not tricking the woman into thinking he has a man bun, he actually has a man bun. The point isn’t to spot the honest signals, it’s to spot the cheap signals, which should be easier to spot in the first place. And to the extent that you’re really getting the girls’ friends to help you cheat on the girls and not faking it with hairties and whatnot, arguably that’s an honest signal too (the signal “I am desirable to these women”), though it’s still Bizarro-World to me that that makes them more likely to stay in a relationship with you. (And it still seems weird to me that that would be a useful strategy in a female-scarce environment, where it should be harder to find women to cheat with.)
I actually don’t think there’s much difference between my relationship and what I would consider an ideal relationship. I do know one person whose boyfriend broke up because he felt that his ideal relationship shouldn’t take work, but I guess I don’t think I know many people who are out of high school whose expectations are still that unrealistic. Cheating on your girlfriends seems like a funny way of convincing them that they’re in the kind of idealized relationships portrayed in Disney and rom-coms… I’ll take your word for it that it seems to work in your current environment, but it seems odd that that would be the reason why it works.
I think “Even with awareness” does even more of the lifting here than it seems at first blush when one takes into account covert product placement, sponsorships for unrelated cool stuff (Like the redbull airforce and Stratos jumps), every sporting event with emblazoned logos that you aren’t even paying attention to, and broad social changes that don’t even need to target you, because they’ve already hit a critical mass of your peers. (Has anyone reading ever paid for bottled water? This was unheard of up until a few decades ago. How about a Diamond for a wedding ring?)
…
With regards to irrational antipathies, the neat dynamic we often see is that to a huge extent, the magnitude of emotional stimulation is what counts, with the direction being less important. Think of die-hard, vocal PC/Mac fans who hate the other team enough to go on forums trashing their inferior hardware, until the day their work sticks them with a workstation of the opposing flavour, and within a few weeks they swear they’ll never go back. It both bugs the hell out of me, and makes me laugh really hard, that this example reads so much like the plot of every romantic comedy produced in the last 30 years. Point being, that intentionally counter-hating something is still giving it even more space in your mind. This works just as well for products as for people.
Hmm… romantic comedies are far from realistic, though, and I have never seen anyone do the kind of dramatic brand reversal you’re talking about, or the rom-com-style “I hate you… no I love you”, so perhaps it’s not as common as you believe.
It seems like the fact that advertising is everywhere, and yet there are many things people could afford to buy but don’t, is an argument for the weakness of its magnitude of effect, not its strength. Sure, I know a few people who seem to be stereotypical consumers piling up credit card debt, but not most people I know. Why do I and the people around me not buy more stuff? Why do I have the savings that I have? Why do I not have a new car if I know I can afford one? Why did I not want to waste money on an engagement ring?
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@closetpuritan
Bro, I’ve never cheated on a partner in my life. I flirt with the darker side of these dynamics, and am definitely what you’d call a bad person because given the choice of being unethical and being punked forever, I will choose the former ever time, but one thing I won’t do is cheat. I’m way proud of the fact that I have never broken a stated commitment to a romantic partner by sexual activity with someone else. You may disagree with huge swathes of my behaviour, but let’s not pretend that I’m working completely without a moral code either.
If you’re thinking that Cheating is what gives the image of an idealized relationship, consider that you might be misreading.
Also keep in mind that the purpose of this account is to highlight the the worst actions I’ve personally tried that have met with paradoxical success. I might also have redeeming qualities. Though *citation needed*
For man buns and cool clothes: You don’t see them for what they are because you’re taking them individually rather than holistically. If women are attracted to a hairstyle that takes literally seconds to create for it’s own sake, then they’re even shittier at making choices than I take them for. Double that for ‘owning a cool jacket’ which anyone can do given a few hundred dollars or a lucky trip to a local goodwill. The fact is, no one is attracted to the article itself, but rather the attributes it signals. Those attributes which are a vague family of contextually implied concepts that, I assure you, affect people much more strongly than the sum of their parts. Given the fact that they don’t need to be openly stated, they don’t even need to technically lie. Make no mistake though, the modern urban lumberjack *IS* falsely implying shared attributes with the real McCoy even if, when pressed, he will fervently deny it. This is why you see the wave of pushback against “Faux Mountain Men who can’t even change a tire”
http://sabotagetimes.com/life/an-open-letter-to-bearded-hipsters-stop-ruining-my-beard-fetish
They key point in the competitive environment is that options are much harder to signal believably, which means that very few of the other guys in the system can signal them either, increasing their power by a lot. As with every trait, it exists within an equilibrium of the latent competition in the area.
Again, I will congratulate you for finding your ideal relationship. Seriously, kudos to you. Though I’d point to the booming industries surrounding products that sell status and romantic success (Which is everything from matchmaking services at one end, through stylish clothes and makeup in the middle, to every 12$ cocktail served in a dance club), that show a lot of money being spent by people who aren’t as perfectly situated.
While we’re at it, do you really want to mention average consumer debt in the same paragraph as you’re claiming the lack of success for advertising? Here in Canada we’re looking at an average of ~$22,000 owed per person, and the figure is somewhere around ~$45,000 in the US. Cool that *you or your friends* don’t have any debt, (And neither do I, because saving isn’t very hard), but realize what outliers this makes you. Do you think anyone is arguing that in order for advertising to be effective it has to make everyone who is subject to it spend every available dollar on their product? Because I don’t see anyone making that argument, or its dating market SexPanther (60% of the time, it works every time) equivalent.
In talking about PC to Mac switches, I was even writing that with a guy I work with in mind. As far as never having seen “I hate you, now I love you” in action, I’m glad you’ve never spoken to any abusive/abused people, who understand the cycle well, or have ever been friends with women who constantly complain about their S/O’s, or even have ever noticed any couple involved in an on-again-off-again relationship (Usually truncated to ‘it’s complicated’.) It’s way easier to make love out of anger than indifference. Which is why makeup sex is universally intense, and indifferent sex is lame. Consider this concept a hint as to why these counterintuitive “Make women angry” strategies might get a lot of mileage when juxtaposed beside the routine relationship enjoyed by their long term partners.
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As for the typical level of unrealistic expectations held by people in our society, I’m afraid we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.
Huge numbers of women feel that they can’t stop wearing makeup for fear that people read a natural face as tired or sick. Huge numbers of men feel stigmatized that anything under 6′ is considered ‘short’, despite 6′ and up being only the tallest 20% of the male population. Google the term “Unrealistic beauty standards” to get an idea of how many people feel this way. And even this is just scratching the physical surface, without getting into the meat of how people have been socialized to relate to one another, which include things people around parts adjacent tend to call ‘rape culture’ and ‘toxic masculinity/femininity’. As I’ve said to other posters, if people around you don’t suffer from these delusions and maladaptive socialization, then I hope your social circle grows and spreads so we all can be a part of it.
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@No One:
Hmm, I’m not sure if what you meant was that you made women think you were, or were thinking about, cheating on them but not actually doing it, or if you mean that you generally don’t get exclusive with anyone, but I feel like we keep talking past each other. Similarly, we’re maybe reading each other as making a more extreme argument with regards to advertising, being “ready to buy”, and relationship satisfaction (which, all the same, I think is in a different category from being dissatisfied with your own body), than we’re actually making. I think I do genuinely hold a different position on this than you, though. Some food for thought on the rise of consumer debt. Anyway, I’m most likely gonna bow out of this conversation.
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@ClosetPuritan
Yeah, you’re definitely getting closer now. When I hit on a woman’s friends it’s always from the position of being either a free agent, or in a nonexclusive arrangement. In any conversation like this I know there’s going to be a huge inferential distance, and I always have to laugh inwardly a little at how when you admit to doing one thing people think is shady, they logically presume that all moral bets are off and you’re probably breaking a bunch of other mores that pattern match to shady along with it. So I don’t hold any of it against you.
I’ve certainly been with women who I knew were cheating on their partner, but as far as I’m concerned that’s their commitment to either honour or break. I won’t break mine.
If I can get one point across that helps in all future predictions, it’s that I’m not a dick arbitrarily or without calculated payout. So acts that hurt people sadistically or recklessly aren’t what I’m talking about. This is definitely an extremely intentional, methodical assholery generally based on what I’ve observed the person reacting favourably to from others.
We might be making different arguments here, you’re correct. I’m not sure how any of those examples (Except the first person facet of of ‘unrealistic beauty standards’) constitute being dissatisfied with one’s own body, unless all the women who note that people read them as sick without makeup are just imagining it (Which I personally very much doubt)
All I get from that article is “Yay Us for being high performing enough to know how to live within our means”. Anyway, It’s been fun talking to you.
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@No One:
Thanks for the clarifications, and we did at least communicate successfully before that you were doing what you do not capriciously but because in your experience it’s what works. Anyway, it’s been interesting, particularly the question of how two people from ostensibly the same culture can have such different impressions of the world.
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Aapje is dead on here. Everything I’m putting forward here is anecdote and can’t be considered definitive. And I’m sure at least some of the women I’ve been with would call it ‘playful arrogance’ at the time too
Nita, I really appreciate your responses and your trying to puzzle through what seems to be a completely foreign perspective. I’ll have a more substantial response this evening when I get back to camp.
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@Aapje:
I think that most political positions are like this: People have a strong believe based on their observations of the world (direct, through the news, etc, etc), but there’s no way to actually take measurements of the world and determine who is “right”. I noticed that rather than take a ‘hard agnostic’ position earlier, though, you said that you thought women and men were equally disadvantaged. That is just as much an opinion as the opinion that women are more disadvantaged.
Some of the resistance I was thinking of on the part of MRAs (not sure how much you’re aligned with them either on this issue or in general) is that feminists often want there to be less stigma on both women and men to do gender-nonconforming things, and MRAs often think that it is bad for the genders to be more similar, and/or that allowing women to do nontraditional things will necessarily result in them doing poor work because they will not be capable of doing such work properly. According to feminists, there isn’t even a penalty for men because the woman is just another worker doing the job, but the MRAs don’t see it that way.
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@closetpuritan
Missed this post earlier, sorry.
I think that there are several reasons why feminists and progressive MRAs tend to see each other as hopelessly misguided and/or believe that they are anti-equality.
One reason is that many MRAs are not willing to presume that men and women are biologically equal and thus not willing to force equal outcomes, but rather favor equality of opportunity. This often results in the misconception by feminists that MRAs do not favor more equality, because they reject many of the feminist solutions that are based on ‘equal outcomes.’
This is similar to how a pro-life person may believe that a progressive person who rejects abstinence education favors more abortion. Of course, the reality is that the progressive person probably favors better sex education and believes that this is a more effective way to reduce the demand for abortions. I believe that many feminists make a similar mistake in perceiving the rejection of their solutions as complete rejection of their end goals (while the truth is that I would be happy with outcomes that match biological reality and given that I believe in gender norms, this would surely be more equal than now).
Secondly and probably the thing that makes MRAs most upset, is the perception that feminist tend to favor equality of outcome only when it favors women. This is the part where many MRAs feel that there is immense sexism in the feminist praxis, where there is a huge stack of rationalizations and double standards to make it seem that the most egalitarian solution is the traditionalist one when that is most convenient. An example is that many feminists favor quotas or other drastic measures to break the cycle where under-representation perpetuates itself, when it comes to high-level work or education, but not when it comes to child care, the legal system or sexual crimes, where they often favor focusing resources on those who are already better off and/or treated better.
So when you say ‘there isn’t even a penalty for men,’ I simply don’t believe you and strongly believe that mainstream feminism is not capable of being fair (because large parts of feminist theory are rationalizations for unfairness).
This is not just theoretical, my mother was nearly fired from her job because my father was supposed to be the breadwinner and later on, my father was turned down for a job merely due to his gender. So I am familiar with both traditionalist and feminist sexism from up close.
PS. I’m definitely more aligned with MRAs than with feminists, although I prefer to be perceived as an individual, rather than a stereotype.
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@Aapje:
So when you say ‘there isn’t even a penalty for men,’ I simply don’t believe you and strongly believe that mainstream feminism is not capable of being fair (because large parts of feminist theory are rationalizations for unfairness).
One of the more visible recent MRA actions was calling for a boycott of “Star Wars” because it features a female character doing warrior-type things, which doesn’t involve imposing quotas. Another is opposing allowing women to serve in all parts of the military. Again, lifting restrictions on one gender serving, not imposing quotas. You may not agree with those particular positions, but that’s the kind of thing I was talking about when I was talking about why the problem was so intractable.
(My perception is that requiring quotas [vs encouraging diverse applicants to apply or considering diversity as one factor of many in admissions or hiring] is not a mainstream feminist position, but I seem to remember that we live in different countries so that could be a reason for the difference.)
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@closetpuritan
Sigh.
If there is a constant in mainstream feminist/media treatment of MRAs is that they tend to say that certain people are MRAs, despite either a complete lack of evidence or strong evidence that people are not. Examples are Return of Kings (RoK), which was the site that called for the Star Wars boycott (and earlier, a Mad Max boycott); and Elliot Rodger (who, for a year or so, was referenced in pretty much every article about the MRA, despite there being zero evidence that he visited an MRA site even once and whose manifesto didn’t mention men’s rights at all).
As for RoK, they explicitly say that they are not MRAs. I suggest you read that article, because it should hopefully be clear you that this was written by a traditionalist, not a MRA (whom he explicitly denounces).
At the moment, the MRA movement suffers very much from being seen through the lens of outgroup homogeneity.
It’s not really surprising, because very few feminists and media people have taken the effort to understand the ideas of various ‘manosphere’ movements and their vocabulary. It’s like the parable of the blind men and an elephant, only with a twist: the men think that they are all examining the same animal, even though one is examining a lion, another an elephant and a third a snake. So they collectively conclude that they are dealing with an animal that has manes, tusks and no limbs.
PS. Now you know another reason why I dislike identifying as an MRA, because it causes me to have to address this kind of disinformation.
PS2. Whenever your media sources say anything about MRAs, fact check yourself. Or just ignore it. If you believe it without questioning, it will make you less knowledgeable as it almost certainly more wrong than right, on average.
PS3. In my country the government recently announced that they would create a bunch of professor positions only for women.
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Did you do a power analysis? The power of these tests is important if you want to make claims about the lack of correlation rather than the inability to establish correlation. (If I understand your interpretation correctly, you are saying that these data would be surprising if there were e.g. a nontrivial partners-disagreeableness correlation, not just that the data would be unsurprising if the true correlation were zero.)
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The thing I did was eyeball the p-values and go “gosh, all of those look really high” and eyeball the correlation coefficients and go “gosh, all of those look really low.” I do not know how to do a power analysis, but if you point me to a Power Analysis for Dummies link I’d be happy to do that.
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I was Googling for something like that and found a lot of statisticians yelling about how you should only do power analysis before you do a study and afterward you should use confidence intervals for the same thing. So if your stats software will give you confidence intervals for the correlation coefficients then you’ve got it made.
Roughly, the question here is “how likely would you get this sort of non-significant result if the things were actually correlated (with some particular strength).” In this context the problem would be if your test, say, would only reject the null half the time if the correlation was 0.2, so even if all the correlations were as big as 0.2 you’d tend to get this sort of pattern of some-significant, some-not.
More generally, if you want to argue that the data weigh against big effect sizes because “if they were there, I would have probably rejected the null,” power is the probability associated with the “probably” in that statement. 80% power for a given effect size means “if an effect like that was there, I would have an 80% chance of rejecting the null.”
Power analysis can you how big your sample size needs to be if you want to get your power to a certain level (typically 80%). But apparently you’re supposed to use a confidence interval instead if you already have the data.
A confidence interval reports a related kind of information: “if my null was anywhere in here, I wouldn’t have rejected it.” This actually isn’t quite the same thing as what power tells you (this distinction is famously confusing), but it gives you a sense of the sort of numbers that you can’t rule out given your data, vs. the ones you probably can.
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Anecdata: assholes are very good at rooting out the people in an ask culture who would prefer to be living in a guess culture, and/or people who display the aforementioned behavior pattern tend to come off as assholes.
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Do assholes get more dates? I tend to think “number of sexual partners” and “number of dates” don’t have to be the same; you can get lots of casual sex where you only hook up with someone once, so being an asshole does not debar you from “we’re both mildly drunk, mildly horny and we only want to bone”.
Getting dates – that is, getting the same person to go out with you more than once – is harder, and being an asshole could be a disadvantage here. Pull the same crappy behaviour several times and eventually the charm won’t make up for it and you’ll get dumped.
Why they never seem to think women, too, might have “yeah he’s good for a fuck but you wouldn’t want a relationship” divisions of the men they associate with, I don’t know. It’s entirely possible a woman might be well aware that this guy is an asshole but she only wants to bang him, not date him, so that’s not a problem.
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413 IS THE HOMESTUCK NUMBER
*goes back and reads the rest of the article*
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I think it makes sense that extroversion matters less for men in tye presence of a strong social norm for asking people out – the norm acts counter to the tendency of introverted men to not ask people out, raising their success rate.
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Also some of the population effect might be cross-gender, if average extroversion and number of partners were different for women vs men
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Small note: r-squared isn’t *really* the same as effect size, only the predictive value. What you really need is the slopes of the lines.
For instance, the first paper I ever published had, for one variable, very low p values and high F-statistics (sort of the categorical-data version of r-squared), but low slope. This meant that this variable predicted the outcome very well and was very unlikely to have been chance, but didn’t really have much effect on the outcome (~20% over the entire range of the variable). Another variables was “noisier”, with higher p’s (still very significant) and lower F’s, but had a very large slope, such that the outcome changed more than threefold over the variable range.
That’s why I insist my students graph the raw data along with stats – significant, tight correlations can have small effects, while the big causes can be noisier but ultimately more important.
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Yes, actually, how hard would it be for you (or someone else) to throw together some graphs with this data?
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(“You” being Ozy, not Cerastes)
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Did you look at the interaction between Extraversion and “asshole traits” (Disagreeableness and Dark Triad)?
A possible explanation may be that extraverted assholes are simply easier to recognize quickly. When many of the people you recognize as assholes are also Extraverts, and thus more successful, that might make assholes seem more successful,even if it isn’t actually the case.
As an aside, I also find it interesting that “assholeness” doesn’t seem to hurt much, either (only some traits, in the long term, and by very little). It seems most people are poor judges of character in general, or with potential partners specifically.
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Not necessarily, it may also be the case that assholes both have traits that people tend to dislike (like using violence against their partner) as well as traits that people tend to like (like pushing boundaries that makes for an exciting life).
If people value the latter more than they disvalue the former, then they can choose a partner despite judging them correctly.
Although the above is mostly me being pedantic, as I also think that most people are poor judges of character.
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I’m wondering if the whole of this myth can be explained by the existence of narcissists.
Narcissists work really, really hard at being attractive because compared to average people they really don’t like being alone. They work on their looks, on their social skills, on how to put their best foot forward and present a dazzling, interesting version of themselves to the people they’re courting (in romantic and non-romantic senses.) So of course they’re successful in getting into relationships.
For these same reasons they tend to be highly visible in groups. So probably everyone knows a romantically successful narcissist or two, and it’s likely that a large number of people have seen the asshole side of the narcissists they know.
The part of this myth that can’t be explained by the existence of narcissists is the part where this is believed to be gendered. But I think that’s just an example of society’s general tendencies to make women responsible for male actions; when women see an unpleasant but attractive woman being romantically successful they usually don’t blame the men for falling for the act. If they go into a blame mindset, they’ll blame themselves for not being attractive enough or maybe blame the woman for being a bitch. The gender-reversal doesn’t hold true, of course.
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I would suggest that the reason for your perception is that you are more sensitive to your own group being targeted than when men are targeted. I’ve seen many accusations that men only want beautiful women.
Blaming yourself for not being attractive enough implicitly blames men for preferring looks over personality. There is a lot of self-hate among romantically unsuccessful men as well, which seems to mirror the kind of self-hate that women have, except that they hate themselves for slightly different things (but only slightly, as a lot of that self-hatred is men calling themselves ugly).
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But have you seen accusations that men only fall for bitches? I mean, I have actually seen it, but it is very very rare. Women wanting assholes is a cultural trope and it’s usually said in a spirit of blaming the women.
Only wanting beautiful women isn’t actually a particularly negative quality (and it is, in fact, quite true of many people that they only want to date the physically attractive. )
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“But I think that’s just an example of society’s general tendencies to make women responsible for male actions; when women see an unpleasant but attractive woman being romantically successful they usually don’t blame the men for falling for the act.”
Since when does society make women responsible for male actions? It seems to be society far more often makes men responsible for female actions.
If a man and a woman commit a crime together, the authorities are often willing to drop the charges against the woman if she rats out the man. For example, a series of rapes and murders were committed by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Bernardo was convicted when Homolka testified against him. Only when video evidence emerged was Homolka arrested, otherwise she would have gotten away with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karla_Homolka
The San Bernardino shooting was commited by Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, but in initial media reports Tashfeen Malik was described as merely “wife of the shooter”: http://www.vocativ.com/news/258199/how-the-media-vastly-underestimated-the-san-bernardino-shooters-wife
A woman can murder her husband in his sleep then claim without any evidence that he was abusive and she acted in “preemptive self-defence”. No such defence is available for a man who murders an abusive woman, even in immediate self-defence – indeed a man risks arrest if he so much as hits back.
Nicole Ryan was caught on video hiring someone she thought was a hitman, actually an undercover police officer, to kill her ex-husband, even explicitly admitting he wasn’t abusive and she didn’t care about the effect on her daughter – she just wanted revenge on him for divorcing her. Yet Ryan still used the “battered woman defence” that she was an abused wife rightfully acting in “preemptive self-defence”. Ryan was defended by not one but two feminist legal services, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies and the Women’s Legal Edcuation and Action Fund. Astoundingly the courts uncritically accepted Ryan’s mere testimony, disregarding the iron-clad video evidence contradicting it and not even allowing her intended victim to present his case in court, and let her off scot-free. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, who finally admitted that Ryan’s defence was invalid, but still accepted Ryan’s allegation that her husband abused her despite a lack of evidence – and inexplicably decided, by an 8-1 margin, to stay proceedings on the basis that a retrial would be unfair on her! Details and sources here: https://youtu.be/DNkl_mfZzxI?t=43m15s
These biases are systemic. For the same crime, a woman is less likely to be charged, less likely to be convicted, less likely to go to jail, and receives a shorter sentence (indeed the gender sentencing gap is six times larger than the racial sentencing gap): http://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_gender_disparities.aspx
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I gave examples in a comment below. I’m not going to watch some Youtube conspiracy theory video, sorry.
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“Most complaints of the form “people want to date assholes” are actually “straight women want to date assholes and thus nice straight men are left in the cold.” Therefore, I analyzed the subgroup straight men.”
This exactly mirrors the bog-standard complaint “Where are aaaaaall the good men….?” and “Men are so shallow; they only want to date conventionally attractive etc…”
“But I think that’s just an example of society’s general tendencies to make women responsible for male actions; ”
With respect, Daisy, when they start blaming mothers for having somehow caused fathers to kill their children, this will begin to have some kind of validity.
“when women see an unpleasant but attractive woman being romantically successful they usually don’t blame the men for falling for the act.”
See the first paragraph.
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With due respect, Gingko, that happens all the goddamn time, where have you been? It is completely bog standard to blame victims of domestic violence for the actions of their abuser. I’m guessing from the way your statement is worded that you have a particular case in mind where this happened in a gender-reversed way. But that’s an exception, not the rule.
Also, women are blamed for men raping them, mothers are blamed for the actions of their violent and murderous offspring… finding the nearest woman to blame for the actions of a violent man is how a large part of our culture works.
“Women only date assholes” is not in any way mirror image of “men only want to date conventionally attractive women.” There are a lot of layers of wrongness packed into the false equivalence you’re creating here; it honestly would take an essay to take it apart properly. I’ll settle for noting that conventionally attractive is a *good thing* and men do not suffer from the attractiveness of their partners.
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And I’ll also note that “Where are all the good men” is a stereotypical thing that is said to be said by straight women as they age and the dating pool gets narrower. It is not in any way an indictment of the male gender as a whole and it’s quite weird to assume it is; notably “Where are all the good men” implies the existence of good men.
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I think the exact type of misogyny of a “women only date assholes” sentiment varies wildly depending on whether the frustration is directed at the women or the assholes.
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It would be interesting to see if the people who agree with the statement “Women prefer to date assholes” have personality traits of assholes themselves.
If so, maybe they end up competing with their fellow assholes for the same women.
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Not that I buy into the “women date assholes” naritive, but this still seems bad. Common sense would say that assholery should be anticorrolated with romantic success, not just uncorrolated. Attractive assholes should do worse than attractive nice guys, not just as well.
So, you know…fuck.
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Why? Female assholes exist and it’s quite possible they choose to date their own kind.
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I don’t know if I buy this. Being an asshole, in the sense that this survey measured, includes beating and yelling at your partner. I don’t know that partner-beaters of any gender select for people who will hit back.
But even further, part of my assumption here is that nobody is actually happy with an asshole. Female assholes probably exist and they probably occasionally date their own kind, but even so this seems like a losing situation that increases the amount of misery in the world.
Otherwise the thing we’re labeling “assholery” is just another perfectly acceptable set of preferences, rather than objectively negative.
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@martinkasakov
Domestic violence research shows that 50% of violent relationships are reciprocally violent.
Of course, it is difficult to judge whether this means that those people are exceptionally prone to violence or whether they become violent during the relationship because of self-defense, because they start to regard violence as the normal way to deal with conflict, etc.
However, the data is not inconsistent with the scenario where many violent people self-select into relationships with other violent people.
The same research shows that women are the perpetrator in 70% of the non-reciprocally violent relationships. So female assholes not only exist, but seem to be much more common than male assholes*.
* My assumption is that this is because men are taught to repress their violent tendencies more and that biologically, men and women are about equally prone to violence.
One doesn’t necessarily have to approve of behavior that people engage in voluntarily. The liberal/authoritarian divide exists because people feel differently about this.
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What do you make of the fact that “sexual promiscuity” is a diagnostic criterion in the Hare Psychopathy Checklist? http://www.minddisorders.com/Flu-Inv/Hare-Psychopathy-Checklist.html
And what do you make of the correlation of a high number of sexual partners with
Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder? http://www.skepticink.com/gps/2015/04/24/the-sex-lives-of-the-borderline-and-narcissist/
Not that I am saying all borderlines are abusive, but I think you’d agree that having the disorder is a risk factor.
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Borderlines have lots of sexual partners because that is an easy self-destructive coping mechanism and way to get people to pay attention to you and love you. I have no strong opinions on narcissists or psychopaths (other than annoyance that the sexual promiscuity question in the Psychopathy inventory might skew my data– which, fortunately, it didn’t!).
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That’s interesting. I’m mostly persuaded by your provisional conclusions.
With regard to the two questions you left somewhat open, my immediate thought was:
Straight men have a lot of pressure to ask people out whether they enjoy or are good at interacting with people or not. So the difference in asking-out or just meeting-new-people between non-extrovert and extrovert is larger for other groups?
Narcissists may not be better at *getting* more partners, but *want* more partners, so put more effort into it?
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I think it’s important to distinguish between “being an asshole” and “deliberate signalling of value” as two distinct categories of actions that have significant overlap when functionally defined. Most of the things that make someone seem attractive/mysterious/etc. come from having high status (in respect to whatever milieu the interaction takes place in — NOT an absolute, globally defined “number”). This is something that’s simply impossible to avoid getting duped by unless you take extreme measures bordering on asceticism. To be more concrete, it includes things like, for example, taking a long time to return someone’s call, or giving them a short low-effort response to some complex and difficult statement — these are just things that a busy, high-status, desirable person with a lot of stuff going on will unavoidably do as a simple consequence of being busy. Being busy is attractive because it means that you’re high-value enough to have things going on in your life besides someone. Now, the interesting thing about these behaviors is that they’re ALSO things that any schmuck can just decide to do as a bluff (with some convincing effort). What people consider attractive is generally a person who could choose anyone and, instead, chooses them. What’s generally regarded as “nice” behavior (i.e. listening patiently to someone tell a boring story, responding to messages promptly, being accomodating with scheduling, etc) also happens to be the behavior of people who DON’T have a lot of cool stuff going on. I mean, the REASON it’s nice is because you’re (ostensibly) giving something up in order to do it. When you answer a phone call you’re (ostensibly) putting something down to answer it. If you’re a winner, that is. If you’re a loser, it’s not really nice, because losers have nothing going on, so they’re more than happy to talk for hours and put in all the effort to keep a conversation going. They have nothing else to do. This is sad, of course — I would really like to be able to just display courtesy to someone without it being interpreted as desperation or weakness — but there’s really no way around it. It’s unavoidable.
Now, to be fair, there IS a certain set of behaviors that I would call “being an asshole” in and of itself. Things like, for example, being physically abusive or manipulative or controlling — I have no idea what’s going on in the head of people who put up with this shit. But the best explanation I’ve been able to come up with is that when someone keeps up a relationship with a person who any casual observer can notice is trash, there’s probably something going on that a casual observer doesn’t see. Either that or mental illness, who knows.
But the point is that if you are viewing romantic relationships as simply analogous to “real-life friendships plus fuckin’ and stuff”, I think you’re kind of screwing yourself (perhaps literally!) and you could stand to gain from some applied game theory…
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Just for fun, I’ll go through Heartiste’s “16 commandments of poon” and associate personality sub-traits with each one (in a roughly informal manner – I’ll use this as a reference: https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/big-five-personality-theory/ )
I. Never say ‘I Love You’ first
Warmth (Extraversion) – low & Straightfowardness (Agreeableness) – low
II. Make her jealous
Actions (Openness) – high & Activity (Extraversion) – high (admittedly this is highly imperfect)
III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority
Achievement & Self-discipline (Conscientiousness) – high
IV. Don’t play by her rules
Compliance (Agreeableness) – low & Assertiveness (Extraversion) – high
V. Adhere to the golden ratio
Warmth & Tender-mindedness (Agreeableness) – low
VI. Keep her guessing
Straightfowardness (Agreeableness) – low & Assertiveness (Extraversion) – high
VII. Always keep two in the kitty
Trust (Agreeableness) – low & Assertiveness (Extraversion) – high
VIII. Say you’re sorry only when absolutely necessary
Compliance (Agreeableness) – low & Assertiveness (Extraversion) – high
IX. Connect with her emotions
Openness (I’m going to say the whole trait) & Excitement-seeking (Extravsion) – high
X. Ignore her beauty
Hard to say – I think this is to instantiate Self-Consciousness (Neuroticism) – low
XI. Be irrationally self-confident
Self-Consciousness (Neuroticism) – low (duh) & Modesty (Agreeableness) – low
XII. Maximize your strengths, minimize your weaknesses
Modesty (Agreeableness) – low & Achievement-Striving (Conscientiousness) – high
XIII. Err on the side of too much boldness, rather than too little
Self-Consciousness (Neuroticism) – low & Assertiveness (Extraversion) – high
XIV. Fuck her good
Er…
XV. Maintain your state control
Tender-mindedness (Agreeableness) – low & Neuroticism (whole trait) – low
XVI. Never be afraid to lose her
Anxiety (Neuroticism) – low & Warmth (Agreeableness) – low
Roughly, Athol Kay recommends low neuroticism, high warmth, high assertiveness, high extraversion generally, high competence, achievement-striving and self-discipline (just from my being familiar with the general thrust of his books & blog)
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