Why Attitudes Matter

Tags

free speech sequence, ozy blog post, sex positivity

Sometimes when I am giving ethical advice to people I say things like “it’s important to think of yourself and your partner as being on the same team” or “just remember that women in short skirts are almost certainly not wearing short skirts to arouse you in particular” or “cultivate your curiosity and desire to know what’s actually going on.”

I get pushback on this. After all, I am a consequentialist. Why am I talking about people’s attitudes instead of their actions? It doesn’t matter what I think of the woman in the short skirt, as long as I refrain from being a dick to her because of her clothing choices.

An emphasis on attitudes can be really bad for some people. Some people, having been given the advice that they should cultivate their curiosity, will spend a lot of time navel-gazing about whether they’re really curious and whether this curiosity counts as curiosity and maybe they are self-deceiving and actually just want to prove themselves right. Not only is this really unpleasant, but if you’re spending all your time navel-gazing about whether you’re sufficiently curious you’re never actually going to go buy a book about the Abbasid empire. It completely fails to achieve the original goal. If this is a problem you’re prone to, I think my attitude-based advice is probably not going to be helpful, although I can’t give any other advice; I personally get as much navel-gazing as I can stand trying to keep my obviously shitty attitudes in check, and don’t have any introspective energy left over for anything else.

Nevertheless, I think an attitude emphasis can be really important, for two reasons.

First, for any remotely complicated situation, it would be impossible to completely list out all the things which are okay or not okay. For instance, think about turning my “think of yourself and your partner as being on the same team” advice into a series of actions. You might say “it is wrong to insult your partner during disagreements.” But for some people, insults are part of resolving disagreements. Saying “I am not sure you’ve really thought this through” rather than “that is the stupidest fucking idea I’ve ever heard” feels artificial to them, like they’re walking on eggshells. For them, intimacy requires the ability to say exactly what you’re feeling, without softening it.

Or you might say “if you think of arguments for your partner’s side, then say it.” However, this might lead you to fall victim to what C S Lewis in the Screwtape Letters called the Generous Conflict Illusion:

Later on you can venture on what may be called the Generous Conflict Illusion. This game is best played with more than two players, in a family with grown-up children for example. Something quite trivial, like having tea in the garden, is proposed. One member takes care to make it quite clear (though not in so many words) that he would rather not but is, of course, prepared to do so out of “Unselfishness”. The others instantly withdraw their proposal, ostensibly through their “Unselfishness”, but really because they don’t want to be used as a sort of lay figure on which the first speaker practices petty altruisms. But he is not going to be done out of his debauch of Unselfishness either. He insists on doing “what the others want”. They insist on doing what he wants. Passions are roused. Soon someone is saying “Very well then, I won’t have any tea at all!”, and a real quarrel ensues with bitter resentment on both sides. You see how it is done? If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official “Unselfishness” of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it. Each side is, indeed, quite alive to the cheap quality of the adversary’s Unselfishness and of the false position into which he is trying to force them; but each manages to feel blameless and ill-used itself, with no more dishonesty than comes natural to a human.

Or you might say “if your partner seems to be making a mistake, give them some friendly advice, without being overly critical.” But some people are naturally controlling– not abusive, just the sort of people who get upset when their partner loads the dishes a different way than they’re used to or prefers to read a map rather than using the GPS. Those people might very well decide that they shouldn’t give any friendly advice, for much the same reason that an alcoholic shouldn’t go to a bar. It never stops after one.

If you are thinking about the situations from a position of “my partner and I are both on Team Our Collective Happiness And Well-Being,” then the answer to all these thorny situations becomes clear. You should give a word of friendly advice, unless you are the sort of person who is incapable of stopping at a word of friendly advice. You should speak in a way that makes your partner and you feel more intimate and able to resolve conflicts, rather than less so. You should say “hm, I think the vacation you want to go on is cheaper” but you should not do the Generous Conflict Illusion. And so on and so forth.

Second, an attitude emphasis prevents rules-lawyering. Whenever you list a set of actions, there are a certain number of people who will figure out how to get as close as possible to breaking the rules, and then complain when you get annoyed at them, because technically they didn’t break any rules. (Rules-lawyering is particularly likely to happen in issues of sexual ethics, but it is certainly not reserved for those situations.) For example, they might say “you said I wasn’t supposed to yell at my wife or call her nasty names! You never specifically said I wasn’t supposed to respond to my wife forgetting to do the dishes by piling up all the dirty dishes onto her bed.”

But obviously if you are two people cooperating to solve the problem of the dirty dishes piling up, “stick the dishes on the other person’s bed” is not how you would respond. (Unless, I guess, they agreed ahead of time that this was a useful if disgusting way to help them remember– like I said, it’s really hard to make hard-and-fast rules.) That is a way you’d respond if you’re approaching the situation as a war between you and your partner, and the winner is whoever gets a clean sink while having to do the least dishes. This is, to put it lightly, not a good way of solving your relationship problems.

I suspect that action-based advice works best in relatively simple situations where there aren’t a lot of possible actions and where there are few situations that require a judgment call: for instance, it works great for “don’t hit people unless they started it”. Attitude-based advice works best for complicated situations where there are lots of possible ways of fucking up: for instance, it works well for intimate relationships, intellectual or artistic life, and career choice.

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Bridging the Inferential Distance on Desexualization

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post, sex positivity, speshul snowflake trans

[Related: Etiquette for People Who Aren’t Attracted To Trans Women]

I notice that conversations about desexualization are particularly prone to people misunderstanding each other. For instance, many people seem to round any conversation about desexualization off to telling people that they have to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with, and then say something along the lines of “didn’t the gay rights movement prove that no one should have to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with? Rapist!” Many other people assume that the first group’s concerns are a smokescreen for not wanting to deal with their own bigotry, and thus assume that they could not have any reasonable concerns about compulsory sexuality.

I don’t have a lot to say to the second group at this time (although theunitofcaring’s Meditation on Boundaries, which has been recently going around again, is excellent, and I endorse her statement that all conversations about desexualization need to begin from the baseline that people should promptly say “no” to intimate activities that they don’t want). But I recently found an article from a few years back that I think might help explain the second group’s position to my readers who are prone to the “rapist” thing. (Please note that the author of the article is pretty mean to techies, and if you don’t want to read that you may want to skip the quoted bit.)

Here’s an excerpt:

You might think an abundance of men is a great thing, but as a wise woman once said, “The odds may be good, but the goods are odd.”

“I’ve lived in Seattle for seven years, single most of them,” Annie Pardo, a 31-year-old freelance event and communications consultant in Seattle, wrote in an email. “The only thing that has changed is the increase in men I’d never want to go out on a date with.” She added, “Can’t believe they actually strap on those new employee book bags.”

For Reifman, the number of men versus women presents a challenge for guys like him—he can’t seem to get a date or hold the attention of the women he’s courting because, presumably, he’s got so much competition. But the reality is that all he has to do is have a personality. I’m serious.

The exact same scenario has been playing out in San Francisco for the last few years. One woman, Violet, a 33-year-old who has lived in the Bay Area for eight years, with one of those in the “belly of the beast,” Palo Alto, experienced many of the same things I and other women did. They had money, but they were boring. They had a lot to say about their job, but their development as a complete human being seemed to be stunted. And they exhibited little to no interest in the other person at the table.

“There were a lot of tech men. I could talk a blue streak about them. I don’t have much positive to say. The biggest thing, the thing that bothered me the most is I felt like my intelligence was greatly devalued,” she wrote. ”I am a smart woman. I have a master’s from Berkeley in philosophy. My brain is very abstract, though, the exact opposite of so many men in tech who have very concrete/literal brains. They interpreted information as intelligence. I constantly felt like I wasn’t seen or valued by them, even though I experienced a lot of them as having a very limited view of the world.”

Carla Swiryn, a matchmatcher for Three Day Rule, a start-up that offers curated online dating services in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, said that her female clients are often hit with a double whammy: “I often hear women say they either date A-holes or nerds—or if they’re really lucky, both in one,” she said. “They feel like they’re dealing with someone who has poor social skills, not a lot of style, and isn’t that attractive, or is decently good-looking, successful, or cool, but by default knows it and acts like it, with a huge ego and selfish mind-set in tow.”

One woman, Bridget Arlene, spent three years in Seattle for graduate school, and said that she actually moved out of the city, in part because of the type of available men—most of whom had computer science or engineering degrees and worked for Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. “The type of person who is attracted to these jobs and thus to the Seattle area seems to be a socially awkward, emotionally stunted, sheltered, strangely entitled, and/or a misogynistic individual,” she wrote in an email. Arlene said that she was once contacted by a Microsoft programmer on OKCupid who required that she read Neuromancer before “he would consider taking me out on a date. He was not joking.”

It goes on like that for a while, but you get the general idea.

So here’s my guess on the reaction of most of my readers to this article:

• You are totally allowed to have a preference not to date nerds, but it is neither kind nor necessary to write thousands of words exploring exactly how undateable you find us.
• There are lots of women who want to date nerds, actually? Maybe you shouldn’t assume your own particular sexual preferences apply to every fucking woman on the planet? Lots of women don’t find “socially awkward with a poor fashion sense” to be a dealbreaker. Lots of women are socially awkward and have terrible fashion sense themselves!
• You are not actually entitled to a dating market that only has people you find attractive in it. People you don’t find attractive are allowed to try to find love too. “Asking you out while being incompatible” is not something people are doing to you.
• Obviously everyone is allowed to have their own dealbreakers, even if some of their dealbreakers are kind of stupid. But god, maybe you could try being a little more open-minded? You might be swept off your feet by a really great guy who happens to wear a new employee book bag. Also, fashion sense is totally a solvable problem, you can say to your new boyfriend “give me a $500 budget and I will buy you clothes that fit.”
• Good fucking riddance, lady, if you’re going to be this much of an asshole we don’t want to date you either.

In particular, that last point is something I want to highlight. It is desirable that the author of this article become less of an asshole, in the same way it’s desirable that any person become less of an asshole. Presumably, if she became less of an asshole, she’d be more open-minded about dating people that she currently considers to be emotionally stunted sheltered man-children with poor fashion sense and an aversion to spending money on messenger bags. But that doesn’t mean you want her to skip the “become less of an asshole” part and start dating techies right now. For one thing, then some innocent techie would be saddled with a girlfriend who hates him. For another thing, being open to dating techies is a predicted consequence of the thing you actually care about, which is her not being an asshole. If she kept her preferences once she became less of an asshole, but no longer wrote long articles about how horrible people she happens to not be attracted to are, then this would also be a fine outcome. “If you did X morally good thing, then you would probably also behave like Y” is a different claim from “you should behave like Y.” You don’t actually want people to date people they despise.

And in my experience those points are what most people who talk about desexualization in an anti-oppression context– whether it’s about race, transness, gender expression, disability, or size– are actually saying. There are legitimate complaints one can have about another person’s sex-related behavior, which are not the same thing as trying to make them have sex they don’t want.

Deradicalizing the Romanceless

Tags

ozy blog post, sex positivity

[Content warning: misogyny, slurs, sexual coercion]

I.

A definitional issue: I am using the word “incel” here, despite its association with terrible misogynists, because I feel like it is the simplest word to gesture at the group I mean. However, I am not using it to refer solely to terrible misogynists, but instead to any person who has gone an extended period of time without having a romantic partner when they would like to.

I am not using the extreme definitions of “incel” that require people to not have any preferences. While I don’t consider, say, a sixty-year-old man who won’t sleep with women over the age of twenty-three to be incel, I think that most people do have reasonable preferences about values and lifestyle compatibility in their partners, including incel people, and the inability to meet these preferences leads to great loneliness.

Interestingly, sexless people are about as happy as people who have sex. I can think of several reasons why this might be the case: many sexless people are asexual, low libido, or voluntarily celibate; many people who have sex are in coercive or unpleasant sexual relationships, or have to worry about unplanned pregnancy or STIs; many sexless people have close friends and a lot of emotional support, which ameliorates the pain of sexlessness; many people who have sex are still lonely. Nevertheless, I think the problem of inceldom is a genuine issue for those who want romance and can’t have it.

II.

When one discusses incels, one inevitably comes to The Asshole Question: namely, “how come these assholes can get a girlfriend, and we incels can’t?”

The Asshole Question in its strong form– arguing that assholes can all get laid, and that incels are generally nice– is clearly untrue. Some involuntarily celibate people are, frankly, terrible. If one looks at the Incels subreddit, for instance, it is astonishingly full of comments like the following:

When you post close ups of your gaping assholes often with various objects stuck in them, and we jerk off to it and some retards even leave comments, we don’t think to ourselves “wow, what an amazing gorgeous girl.” We think that you’re a disgusting whore and we get off on that. We get kicks out of how pathetic you are while boosting your ego so that you don’t stop.

and

Women can smell Chad genes from a mile away, if Chad locked himself in a bomb shelter, women would break down the door with muli million dollar equipment to extract his semen.

and

But then again, what is a woman? A rather weak creature that is beneath the man. Equipped with less intellectual gifts, not as beatiful or well formed as the human male, repulsive actually. A creature that is 3/4 of its life sick and isnt even possible to satisfy her man at all times. Because nature doesn’t allow it. It’s common knowledge that females are lesser beings.

These aren’t cherrypicked, by the way, I just looked at three of the four top posts when I was writing this section of the blog post. (The fourth was a man who was sad that even an incel woman wouldn’t sleep with him, and did not contain any douchebaggery.)

Now, one might argue that years of loneliness twist people and make them bitter, and that’s not false. But I also know lots of incel and formerly incel men, many of whom have been lonely for years if not decades, and none of them have wound up opining that women are lesser beings and that they get off on how pathetic porn stars are. I would suggest that if your response to emotional pain is “maybe half of humanity is subhuman”, this probably says more about your character than about your circumstances. Loneliness alone is not enough to make someone a misogynist. Frankly, I think it’s offensive to all the perfectly lovely incels in the world to say so.

The weakest form of the Asshole Question– “why do there exist at least some nice people who can’t find romantic partners when there also exist at least some assholes who can?”– is also easy to answer. Some people are extraordinarily bad at selecting partners, and preferentially select people who treat them like shit. Other people are deceived and wind up accidentally dating assholes. Still other people are willing to put up with a douchebag who has money, good looks, or high status.

But there’s an intermediate question, which is the one I think people are usually asking. They say something like “even given that some nice people find romantic partners and some assholes don’t, I think that assholes in general are more likely to find romantic partners. Why is that?”

III.

The first thing to address in that question is whether it’s true.

Scott Alexander writes:

I will have to use virginity statistics as a proxy for the harder-to-measure romancelessness statistics, but these are bad enough. In high school each extra IQ point above average increases chances of male virginity by about 3%. 35% of MIT grad students have never had sex, compared to only 20% of average nineteen year old men. Compared with virgins, men with more sexual experience are likely to drink more alcohol, attend church less, and have a criminal history. A Dr. Beaver (nominative determinism again!) was able to predict number of sexual partners pretty well using a scale with such delightful items as “have you been in a gang”, “have you used a weapon in a fight”, et cetera. An analysis of the psychometric Big Five consistently find that high levels of disagreeableness predict high sexual success in both men and women.

If you’re smart, don’t drink much, stay out of fights, display a friendly personality, and have no criminal history – then you are the population most at risk of being miserable and alone. “At risk” doesn’t mean “for sure”, any more than every single smoker gets lung cancer and every single nonsmoker lives to a ripe old age – but your odds get worse. In other words, everything that “nice guys” complain of is pretty darned accurate. But that shouldn’t be too hard to guess…

I am going to be a little bit unfair to Scott here. He admits he’s using virginity statistics as a proxy for the harder-to-measure romanceless statistics, and I don’t exactly have any good way of measuring inceldom either.

Now that I’ve admitted I’m being unfair… I would like to point out that “having a high IQ” and “being an MIT graduate student” have no relationship with whether you’re an asshole at all. There is no significant correlation between IQ and agreeableness; there is also no significant correlation between IQ and dark triad personality traits. (I was unfortunately unable to find statistics about the disagreeableness or dark triad-ness of MIT graduate students.) It may perfectly well be that intelligence is sexually unattractive to most people and also people are attracted to nice people. In addition, high-IQ people and MIT grad students may have priorities other than having sex: if you spend all your time solving math problems instead of going to parties, of course you’re more likely to be a virgin.

So let’s look at Big Five and the works of Dr. Beaver. There is a small problem and a big problem with Scott’s statistics. The small problem is that there’s a bunch of sex you’re vastly more likely to have if you’re a terrible person: rape; cheating on your partner; helping someone else cheat on their partner; getting someone drunk or high to have sex with them that they wouldn’t have sober; convincing someone that you love them when you don’t for the purpose of getting laid; “convincing” someone who said “no” at the beginning of the night; and so on. Since presumably terrible people aren’t Captain Planet villains who turn down all the ethical sex because they want to increase the amount of sex-related suffering in the world, we can expect terrible people to have more sexual partners than non-terrible people, all things equal. But I don’t think that’s that large an effect.

The big problem is that sluts are evil.

That is, in general, people who desire lots of sexual partners tend to be disagreeable, lower on honesty-humility, impulsive, risk-taking, avoidant attachment style, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and psychopathic.

To be clear, only three of the nine questions on the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory are about sexual behavior. The other six are about desire. You can score very highly on the SOI while being a virgin. While I don’t know of any studies that exclude the three behavioral questions, I believe the evidence suggests that people who want lots of sexual partners tend to be jerks.

Imagine a very attractive guy who has no interest in sex outside of committed long-term relationships. He loses his virginity to his high school girlfriend, dates a girl for a while in college but breaks up with her a year after graduation, dates around for a bit but doesn’t sleep with anyone he’s dating, meets his wife at 26, dates her for two years, is engaged to her for one year, and marries her at the median age of 29. Afterward, he is monogamous and does not divorce; his wife outlives him. He has had three lifetime sexual partners, well below the average for men. But that’s about his interest level, not his attractiveness. He could have had casual sex if he wanted, but since he didn’t want casual sex, his sexual partner count is lower.

IV.

I feel like a big problem is that people tend to combine “casual sex” and “dating” into a single category, when in reality they’re quite separate issues. Men, as a group, are more interested than women, as a group, in casual sex– possibly because casual sex is less enjoyable for women, possibly because women are more likely to fear social stigma and violence, possibly because women are at higher risk of STIs and pregnancy, and possibly because women typically find sex with strangers a less appetizing prospect. Since most men are heterosexual, it is significantly easier for women to obtain casual sex than it is for men to obtain casual sex.

However, women being able to easily obtain casual sex is mostly a product of them not wanting casual sex. It’s not really an advantage to be able to easily get something you don’t want anyway. “Yay! It is super-easy for you to risk serious health problems, stigma, and violence in order to have a physically and emotionally unpleasant experience! Lucky!” While the situation is great for women who like casual sex (boy, is it ever), it’s not that much of an advantage for women as a group.

And, frankly, casual sex isn’t what most incels want either. If they did, they’d just hire a sex worker. Admittedly, hiring a sex worker is not particularly validating of one’s attractiveness, but neither is fucking the guy who messaged everyone in a fifty-mile radius on OKCupid, and the sex worker is no doubt a good deal more attractive. But hiring a sex worker won’t give incels what they want, because what they usually want– quite reasonably!– is love, affection, romance, and someone to share their lives with.

And love, affection, and romance are far more gender-balanced markets.

I will use marriage as a proxy for long-term relationships, as it is easier to find statistics, and marriage is the end goal of long-term relationships for most people anyway. There are approximately as many men as there are women. There seem to be more exclusively gay men than exclusively gay women in the US; depending on definition, men may also be more likely to be asexual. Marriage is generally monogamous, which means that for every married man there is exactly one married woman.  Consensual non-monogamy is relatively rare and MMF triads are not notably less common than FFM triads– certainly not enough to have a notable effect on the dating market. Non-consensual non-monogamy is more common, but it’s unclear to me how often a cheating person monopolizes two people’s affections (as opposed to two married people cheating on their spouses with each other, casual sex, etc.) While men are more likely to cheat than women, this may not lead to an imbalance if (a) women are lying, (b) men are more likely to have casual sex or hire a sex worker, or (c) the men are all cheating on their spouses with the same small pool of women. For the sake of analysis, I’m going to act like this isn’t an issue, but if you have less uncertain opinions than mine about cheating you may come to different conclusions.

So the next issue is how much people desire to get married; maybe men as a group want to get married and women as a group can take or leave it, just like men as a group want casual sex and women as a group can take or leave it. Among never-married young adults, men and women are equally likely to say that they would like to get married; women age 18-34 are more likely than men in the same age group to say that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their life. Anecdotally, one notes that the vast majority of How To Get A Partner magazines and self-help books are aimed at women. Therefore, I think that– if anything– men as a group are the ones dragging their feet about long-term relationships.

However, my analysis is a society-wide analysis. It is very possible that there are subcultural imbalances.

Consider the book Promises I Can Keep (summary here). Poor women in working-class neighborhoods tend not to get married. This is because there is a tremendous shortage of men who meet very reasonable, basic requirements like “is not a felon” and “has a job” and “does not beat me” and “is not an alcoholic.” Because these women value having children a lot and they don’t have any good options for husbands, they tend to become single moms; they see no realistic prospect for their children to have a committed, loving father.

A lot of the incels I know don’t commit crimes or drink, don’t beat up their partners, and not only have jobs but also make an above-average income. So why aren’t they marrying the women of Promises I Can Keep? Well, first of all, they’re unlikely to meet those women: both the women of Promises I Can Keep and my friends typically spend time around people of their own class background. They probably don’t even use the same dating sites.

Even if they do meet, they might not be particularly interested in each other. My friends probably don’t want to help raise two or three children that are not genetically related to them, and they certainly don’t want to raise children with someone who thinks not spanking is neglectful. They probably don’t want to devote a significant fraction of their income to helping their wife’s poor relatives fix their cars and pay the rent. They don’t want a partner who thinks that homeopathy is an appropriate treatment and that her new husband is due to God rewarding her for donating to her church. They would like a partner who reads books and blogs and who is able to participate in a discussion about trolley problems or Magic: the Gathering. I don’t know the culture of the women of Promises I Can Keep well enough to know what their dealbreakers about my friends are (see: spending time around people of your own class background), but I’m pretty sure they also have them.

To be clear, these are all totally reasonable preferences to have! In fact, it is good to have these preferences! You should marry someone whom you can talk to and who shares your interests and values and worldview; you shouldn’t raise children with someone unless you agree on parenting philosophy, at least in broad strokes; if you’d feel super-resentful about some aspect of your relationship, don’t get in the relationship. (Of course, it’s also great if you do want to help raise your partner’s children and help their impoverished relatives.) But it does mean that my friends and the women of Promises I Can Keep are unlikely to have happy relationships with each other.

For every man who can’t find a partner, there is approximately one woman who also can’t find a partner. (This is pretty obvious in the Promises I Can Keep case, which is balanced by a large number of incel or situationally homosexual men from those neighborhoods, who are in prison.) However, it is very unlikely that you will be able to have a happy relationship with her, or otherwise you already would. Sorry.

V.

The other important aspect of the incel problem is shyness. In my anecdotal experience, it is hard to overestimate the importance of shyness in keeping incel people of the sort who are likely to read this blog post incel.

Lots of incel people don’t have many friends to begin with, so they don’t get a lot of opportunities to meet people they might want to date in the first place. The odds are very much not in their favor. Even if they do have friends, lots of incels are shy specifically about flirting: they’re afraid of being seen as creepy or making people feel uncomfortable; they don’t know what to do, and it’s frightening. It is extremely common in my experience for incels to be so scared of flirting that they accidentally give off I-am-not-enjoying-this-please-stop body language, which means that even getting hit on isn’t necessarily a solution; interested people are likely to notice that they’re uncomfortable and disengage.

Incels are often advised that confidence is attractive. I’m not sure if this is true in the general case, but for incels I think that becoming more confident will, in fact, increase their chances of getting laid. This isn’t because people find confidence attractive (although many people do), but instead because incels are constantly self-sabotaging because of their own insecurity. Of course, being confident in your own attractiveness as an incel is sort of like trying to fly by tugging firmly on your shoelaces.

This is another reason why you can have both women and men who can’t find a romantic partner. If they never meet each other because they’re both holed up in their rooms reading the Kingkiller Chronicles, if they never hit on each other because they’re afraid of coming off as creepy, or if one of them works up the nerve to flirt with the other only to flee because they assume the other’s terrified body language is a rejection, you can have two people who would have a quite happy relationship both be lonely.

VI.

The worst part of the incel problem is how hard redistribution is.

Like, it’s super-easy to redistribute money. You take it from rich people and give it from poor people. There are, of course, implementation problems, but the principle is simple.

But you can’t really redistribute love.

If it were possible, I would happily take the Caring What We Can Pledge to give ten percent of the love and care I experience to those in need. But I can’t. My husband and my friends love me; there is no way to make their love for me become love of someone else. And I’ve learned that providing emotional support to someone out of obligation, when I don’t like them as a person, leads to burnout which leaves them worse off than they were when they started. Besides, most people want to be loved for themselves and not treated as an object of pity.

It still saddens me.

Concerning Archive of Our Own

Tags

fandom, ozy blog post, sex positivity

[content warning: discussion of stories about abuse, child porn, porn of teenagers]

I’ve gotten into a fair number of conversations recently about AO3’s way of dealing with controversial fanfics (i.e. you can use the standard archive warnings so people don’t have to see stories with rape or abuse or underage sex in it, but the moderators don’t delete fanfics), so I thought I should write up my thoughts on the subject.

Legal Issues

One controversial aspect of Archive of Our Own is the fact that they permit stories about underage people having sex with each other, which many people believe to be illegal in the US. Please note that I am not a lawyer and may have gotten many details wrong; I welcome corrections.

The current law which applies to child porn in the US is the PROTECT Act of 2003. Under the PROTECT Act, computer-generated child porn which is indistinguishable from a child is illegal, as are obscene drawings, sculptures, and photographs that depict underage people. Writing stories about underage people having sex is not illegal in the United States, so the vast majority of Archive of Our Own’s content is legally in the clear.

However, AO3 does occasionally host fanart, some of which may involve minors. Is that illegal? It’s unclear.

The Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, the previous law about child porn, was judged unconstitutional in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition because it made illegal non-obscene visual depictions of minors having sex. The Supreme Court pointed out that this included Romeo and Juliet, and that it was generally a bad idea to make Shakespeare plays illegal; you can’t ban a bunch of protected speech because you don’t like it. However, the PROTECT Act only criminalizes obscene visual depictions of minors having sex.

A work is obscene if it fails the Miller test:

• An average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the work taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest.
• The work depicts sexual content in a patently offensive way.
• The work, taken as a whole, lacks serious artistic, literary, political, or scientific value.

So are the depictions of minors having sex on AO3 obscene? It’s unclear to me. There have been legal cases in which people have been prosecuted for cartoon child porn. However, many of them end in a plea deal, which means we don’t have evidence about how a judge would rule. So I think this is a gray area legally. (I have absolutely no legal grounds to support this, but I suspect the typical underage fanart on AO3– which depicts people who are canonically in high school but physically adult and often in canon played by adult actors– is going to be a lot less controversial than the lolicon that most of the case law is about.)

Should AO3 Delete Controversial Works?

I think that AO3 will not be able to delete controversial fanfics in a way that remotely satisfies the people asking them to do so.

First, AO3 is run by volunteers, which puts a limit on how much manpower they can devote to deleting controversial fanfiction. Fanfiction.net, a similar website, bans porn, but it’s not exactly difficult to find porn on Fanfiction.net. By eliminating tagging and incentivizing fanfiction writers to hide the content that might get deleted, it simply increases the likelihood that people who don’t want to see rape or abuse will see it anyway.

Second, there’s an enormous judgment problem with deleting fanfiction. Both broadness and narrowness have serious failure modes.

If your rules are too narrow, people will rules-lawyer their way around them. For instance, the website Literotica has a rule that all characters must be over the age of eighteen. Naturally, there are an improbable number of eighteen-year-old high-school students, and quite a lot of porn in which the lollipop-licking, pigtailed protagonist who doesn’t know what sex is mentions in the first paragraph that she’s eighteen. Obviously, this is not a satisfactory solution for people who don’t want underage porn to be written.

If your rules are too broad, a lot of things become judgment calls. I’m going to talk about something that’s a lot more clear-cut than abuse: one person I’ve talked to suggested that it’s homophobic to ship heterosexual ships with canonically gay characters, and that Archive of Our Own should remove such fanfic. This seems pretty simple: “is this character gay?” definitely seems a lot easier to figure out than “is this relationship abusive?”

So: what do we do about Willow? There is a loud and angry contingent of Buffy fans who believe that Willow is a lesbian who dated a man in high school because she hadn’t come out to herself yet, as many lesbians do. There is an equally loud and angry contingent of Buffy fans who believe that Willow is bisexual because of her obviously loving relationship with Oz, and that Joss Whedon has never heard of the concept of ‘bisexuality’. If you say Oz/Willow is homophobic, you going to get a bunch of people calling you a biphobe, and if you say it isn’t homophobic, you’re going to get a different bunch of people calling you a lesbophobe.

What do we do about Margot Verger? Margot is canonically a lesbian, but she also canonically has sex with Will Graham in order to conceive a Verger heir so that she can murder her abusive brother and get his inheritance. Will we delete fanfiction that explores the implications of something that happened in the show?

Or what about Messala from the movie Ben-Hur? According to the documentary the Celluloid Closet, the director intended Ben-Hur and Messala to have been in a gay relationship; he told the actor playing Messala, but did not tell Charlton Heston, because Charlton Heston was a homophobe. In that case, it’s difficult to tell if Ben-Hur and Messala were even in a canonical gay relationship, much less whether Messala is canonically gay himself. Wait, is it ahistorical to characterize someone as “canonically gay” in a time period with such a different understanding of sexuality? Okay, everyone, get out your Foucault and Halperin, we’re going to have to resolve one of the most fundamental arguments in queer theory before we can figure out which slash fic we’re going to delete…

And frankly “is this character gay?” is much easier to answer than “is this character in an abusive relationship?” A lot of abuse is subtle and contextual. Sometimes abusers call their partners names. Sometimes people’s preferred way of conflict resolution is shouting mean things at each other, and while that certainly isn’t what I’d prefer, these relationships can be perfectly happy and functional and the people involved can resolve their conflicts to their mutual satisfaction. Whether a scene in a story is an instance of the former or the latter is often very unclear, and different people can interpret it differently.

And you can’t trust that these judgment calls will be made in the way you prefer. The whole reason we’re having this discussion is that fandom, in general, has its head up its ass about what ‘abuse’ is. On Archive of Our Own, stalking, sexual coercion, and wildly unethical power dynamics are regularly depicted as romantic without so much as a warning. Even coffeeshop AUs, which are notoriously fluffy, light-hearted, and angst-free, regularly depict workplace sexual harassment– often to the point that it would be an EEOC violation in real life. If Archive of Our Own set about trying to delete all the abusive fic, the deletions would be made by the exact people who keep putting sexual harassment and stalking in all their light and fluffy fanfiction. I do not really trust this to have a positive outcome.

And then there are the people who think that all BDSM is abuse, and I don’t even want to know what trans-exclusive radical feminists would do with the ability to delete all femmeslash with a trans character on the grounds of being homophobic…

I think a much better strategy for people who want to reduce the rate of abusive relationships in fiction is attempting to convince others of their beliefs. This has been successful in the past: for instance, the We’re Not Gay We Just Love Each Other story genre has almost been eliminated. That happened because a lot of people wrote essays along the lines of “it is really fucked up and homophobic to think that men can’t be attractive and masculine if they’re gay, and also the word you’re looking for if someone is attracted to women and men is ‘bisexual’.” If you want people to not write fic in which workplace sexual harassment is depicted as romantic, I think it’s going to be a lot more effective to try to convince people than workplace sexual harassment is not romantic than it is to get those fics deleted.

Fantasies Are Okay

Tags

noncon cw, ozy blog post, sex positivity

[This post is a request made by Cliff Pervocracy. One person who backs me on Patreon at the $5 level or above will be randomly selected each month to pick a topic for a post or story I write.]
[content warning: murder fantasies, rape fantasies]

Is it okay to fantasize about killing your boss?

It’s definitely not okay to start researching how to get a gun license and tracking your boss’s schedule to find out when he’ll be alone. That is not fantasizing but, in fact, what is technically called “planning”.

It’s probably not okay to deep in your heart of hearts want to kill your boss, to think it would be a very good thing if he were dead and very satisfying to watch his blood spurt over your hands, and if you had a ring of invisibility you would stab him and watch him die. That is also not fantasizing; it is instead “desiring”. It is not as bad as actually planning to kill your boss, but it’s still not a very good state of affairs, and you should probably think about treating your burnout or moving to a different office.

But what if you just get chewed out by your boss, and as you sit down at your desk you think “what if I stabbed him with that pretentious gold pen he has on his desk. man, if only”– but if anybody offered you the opportunity, you’d turn it down? I mean, he has kids, and he’s a pretty reasonable guy all things considered even if he was unfair today. You wouldn’t actually want to kill him.

That’s fine, it’s normal, and everyone does it.

Maybe not about bosses in particular. Maybe it’s your ex-boyfriend, or your abusive mom, or that asshole who doesn’t know how to drive. Maybe you’re a free-speech absolutist who kind of wishes Nazis would get punched in the face. Maybe you’re not particularly prone to the sin of wrath– some people aren’t– and instead you fantasize about laying in bed all day (even though in reality that’s kind of boring) or eating 24 donuts (even though that would make you sick) or having your neighbor’s fancy car (even though you know it would stop being attractive as soon as you actually own one).

The thing about fantasies is that, in fantasies, you usually only focus on the desirable part and abstract away the parts that make the reality horrifying. You think about the good parts of murdering your boss: you don’t have to put up with that asshole anymore, and you would wreak vengeance for the injustice done you. You don’t think about the grief of your boss’s family, or your husband sobbing as visitor hours at the prison end and he won’t be able to see you for another week, or your tremendous guilt at violating your moral beliefs about murder, or the fact that there’d be a human life, a little world, forever gone.

Or think about the zombie apocalypse. Lots of people enjoy fantasizing about the zombie apocalypse. Some people like thinking about shooting zombies with their arsenals of weaponry, personally I like thinking about the details of crop rotation, whatever floats your boat. But notably I have never met anyone whose fantasies include “everyone I know and love would be dead.” Or “I would suffer crippling PTSD.” Or “no one would ever make a Star Wars movie again.” Or “I would probably not be a stone-cold badass, actually, I would probably get chewed on by a zombie while I was taking a shit and die thirty minutes into the apocalypse.”

This is why fantasies about the zombie apocalypse are cool, and the actual zombie apocalypse would be terrible.

But of course people don’t usually feel guilt about their fantasies about the zombie apocalypse or boss murder. No, this guilt is usually reserved for sexual fantasies.

All of the same arguments apply. There are lots of happily monogamously married women who sometimes fantasize about fucking a cute stranger they pass on the street. These fantasies notably do not include “my wife, whom I love more than life, feels crushed and betrayed that I cheated on her”, or “I broke my promise, which goes against everything I hold dear”, or “sex with random strangers is often really bad”, or “the random stranger might have an STI or get me pregnant or assault me”, or “I don’t actually want sex with strangers, it takes me some time to get comfortable with someone before I want to have sex with them”. It is totally consistent to have sexual fantasies about cheating and not actually want to cheat.

And similarly for other sorts of sexual fantasies. I sometimes see the argument that rape fantasies are actually ravishment fantasies, because in many such fantasies the victim actually wants sex. This argument has always seemed problematic to me (in real life, if someone says “no” but is aroused by the sex anyway, it’s still rape) and anyway I don’t know about you but I definitely don’t only have fantasies about attractive men having sex with women who say “no” but are secretly enthusiastic. My rape fantasies have actual rape in them.

But having a rape fantasy doesn’t mean you actually want to rape anyone or be raped, any more than making a zombie plan means you want all your friends to die. It is totally consistent to be sexually aroused by the thought of raping someone and to actually have moral objections to causing people years of emotional trauma and pain, such that actual rape is repulsive to you.

There are two special circumstances I want to talk about. First, sometimes having fantasies makes you want to do the thing more than you would otherwise. For instance, some recovering alcoholics find fantasizing about beer makes them want to drink, and some people who cheat on their partners find that sexual fantasies about people other than their spouses make them want to cheat. It makes sense that that would happen: fantasizing makes the good parts more salient than the bad parts. In that case, it can be helpful to explicitly remember the bad aspects. For instance, it’s fun to drink and makes you feel less anxious, and also last time you went on a bender you lost your job. Sex with the cute girl would feel really good, and it would break your wife’s heart.

Second, sometimes people don’t want to have close relationships with people who have certain fantasies. I think there’s a certain level of emotional intimacy required before that’s a reasonable request: your boss doesn’t get to request that you don’t have murder fantasies about him, no matter how much he’d like it. But it’s okay for someone to prefer that their romantic partner not have sexual fantasies about anyone else or that their friend not fantasize about killing them when they’re pissed off. If you have those fantasies anyway, you can try to stop (if that’s something that’s pretty easy for you to do, or if the relationship is worth it), or you can choose to end the relationship.

Sociosexuality Results

Tags

ozy blog posts, sex positivity, the sluts are evil theory

I recently ran a survey about whether women date assholes. Since I was already collecting information about people’s assholishness and their sexual history, I thought I would also test another hypothesis of mine.

Sociosexual orientation is your willingness to engage in sex outside of a committed relationship. In general, people with an unrestricted sociosexual orientation (that is, who enjoy sex with people they don’t know very well) are assholes. However, the unrestricted people I know– including myself– are all perfectly nice. I wondered if perhaps this was because in sexually conservative communities having lots of casual sex means leading on people who want to be in a relationship with you, while in my community having lots of casual sex means you like a lot of different 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. Since all participants are answering a survey about polyamory, it is assumed that they are all in sex-positive communities. If this is not true, it may be a weakness of the survey.

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 used one measure of sociosexuality, the Revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory. Two-thirds of the questions on the Revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory measure desire for casual sex, not how much casual sex you actually have; however, one third are about actual amount of casual sex had.

Results

The p-value of the correlation between extroversion and sociosexuality is significant at .000001. The r-value is 0.235, which is moderate. I can conclusively state that extroverts have higher sociosexualities than introverts. This is not particularly surprising.

The p-value of the correlation between openness and sociosexuality is .0001. The r-value is 0.156, which is small. Highly open people have higher sociosexualities than people who are not highly open. This is also not particularly surprising.

The p-value of the correlation between narcissism and sociosexuality is .00000002. The r-value is 0.269, which is moderate. Narcissists have higher sociosexualities than non-narcissists.

The p-value of the correlation between psychopathy and sociosexuality is .00000000008. The r-value is 0.311. This is the largest effect on our survey. However, one of the questions on the psychopathy instrument is “I enjoy having sex with people I hardly know,” which seems likely to confound the data. After I dropped that item, the p-value was .007 and the r-value was .13. This suggests that psychopaths have higher sociosexualities than non-psychopaths, but the effect is small.

The p-value of the correlation between abusiveness and sociosexuality is .009. The r-value is .129. Again, abusive people have higher sociosexualities than non-abusive people, but the effect is small.

No other results were significant.

Conclusions

This is my current model for explaining the data; it may be inaccurate. I think I was right that people with unrestricted sociosexualities in sex-positive communities are less likely to be jerks, because in a non-sex-positive community having a lot of casual sex often means leading people on and other anti-social behavior. That explains why disagreeableness and machiavellianism are no different between poly people with unrestricted sociosexualities and poly people with restricted sociosexualities, even though unrestricted people in the general population tend to be more machiavellian and disagreeable.

However, I failed to take into account that psychopaths tend to have an unrestricted sociosexuality, and that there is no reason to believe that this is different between poly and monogamous communities. I believe this also explains the abusiveness data. The effect size for psychopathy is quite small, which I think reflects the reality that while psychopaths tend to be unrestricted most unrestricted people are not psychopaths.

Finally, I think that people with unrestricted sociosexualities do tend to be extroverted and narcissistic. While I don’t observe this trend personally, I think that this is probably because I either am bad at noticing narcissists or tend to interact with people similar to myself (introverted and non-narcissistic).

On Pro-Choice Veganism

Tags

ozy blog post, pregnancy cw, world's worst vegan

[This post was suggested by my Patreon backer Ryan (yes, the same Ryan– this is how random number generators work, people). A random backer at the $5/month or more level is selected each month to suggest a post or story.]

Many people care about animal welfare: that is, they might stop eating meat or donate to charities which campaign for cage-free eggs, because they care about creatures that are generally less intelligent than humans. However, a lot of people who support animal welfare are pro-choice: they think it should be legal to kill fetuses, often because fetuses are less intelligent than born humans and thus matter less. That seems sort of strange.

I think there are three ways to harmonize pro-choice and pro-animal-welfare beliefs.

First, young fetuses are probably significantly less morally relevant than chickens or even crickets. A systemic review suggests that fetuses certainly cannot feel pain before 23 weeks, because their thalamocortical fibers have not developed yet, and evidence from electroencephalography suggests that they probably cannot feel pain before 30 weeks. Conversely, there is no scientific consensus on whether insects feel pain, and chickens certainly do experience pain. Pain matters not just because it’s a pretty significant source of disutility but because it’s relatively simple. If a fetus has not developed the ability to feel pain, it probably hasn’t developed other morally relevant capacities either, most of which are probably more complicated than feeling pain and would thus take longer to develop. 88% of abortions occur during the first trimester, which is well before the fetus has developed its capability to feel pain. Only a tiny percentage of abortions occur with a morally relevant fetus, and a much smaller percentage are for reasons other than life or health of the pregnant person or severe disability of the fetus, which most people think are okay reasons to abort.

Second, most consequentialist vegetarianisms are not about the right to life per se but instead about suffering. Many vegetarians believe it is okay to kill animals, but not okay to allow them to suffer. However, broiler chickens do not have lives that are worth living; therefore, one should avoid eating them in order to not create an incentive to create more broiler chickens. Fetuses, conversely, probably have pretty okay lives: they’re in a warm and safe environment, they are adequately fed, they generally don’t suffer from many diseases and they can enjoy pleasurable activities like listening to their parents’ voices, thumb-sucking, and masturbation. The only painful thing an aborted fetus is likely to experience is its death. Of course, given how short a fetus’s life is, its death makes up a pretty significant percentage of its life. However, it is possible to eliminate even this suffering. Fetal anesthesia has been developed, and laws in some states require its use during abortion, although usually far before the fetus is actually capable of feeling pain. It seems wise to me to require anesthesia to be used in third-trimester abortions (which, again, are a tiny percentage of abortions), assuming that there is no health risk to the pregnant person in doing so. Given that most third-trimester abortions are of wanted children, routine use of anesthetic may even provide some comfort to the mother.

Third, most vegetarians are not advocating for making meat illegal. We even think it’s okay to eat meat in certain serious situations: for instance, if you have an eating disorder triggered by vegetarianism, your diet is very limited due to a physical health condition, or you are averse to eating essentially all plant matter and if you became vegetarian you would wind up living on white bread and Skittles. And we certainly wouldn’t want to have a doctor or government board who’s in charge of deciding whether or not someone’s situation is grave enough to allow them to eat meat; that’s something the individual should decide for themselves. Even many vegetarians who believe that animals have a right to life believe that that right can be overridden by the welfare of a human being.

Imagine adopting a similar attitude towards fetuses. You don’t want abortion to be illegal. You think abortion is okay in certain serious situations: for instance, if you have a health condition aggravated by pregnancy, you’re carrying your rapist’s child, or you’re phobic of pregnancy. And you certainly wouldn’t want to have a doctor or a government board who’s in charge of deciding whether or not someone’s situation is grave enough to allow them to abort; that’s something the individual should decide for themselves.

Congratulations, you’re pro-choice! Certainly you have a complex and not unambiguous relationship with abortion, but so do many pro-choice people.

Of course, you might want to take steps to reduce abortion. For instance, one might want to make long-acting reversible contraception easier to access, so that people have fewer unintended pregnancies. One might want to accommodate parents better (both through government and workplace policy and through social support for parents), so that fewer people have abortions due to financial difficulties or the inability to be a single parent. One might ensure that birth parents have access to appropriate mental health support after their adoption and that open adoptions are legally enforceable, so that the grief of giving up one’s child for adoption can be minimized.

What you definitely don’t want to do is make abortion more difficult to get, because that means that pregnant people will get abortions later. The older a fetus is, the more likely that it is morally relevant. Thus, the entire strategy of the pro-life movement is unacceptable to a consequentialist who believes fetuses have a right to life.

Monogamous People Are Stupidly Oversensitive

Tags

ozy blog post, polyamory

I don’t want to say that there are literally zero polyamorous people who go around saying that polyamory is better than monogamy. The world is wide and full of many things, and God knows that people on the Internet can be blithering idiots on any topic.

However, I have literally never met such a person in my life, and yet I encounter monogamous people talking about how terrible such people are at least twice a month. It’s okay, guys! You’ve won! The enemy has been routed! You can stop discoursing now! Literally no one is arguing with you!

But then a funny thing happens when you try to get people to provide links to examples of this alleged ‘polyamory is better than monogamy’ claims. It turns out that they are actually instances of “a person saying that they are happier being poly than they were being monogamous.”

Or “a person saying that they had some problems becoming poly, but now they’re happily poly, and here’s how they did it.”

Or “a poly person being proud to be poly, in spite of the stigma they face from the rest of the world.”

Or “a silly Tumblr post about how we should resolve love triangles with polyamory.”

Or “poly people existing and being happy in public at all.”

It seems that growing up in a culture where monogamy is validated and accepted tends to leave a lot of monogamous people with a little bit of a thin skin.

Look, I get that having a relationship style you don’t share with the rest of your friends can be alienating. It can be harder to find partners. People might assume your relationship style is something that it really isn’t. People write fluffy romantic things that you don’t empathize with because they hinge on a different relationship style than yours. It sucks! I can empathize!

The reason I can empathize is that the places that are like this for me include literally the entire rest of the world.

Except that, while poly people who go around saying polyamory is better are mostly nonexistent, monogamous people who go around saying monogamy is better are not. They really, really are not. Feel free to peruse Polyamory in the News’s Critics of Poly tag if you don’t believe me. Or look at the comments of any news article about polyamory. Or come and meet my dad, who sent me a letter saying I was going to get AIDS before disowning me.

I wonder how many monogamous people asked a large and scary-looking friend to keep an eye on their family at their wedding, because they were afraid their family would make a scene about them being monogamous. Few?

I do not think there is anything wrong with monogamy. It’s not for me, but then neither are polo shirts, death metal, or ice dancing. I feel as little antipathy towards monogamous people as I do towards people wearing polo shirts, death metal fans, or ice dancers. But someone saying “I’m so happy now that I wear polo shirts all the time!” is not criticizing me as a T-shirt wearer. Someone talking about how they used to not be into death metal and now they are and here’s how is not criticizing me as a pop fan. The existence of happy ice dancers does not somehow mean I have to engage in ice dancing. The mere existence of happy people who do not share your preferences should not make you feel bad about your preferences. The fact that not everyone goes about constantly affirming how wonderful your life choices are does not mean you are being mistreated. Stop it.

On Polyamory Advice

Tags

ozy blog post, polyamory

Part of the problem with polyamory advice is that it usually comes from people who give advice.

This creates two distortions. First, many people who dislike commonly given polyamory advice would prefer something along the lines of “whatever works for you and your partners is great.” The problem is that this is really terrible advice.

As a comparison, consider a certain genre of sex-positive advice columns. These advice columns will answer every question with “talk to your partners! People are diverse, so you should figure out what works for you.” How do you eat someone out? “Talk to your partners! People are diverse, so you should figure out what works for you.” How do you dominate someone? “Talk to your partners! People are diverse, so you should figure out what works for you.” You like sex when you have it, but you’re rarely in the mood, so it’s easy to go weeks or months without having sex? “Talk to your partners! People are diverse, so you should figure out what works for you.” The sex is just kind of… meh? “Talk to your partners! People are diverse, so you should figure out what works for you.”

Of course, people are diverse, you should talk to your partners, and it’s a good idea to figure out what works for you. But this is also totally useless advice. If I knew what worked for me and my partners, I wouldn’t be writing to an advice column. And it’s not like there are literally zero generalities. You can say “in general, it’s a good idea to warm up your partner a bit before you approach her clit”. You can say “a lot of people find that making your partner call you ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ puts them in a good headspace.” You can say “that’s called responsive desire, it’s very common among people of all genders, and if you want to have sex more you can plan to spend some time kissing and cuddling on a regular basis and you may find that you’re in the mood for sex.” You can say “why don’t you try some different things that seem interesting? Even if most of them turn out to be silly or boring, adding a couple new things to your repertoire can stave off boredom.” Even though that isn’t going to work for everyone, it is sure as hell going to work for more people than “figure out what works for you!” without any guidance about how you do this.

Similarly, there are certain generalities among people in relationships. You should be familiar with your partner as a person, ranging from their favorite books to their problems to their deeply held values. You should try to be thankful about nice things your partner has done for you and to admire their good qualities. You should listen when they want to tell you something, even if you are a little busy. You should compromise. You should take a break when you feel like screaming at your partner.

Of course, these don’t apply to every relationship. There are people who are in happy marriages that are primarily an economic exchange and division of chores, where they don’t know much about each other beyond what is necessary to do their respective jobs. There are people who don’t mind being taken for granted. There are people who consider it an important part of respect for each other’s intellectual work that they never interrupt a train of thought with a question. There are people who thrive when their partner does whatever they want without taking their wishes into account. There are people who scream at each other and then have hot sex and feel like their conflict is resolved.

But that said, if I know that someone is unhappy in their relationship, and they don’t know how to fix it, and I know that they resolve all their conflicts by screaming at each other, I am going to suggest “why don’t you try resolving your conflicts through calm discussion and not screaming?” And I think that is much more likely to work than “whatever works for you and your partners is fine!”

I think this generalizes to a lot of the controversial polyamory advice as well. Is there somewhere out there a triad with an ecstatically happy bisexual woman partner who isn’t allowed to have sex with people outside the triad, is officially secondary, is required to love both of her partners equally, is an unpaid nanny/maid, and isn’t allowed to tell anyone whom she’s dating because they’re not out as poly? Probably! But I am not going to endorse this as a general practice.

Second, most people are reasonable, sensible people, but some people are ridiculous and terrible. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who write to advice columns are either ridiculous terrible people or reasonable sensible people who have somehow managed to get stuck in a relationship with ridiculous terrible people, because the reasonable sensible people generally have good relationships and therefore have no need to write to advice columns.

(yr humble blogger queers the ridiculous terrible/reasonable sensible binary)

So someone writes to the advice column and says “I won’t let my husband’s girlfriend kiss him except on the cheek or through a dental dam because she has oral herpes. She’s upset about this. How do I get her to see that this is necessary to prevent me from becoming a disgusting diseased herpetic?” And the advice columnist says “Jesus fucking christ, cut that shit out, you are ridiculous and terrible and also really bad at risk analysis.”

And then some reasonable sensible people read this and say “But I am immunosuppressed! I’m lucky enough not to have herpes, but if I catch it it would be really bad! It makes sense that my partners should have to take lots of precautions to avoid transmitting herpes to me.”

And a member of Team Do What Works For You is like “people should do whatever they want as long as it works for them and their partners! There is nothing wrong with making your metamour only kiss your husband through plastic wrap!”

My position here is that:

(1) We are, of course, going to follow the John Stuart Mill rules about people who are hurting themselves– one may argue with, attempt to persuade, or entreat a person who is making a poor decision, but one may not force them to do the thing you want or visit any sort of evil upon them for not doing so.
(2) We are not going to get more liberal than John Stuart Mill and assume that tolerance requires that no one ever think you’re making a bad choice.
(3) Some people have good reasons for making their metamours kiss their partners through plastic wrap.
(4) For the vast majority of people, this is a horrible idea and your relationships would be a lot better if you instead learned how to do reasonable STI risk assessment.
(5) The majority of people would not force their partners to kiss their partners through plastic wrap, it would never occur to them to do so, and find the whole idea vaguely horrifying.

The problem of ridiculous terrible people comes up particularly with the cluster exemplified by vetoes, rules, relationship contracts, and hierarchy. Ridiculous terrible people can get up to all kinds of ridiculous and terrible shit with vetoes, rules, relationship contracts, and hierarchy. As an example, in the book More Than Two, a man vetoes his wife’s relationship, refusing to even allow her to talk to him again to say goodbye, because he makes her too happy (?!) and this makes him feel jealous (?!?!).

If I were reading a bunch of letters from similarly ridiculous terrible people or their partners, I would probably be pretty down on veto too.

But in practice, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of difference between Reasonable Sensible People Polyamory With Rules and Reasonable Sensible People Polyamory Without Rules. My husband does not have a veto over whom I date, but he does get to have opinions. Naturally, I respect my husband’s judgment about other people, so I will listen to him to see if he’s seen something I’m blinded to by new relationship energy. Naturally, my husband respects my judgment about other people, so he will listen to me about the merits of the person he’s judged distasteful. Naturally, he doesn’t want to make me unhappy, so he will swallow his dislike and be cordial if necessary. Naturally, I don’t want to make him unhappy, so I will avoid squeeing about the awesomeness of people he dislikes. And if in spite of all this we can’t resolve the conflict, we’ll figure out how to manage it while keeping the lines of communication open so we can maybe find a resolution.

I am dating people whose partners do have veto power, and in terms of actual relationship dynamics as opposed to rules, they do the exact same thing. “My husband has veto” translates to “I respect my husband’s judgment and don’t want to do things that make him unhappy, so if he dislikes one of my partners I put a fairly significant amount of weight on that.”

In this case, I feel like a veto is harmless. I personally don’t have one, because I dislike having a power that I would never actually exercise. If I am relying on my husband’s care for my happiness and respect for my judgment, I prefer to say that rather than having it disguised as a rule. Other people find that having a veto gives them a sense of comfort; it feels like a strong signal that their partner has respect for their judgment and cares about their happiness, which is very important in any relationship. Still other people have truly abominable taste and their partners have a veto as a way of recognizing that they must be continually saved from themselves; in this case, the veto is Past You and Present Partners conniving to harsh the buzz of Present You, who is absolutely convinced that this one-eyed three-legged dog is totally worth saving and, see, they only bite a little bit. (In my anecdotal experience, in such situations, their committed secondary partners sometimes also have veto, possibly because Present You is more likely to listen to four people yelling about why you shouldn’t date people with four restraining orders and a domestic violence conviction.) There are probably other decent ways of handling it that I’m not thinking of.

And, indeed, if ridiculous terrible people didn’t have vetoes they would probably be going around being ridiculous and terrible some other way. The core problem with “your partner is making you too happy! I’m upset! I’m vetoing your relationship!” is not the veto. It’s being upset because a person you claim to love is happy.

The actual solution here is probably something like honesty, compassion, forgiveness, courage, growth, fairness, joy, empathy, respect, a sense of humor, a sense of perspective, and all the other virtues. But “be more compassionate! The details will work themselves out” is also kind of terrible advice, because “be more compassionate” is not exactly taskified. So instead we’re stuck with the “don’t have veto” thing.

Do Women Date Assholes? A Study

Tags

ozy blog post, polyamory, PRECIOUS sexual energy

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.