Sex-Positive, Porn-Critical?

Tags

ozy blog post, porn, PRECIOUS sexual energy

In the past, I have had a bunch of pretty positive things to say about porn.

Mea culpa.

To be clear, I have pretty positive things to say about some porn. I have nothing but positive feelings about AO3, pictures of hot naked people, the Best Women’s Erotica series, the Erogamer, porn comics, caption porn Tumblrs (RIP), the work produced by many independent camgirls, and the noble person who put every sex scene from Call Me By Your Name on Pornhub. But man, guys, mainstream video porn– the thing you get if you open up the tube sites and start scrolling– that stuff is actually pretty bad!

Now, in my defense, everyone else is entirely wrong about why it is bad. Criticism of mainstream video porn usually involves listing a bunch of sex acts I’ve done and then explaining that no real human being would ever do them. It is then explained that these acts are inherently degrading and objectifying and it is impossible to do them in a way that is respectful of other people’s personhood. The statistic that 88% of porn films include violence against women is thrown around, along with the fact that the women typically respond with pleasure. Finally, the explanation is wrapped up by explaining that all of this will lead to an epidemic of violence against women and porn-induced erectile dysfunction.

Taking it from last to first: It is difficult to know how common erectile dysfunction is. One review suggests a prevalence of somewhere between 3% and 76.5%. Therefore, it is very difficult to know whether erectile dysfunction is increasing beyond the expected rate of increase due to aging. More young men may be going to their doctors complaining of erectile dysfunction, but this might simply be because the treatment for ED now is a pill instead of months of therapy. Of course, there have been some positive anecdotes of people who stopped using pornography and their erectile dysfunction went away; if you struggle with ED and want to try it, there doesn’t seem to be any harm. But it is very far from certain that there is any link between erectile dysfunction and porn use in the general population.

If porn causes an epidemic of sexual violence, it is difficult to explain why rates of sexual violence continue to fall during the largest expansion of porn use in history. Of course, it is possible that some other cause, such as a decline in the acceptability of rape, is making rape rates fall, and they would have fallen even faster without porn. More careful work should be done. (It’s a pity no one convinced PornHub to roll out to a random selection of US counties for a few years first.) But I think this does put a hard cap on how large the problem could possibly be, and suggests that we should not come to overly firm conclusions from short-term laboratory studies of exactly the sort that have been falling victim to the replication crisis.

If the woman enjoys and consents to the violence against her, that is not violence, it is BDSM. Most porn videos depicting BDSM is an interesting fact but not in and of itself a sign that anything has gone wrong.

Sex acts are not inherently degrading or objectifying. Degradation and objectification are attitudes that people have to other people, and you cannot ward them off by sticking exclusively to PIV and oral. If you can’t understand how someone could facefuck someone they like, the problem is your failure of imagination, not the pornography.

I assure you that people who are not porn stars have deepthroated dick, taken it up the ass, had various body parts come on, been double-penetrated, been fisted, and nearly everything else you think real people don’t do. (I must admit, however, that as far as I can tell you are right about double anal. I too am suspicious that this sex act has only ever been performed with a camera in the room.)

So I feel I had a very reasonable conclusion here that mainstream video porn was probably fine, because all the arguments against it are terrible.

But I think, having watched more of it, actually I was quite wrong, and there are legitimate concerns I have about it.

Contrast mainstream video porn with, say, fanfiction. We make fun of Horrifying Fanfiction Lube, but the average fanfiction sex scene, in an ordinary ship, where everyone involved is human beings and not space aliens or elves or omegas, is a reasonably accurate depiction of 95th percentile sexy sex. The sex is somewhat kinkier than most sex is; communication is more seamless; no one ever farts or loses their erection at an inopportune time; people instinctively know the best ways to touch each other and no one has to figure out how to gently redirect someone else away from slobbering on their neck. And of course the sex usually has far more of a role in the narrative arc than sex in real life ever does. But overall, the acts people perform, the kinds of feelings they have, the relationships they have with other people, all seem like things real people would do.

Most of the time, to the extent that it is inaccurate, it’s inaccurate in a direction where, all things considered, you’d prefer it to be inaccurate. For example, fanfiction has an unrealistically high percentage of married gay couples who use condoms and typically depicts significantly more prep for anal sex than people usually do. But normalizing condom use is a good thing. And it’s good for people who are trying anal for the first time to be very cautious and go very slow; they can switch to a more reasonable amount of prep once they have more experience.

(One thing fanfiction is definitely inaccurate about, much to my eternal disappointment, is the percentage of men who are gay.)

And the things that are inaccurate are more clearly marked as inaccurate. No one is surprised when it turns out that human males do not typically go into heat or have self-lubricating asses. And it’s very rare to look in the Spike/Buffy ship tag for a depiction of loving, consensual sex in a healthy relationship. I know people who have gotten themselves in trouble because they’ve been misled by fanfiction, but you do have to work at it.

Mainstream video porn, on the other hand…

Most obviously, sex acts are often depicted in a way that is actively unsafe. The most obvious example is not using condoms, obviously, and I don’t need to belabor that. But think about the way mainstream porn depicts anal. Horrifying Fanfiction Lube is one thing, but at least they’re aware that you need lube. In mainstream video porn, you get guys with enormous dicks just banging away immediately without any sort of preparation or working up to it or even starting off slowly so she can relax. In real life, this is a recipe not just for painful, unpleasant sex but for anal fissures.

But even that criticism– as well as the criticisms I discussed above– miss the most important problem with mainstream video porn, which is that all of the films are apparently shot, directed, and starred in by bizarre sex aliens.

As far as I can tell, there’s very little foreplay, particularly if you require that your foreplay involve touching and caressing and exclude oral sex. There’s strikingly little kissing, and very little talking. Surprisingly often, sex begins by a woman stripping naked without a man touching her, dropping to her knees, and giving him a blowjob, without any sort of preliminaries. No one uses condoms or discusses birth control or testing. Strange and acrobatic sexual positions are depicted. At the end, he either pulls out and comes on her face, or comes inside her and then she squeezes the come out in a very unusual fashion. No one cuddles.

Now, I don’t mean to say that people don’t do those things. Obviously, people have unprotected sex without talking or kissing or touching, or where they strip naked instead of taking each other’s clothes off, engage in almost no non-genital sexual activities, use uncomfortable sex positions, and then end with a facial or the squeezy come thing and no cuddles. Some people even do all of those things. But I think the combination of all of those things is actually very very rare, while in porn it is a plurality of the videos available. It is not that any individual thing depicted is that strange, but collectively they give the impression that no one involved in creating porn has ever actually had sex with a human being.

What is worse, I think, is the absence of feelings or relationships. As far as I can tell, in video porn, sex typically consists solely of genitals being combined in various ways with orifices. It is quite difficult to work out what anyone’s opinion of the situation is, although you can extrapolate that presumably people think orgasms are nice. No one is unhappy and being comforted, or ecstatic about getting to have sex with someone so hot, or hopelessly in love, or trusting that their partner won’t hurt them when they try something new, or any of the other things that people sometimes feel about sex. In particular, it is quite hard to figure out what the people involved seem to think of each other. Rarely do the people involved seem to like each other, or dislike each other, or really have any sort of opinion of each other at all. In Bizarre Sex Alien Land, people typically have sex with people they’re completely neutral about.

This is even more appalling, in my opinion, than the first thing. Uncomfortable sex positions are a thing some people like, but it is actually extraordinarily rare to have sex where you have no emotions about the sex or the person whatsoever. Mainstream video porn leaves out a lot of what makes sex different from– and better than– masturbation. It’s a systematically inaccurate depiction of what sex is like.

Now, you might say that porn is intended as a masturbatory aid, not sex education, and sex education should be in schools. This is true as far as it goes. But I think proponents of this idea have failed to consider the sheer awkwardness of having education in middle-school health class about how most people typically kiss and touch each other extensively before they begin oral sex. This is really not the sort of lesson you want to have from your gym teacher. And while perhaps many people should read a good sex advice book before they begin having sex, most people won’t.

And, even setting that aside, I do think that watching a lot of mainstream video pornography is going to have an effect on your sexual script. How could it not? You have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours watching people do a thing. You may have few other sources of information of how it is done; you may never have done it yourself. Even if you know porn is inaccurate, where are you going to learn what sex is really like?

Of course, many people are sophisticated consumers of media, capable of separating reality from fiction. But mainstream video porn does not present itself as a ludicrous fantasy. It presents itself as a documentary of normal people having sex. And while viewers may be able to recognize that penises are not normally that large and women have pubic hair and you should use condoms, are they going to be able to recognize literally every way that porn is inaccurate?

I do not have hard data that suggests problems related to this. The generation that grew up with unlimited streaming video porn is still quite young. But I do not think it is at all unreasonable for sex-positive feminists to be concerned, and I wish that porn-critical discussions would move away from inaccurate statistics and slut-shaming and towards a more real discussion of the problems with pornography.

Don’t Goodhart Yourself

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

[content warning: some non-explicit discussion of self-harm]

Goodhart’s Law is a concept used in data science which goes like this:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Goodhart’s Law is usually applied to the behavior of other people. For example, attendance is a good way of measuring how diligent your employees are, but if you start firing people for missing days then you’ll get people coming in with colds, infecting everyone, and playing Candy Crush all day because they’re too tired to get any work done. How many papers a scientist publishes is a good way of measuring how much they work, but if you make tenure dependent on how many papers a scientist publishes they’ll start breaking everything up into the smallest units of paper possible. How many nails a factory produces is a good way of measuring its success as a factory, but if you are a Soviet planner who requires the factory to produce as many nails as possible it will make tiny nails that aren’t useful for anything.

(There are other ways that Goodhart’s Law can end up working– for example, ice cream sales are a good way of measuring how hot it is, but setting a goal of selling a large amount of ice cream each day will not make the weather nicer– but these are not relevant for my post.)

However, Goodhart’s Law can also be applied to yourself.

People often set self-improvement goals, and when they do they often think of some way to measure what they care about. For example, if you want to exercise more, you might set a goal to go to the gym three days a week. If you want to finish a novel, you might set a goal to write five hundred words a day. If you want to have a better relationship with your husband, you might set a goal to have less than four fights per month.

Sometimes, the thing you’re measuring is directly the thing you care about. For example, if you are chronically sleep-deprived and decide to track how tired you feel in the morning, you aren’t going to encounter Goodhart’s Law problems, because tiredness is actually the thing you care about.

Often, however, the thing you’re measuring is different from the thing you care about. If you want to exercise more, you don’t want to fuck around at the gym on your phone, you want to take a class or use the treadmill or lift up heavy things and put them down.

Some of the ways Goodhart’s Law operates with people’s goals can be really obvious. For example, some people finishing NaNoWriMo will name their characters things like “Lady Mary von Grackle the Fourth” and then use the entire thing every time she comes up, or include the entire lyrics of every song their character is listening to, or edit every line of dialogue to include “X said” even if it is perfectly obvious who’s talking. If you are doing this stuff, it’s pretty obvious that you’re Goodharting your goal of writing a 50,000-word novel.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s not obvious at all, and that’s where you run into real trouble. You might be really proud of yourself for not getting into fights with your husband anymore– but instead you’re walking on eggshells avoiding every topic that might upset him and failing to bring up topics which you really ought to bring up, which actually makes your relationship worse.

And sometimes things can be Goodharting for some people and not for others. Let’s say your goal is to stop self-harming. For some people, the goal is actually to stop self-harming: maybe they’re tired of getting scars or it frightens other people. For other people, the goal is to avoid getting into situations where you’re so emotionally fucked up that self-harming seems like a good idea. If your goal is that second thing, white-knuckling through your self-harm urges by drawing red lines on yourself is actually useless– it achieves your target but does nothing about your goal.

Similarly, let’s say you set a target to do three things off your to do list each day. For many people– perhaps most– the real goal would be to accomplish things, and the worries about Goodharting would mostly be related to putting unnecessary things on your to do list so you can check them off. But if you have depression, your goal might be to recover from depression. You might drag your brain over metaphorical rocks getting yourself to do some dishes and cook dinner and achieve your target, but you’re still depressed.

Goodharting can get you into trouble in two ways. First, as in the arguments case, your target might be so poorly specified that it gets you to do things that are actively counterproductive to your goal– like not bringing up problems in your relationship.

Second, as in the self-harm, depression, and NaNoWriMo cases, reaching your target won’t directly harm your goal. You can search-and-replace “Lady Mary von Grackle the Fourth” with “Mary” and get a readable book. Doing more things off your to do list might even make you less depressed, if you’re the sort of person who tends to get less depressed if you’re more active. (Or more depressed, if you’re drawing on emotional reserves that you really shouldn’t be drawing on. It can go either way.)

The problem is that Goodharting misleads you about whether you’ve met your goal. You think you’ve written a novel, but when you cut out all the padding it’s a novelette at best. You think you’ve fixed your depression, but actually you’re just willpowering your way through doing the dishes. You think you’ve learned how to regulate your emotions better, but actually you’ve learned that if you self-harm by holding ice instead of by cutting you can pass it off to your therapists as a healthy coping mechanism. You’re putting a lot of work in– but you’re not going to have the outcomes you want.

How do you avoid Goodharting? It can help to explicitly distinguish “goal” and “target”: your goal isn’t to go to the gym three times a week unless you’d be just as happy if you spent the entire time at the gym reading a nice novel. That way, you can notice when you’re meeting your targets but not your goals. If your relationship with your husband is getting worse, you can step back and reassess.

It can also help to deliberately avoid doing things that help you reach your targets but not your goals. This is one way that single-person Goodharting is much easier to solve than multi-person Goodharting: you can just decide that you’re not going to Goodhart, once you’re aware that this is an issue. For example, if you’re depressed, you might commit to never using willpower to get yourself to do things. If you’re writing a novel, you might decide not to use cheap tricks to pad your word count.

In other cases, that isn’t realistic. For example, you might not want to commit to self-harming every time you feel like self-harming, and if you’re depressed you might ever need to force yourself to do the dishes so you have something clean to eat off of. In those cases, you might want to count Goodharted things separately. For example, as a depressed person, you might want to separately track things you did without willpower and things you did with willpower; if you’re trying to recover from self-harming, you might want to track both self-harm instances and strong urges to self-harm.

Autogynephilia Survey

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

Methods

I have 784 respondents; twenty respondents were deleted for skipping an excessive number of questions, leaving me with 764 respondents. The respondents were mostly taken from my blog, Thing of Things; therefore, they may not be representative of the general population.

To assess autogynephilia, I used a 22-item scale which is commonly used in the literature on autogynephilia. Unlike in previous studies, I did not alter the language for cisgender respondents. To assess autoandrophilia, I genderswapped the items on the scale. Certain items were easily genderswapped: for example, “fantasies in which I have a vagina/vulva” became “fantasies in which I have a penis”. Others required more of a judgment call, as when I decided that erections and ejaculation are physical male functions analogous to pregnancy. As my autoandrophilia scale has never been validated, the results are unreliable and should be considered preliminary. Further, this scale would not capture any ways that autoandrophilia manifests differently than autogynephilia. (For example, one might expect autogynephiles to be more interested in wearing women’s clothing, as there is more sexy clothing which is only for women than sexy clothing which is only for men.)

To assess gender, I presented two questions. The first asked people to identify as cisgender or transgender. The second asked people to identify as transgender, definitely cisgender, or uncertain whether the terms “cisgender” or “transgender” best describes them.

To assess sexual orientation, I asked whether a person was attracted to both men and women, men but not women, women but not men, exclusively nonbinary people, or no one at all.

Demographics

A gender and sexuality breakdown follows. Percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding.

53% cisgender men
19% cisgender women
10% transgender people assigned female at birth
18% transgender people assigned male at birth

24% definitely cisgender men
9% definitely cisgender women
8% AFAB transgender
16% AMAB transgender
14% neither cisgender nor transgender AFAB
30% neither cisgender nor transgender AMAB

18% bisexual cisgender men
32% heterosexual cisgender men
2% homosexual cisgender men
1% asexual cisgender women
12% bisexual cisgender women
4% heterosexual cisgender women
1% homosexual cisgender women
2% asexual AFAB trans people
6% bisexual AFAB trans people
2% homosexual AFAB trans people
2% asexual AMAB trans people
8% bisexual AMAB trans people
1% heterosexual AMAB trans people
6% homosexual AMAB trans people
1% miscellaneous

Autogynephilia and Autoandrophilia Scores

(For these numbers, a score of zero indicates that none of the fantasies are arousing, while a score of 88 indicates that all of the fantasies are very arousing. Please behold the quarter-assed bar charts.)

Autogynephilia

Cisgender man: 44
Cisgender woman: 22
AFAB trans: 13
AMAB trans: 35

 

Definitely cisgender man: 36
Definitely cisgender woman: 25
AFAB trans: 11
AMAB trans: 40
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AFAB: 22
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AMAB: 48

Asexual cisgender man: 41
Bisexual cisgender man: 52
Straight cisgender man: 40
Gay cisgender man: 40

Asexual cisgender woman: 6
Bisexual cisgender woman: 36
Straight cisgender woman: 17
Gay cisgender woman: 21

Asexual AFAB trans: 2
Bisexual AFAB trans: 17
Straight AFAB trans: 15
Gay AFAB trans: 7

Asexual AMAB trans: 31
Bisexual AMAB trans: 39
Straight AMAB trans: 17
Gay AMAB trans: 36

[Note that sample sizes for asexual cisgender men and heterosexual AFAB trans people are particularly small.]

Autoandrophilia

Cisgender man: 20
Cisgender woman: 25
AFAB trans: 30
AMAB trans: 6

Definitely cisgender man: 23
Definitely cisgender woman: 18
AFAB trans: 30
AMAB trans: 7
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AFAB: 29
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AMAB: 17

Asexual cisgender man: 18
Bisexual cisgender man: 23
Straight cisgender man: 18
Gay cisgender man: 26

Asexual cisgender woman: 8
Bisexual cisgender woman: 28
Straight cisgender woman: 23
Gay cisgender woman: 24

Asexual AFAB trans: 19
Bisexual AFAB trans: 33
Straight AFAB trans: 19
Gay AFAB trans: 34

Asexual AMAB trans: 7
Bisexual AMAB trans: 8
Straight AMAB trans: 3
Gay AMAB trans: 2

[Note that sample sizes for asexual cisgender men and heterosexual AFAB trans people are particularly small.]

Discussion

Confusingly, cis men are the group most likely to experience autogynephilia, and cis women are also more likely than average to experience autoandrophilia. However, when broken out into more specific categories, we discover that this is mostly driven by people who identify as neither cisgender nor transgender– that is, the potentially gender dysphoric.

People are much less likely to experience autoandrophilia than autogynephilia. It is unclear why this might be. It is possible that my measure failed to capture autoandrophiliac sexuality; I suggest performing qualitative research on transgender men to construct an appropriate measure. It is also possible that autoandrophilia is legitimately less common than autogynephilia for some reason: for example, perhaps because female bodies are hypersexualized in the media while male bodies are not, or because people with testosterone-dominant systems have kinkier sexual fantasies.

It has been occasionally claimed that women do not experience autogynephilia. My study suggests that this is false. While cisgender women do not experience autogynephiliac fantasies as commonly as AMAB transgender people do, they do seem to sometimes experience autogynephilia. However, it is also occasionally claimed that autogynephilia is ordinary female sexuality. It does not appear that my survey supports this hypothesis; cis women are far less likely than trans women to be autogynephiles. Autogynephilia seems more characteristic of definitely cis male sexuality than definitely cis female.

Some trans advocates argue that trans women overreport autogynephilia, because if one has a penis it is marked and unusual to have sexual fantasies in which you have a vagina, while if one has a vagina it is not at all marked or unusual to have sexual fantasies in which you have a vagina. It is unclear how this hypothesis can be tested; as such, my survey does not provide evidence for or against it.

It has been occasionally claimed that trans men do not experience autoandrophilia. My survey suggests that this is false; trans men have a notably higher rate of autoandrophilia than other groups. The alternate construct of “autohomoeroticism” is not supported: autoandrophilia is detected in a survey which does not ask about any specifically homosexual male behaviors, but merely about sexual arousal when imagining having a physically male body and adopting a male social role.

Autogynephiliac fantasies tend to be about having a woman’s body, wearing women’s clothing, or being admired or having sex while a woman. Very few people were interested in more outré forms of sexuality, such as menstruation, urinating while sitting down, sitting in a feminine way, or being seen as a woman by strangers. Trans women are more likely than cis women to be aroused by these unusual fantasies: cis women’s average is typically between 0 and 0.5 on a scale where 0 means not at all arousing, and trans women’s is typically around 1. However, most trans women have no interest in these fantasies; attempts to depict them as typical of trans female sexuality are inaccurate. 

Similarly, autoandrophiliac fantasies tend to be about having a man’s body (particularly a penis) or being admired or having sex while a man, and not about adopting a male-typical social role outside of a sexual context. 

Bisexual cis women experience a rate of autogynephilia comparable to transgender women’s. I believe this is problematic for claims that no real woman would experience autogynephilia; it implies that either bisexual cis women are not real women or that they are lying about their sexual fantasies in a far less socially desirable direction. It is possible that something unusual about bisexual cis women causes them to fetishize womanhood. It is also possible that autogynephilia is associated with same-gender attraction; certainly, it seems like being attracted to breasts might cause you to be attracted to your own breasts. However, if that is the case, it is unclear why lesbians show such low rates of autogynephilia. My sample size of lesbians was quite small and it is possible this is just noise. I suggest interested people study autogynephilia specifically in a queer cisgender female population.

Gay and bisexual men show elevated rates of autoandrophilia compared to heterosexual men. However, their rates are not comparable to trans men’s. It is possible that while autogynephilia similar to trans women’s is typical of (bisexual) female sexuality, autoandrophilia similar to trans men’s is not typical of any sort of male sexuality. It may also reflect the inadequacy of my measure of autoandrophilia.

Definitely cisgender men are both more autogynephiliac and more autoandrophiliac than definitely cisgender women. This may be due to social desirability bias, poor awareness of one’s sexual fantasies, lower sex drives due to estrogen-dominant hormone systems, or a legitimate difference in sexual interests between definitely cisgender men and definitely cisgender women.

Polyamory Survey

Tags

ozy blog post, polyamory

I have some questions about polyamory I’d like to have answered! Click here for invasive questions about your relationship satisfaction, sexual interests, and sad feelings. You will be rewarded with animal and plant pictures.

This survey is for non-monogamous people only. That means that, if you wanted to, you and/or your partner(s) could date and/or have sex with more than one person, without violating the rules of your relationship. If you do not have any partners but expect that you would be nonmonogamous if you did, you are nonmonogamous. If you and your partner are both dating only each other, but could date other people if you chose, you are nonmonogamous.

If you are monogamous and take this survey you will not get to answer any questions. You will merely be redirected to the following image of a sad puppy:

 

Philosophy of My Advice Column

Tags

ozy blog post

I have been writing an advice column for a little more than a month, and I have already discovered I have many opinions about how my advice column works. I have decided to write them up in order to help people decide whether they would like to write to my advice column or a different advice columnist.

First: I view my job as an advice columnist as trying to help the letter writer solve their particular problems. I am on, a very basic level, on my letter writer’s side. I have already received letters that make me feel like I would not like the letter writer particularly much as a person, ones with political beliefs I strongly disagree with, and even ones that made me tempted to go “well, stop sucking and you wouldn’t have the problem anymore.” But I’ve tried my best to attempt to improve my letter writers’ lives according to their own values, goals, and preferences, without telling them those values are stupid and they should get better ones. And I avoid telling my letter writers that they are terrible people.

If I receive a letter where I’d have a hard time being on my letter writer’s side– whether because of personal triggers or because I actually find their goal appalling — I’d probably avoid answering it. But I think I can be on the side of a lot more writers than one could naively assume: if you want to write me about your struggle to avoid masturbation, or your difficulties with loneliness as a celibate same-sex-attracted person, or your paralyzing fear about the world being destroyed by superintelligent AI, I am going to do my best to adopt your worldview instead of starting with “well, I disagree.” (If for some reason this is a problem you feel is best solved by a sex-positive feminist who prioritizes global poverty and animals.)

I don’t think this approach is right for every advice columnist: Dan Savage certainly doesn’t, and Savage Love is an amazing advice column; That Bad Advice is an amazing advice column which does literally the opposite of my thing. But I think it creates a certain amount of safety when you’re writing, and it’s an approach I personally feel comfortable with.

Second: this is an advice column. I am providing solutions to problems the letter writer has in their life. I am not providing political commentary, structural solutions, explanations of what things would be like in a better world than the one that already exists, or essays loosely inspired by the letter. Again, there are lots of great advice columns that do those things, but this is my advice column and this is what I’m doing.

Third: I am a person with limited knowledge. In an announcement, I described my areas of expertise as “sex, kink, dating, polyamory, BPD, neurodivergence more generally, effective altruism, transness, scrupulosity, abuse, spiritual abuse, and parenting persons under the age of 18 months.” However, if you write me about some topic that is far outside of my area of expertise, I’m going to assume you want my perspective on it; I will probably talk to friends with more knowledge or note that this is not a thing I have a lot of experience in, but I will still offer my uninformed opinions.

Right now, I’m getting few enough letters that I can answer every letter. If or when that changes, I’m probably going to favor answering letters in my areas of expertise over answering letters which are not in my areas of expertise.

Fourth: I strive not to recommend ending relationships or seeking therapy/medication. I feel like these are common band-aids when the advice columnist doesn’t really know how to answer the question, and they’re usually provided without considering why it might be hard for a person to end a relationship or seek therapy/medication. Some people have moral objections to divorce or estrangement from parents; some people are financially dependent on the person; some people are coparenting children and have a functional coparenting relationship; some people are simply not ready to end it. Many people can’t afford therapy or medication, have a difficult time finding a compatible therapist, can’t fit in appointments around their schedules, or are dependent on a parent or spouse who would object.

I do suggest ending relationships, therapy, and medication sometimes. But I try to always provide some other alternative, in case the person doesn’t choose that: advice about how to maintain the relationship, in the former case, or self-help books, peer support groups, coping mechanisms, or advice about supplementation.

(Exception: if to the best of my ability to interpret the letter writer they are writing a letter of the genre “please give me Official Permission to end my terrible relationship,” I will give them official permission to end their terrible relationship. This is also the response you can expect if you’re looking for Official Permission to transition, to identify as LGBT+, to have a particular kind of sex, or not to have sex.)

Fifth: I am a weird person and this has improved my life a bunch. A lot of my solutions tend to be of the form “have you considered just being weird?” If you are particularly interested in being normal and respectable (instead of just appearing normal and respectable to outsiders, which of course is a thing many weird people sometimes have to do), my advice is unlikely to be helpful.

Sixth: I tend to recommend safe rules. These are rules that have a lot of false negatives but don’t have a lot of false positives: that is, they almost never say something is okay when it isn’t, but they often say that things aren’t okay when they really are. Knowing what actions are okay often comes down to context, personal relationships, and the ability to read the room. As an advice columnist, those are exactly the things I don’t have– and I definitely can’t have it for every situation you might encounter. That letter would be far far too long. And I don’t want to say “pay attention to context and read the room,” because if you knew how to do that you probably wouldn’t be writing me. I also find that safe rules tend to be helpful for my anxiety: I can very confidently say “well, I’m following the rule, so it’s fine.”

When I’m recommending a safe rule, I tend to specifically highlight it as a conservative rule with a lot of false negatives and few false positives, so that people don’t worry that the probably-fine things they’re doing are actually bad.

If this advice column interests you, you can read it here or send an email to thingofthingsadvice@gmail.com. (For people who use throwaway emails, I’ll note that I don’t answer letters privately and you don’t have to remember the password to your throwaway.) If you appreciate my advice, you can back me on Patreon.

Why More Transgender People?

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

[This post was prompted by Andree. To prompt a post, back me on Patreon.]

In the past ten or fifteen years, there has been a massive increase in the number of transgender people. A 1997 estimate– from the clinic that treated over 95% of transgender people in the Netherlands– suggested 1 in 10,000 people assigned male at birth and 1 in 30,000 people assigned female at birth are transgender. Today, the best surveys suggest that 0.6% of people in the United States identify as transgender. How did this increase happen?

If you read LGBT history, it is striking how many people are what we would presently call transgender. Classic lesbian novels such as the Well of Loneliness depict recognizably transgender experiences. Stone butch women wore masculine clothing, behaved in a masculine fashion towards their partners, and did not allow their partners to touch their genitals; some people who had a stone butch identity, such as Leslie Feinberg, eventually identified as transgender. In the gay male community, we see “drag queens” who lived as women, used female pronouns, and desired bottom surgery (for an introduction, I can’t recommend highly enough the documentary Paris is Burning and David Valentine’s excellent Imagining Transgender). There were many heterosexual men who crossdressed regularly, and even special cruises and conferences which catered to them; again, many of these men took hormones or even sought surgery (Amy Bloom’s Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses is unsympathetic and rather transmisogynistic, but an interesting resource).

What did these people have in common? If they bought hormones, they did so on the grey market; if they got surgery (and most either couldn’t afford it or had spouses who objected), they flew to Thailand. Most did not biomedically transition. They also did not legally transition, and often did not socially transition: crossdressers were male at work and around their family; many drag queens and butches lived as their assigned gender during the work week. Their experiences are recognizably transgender experiences, but they are invisible to gender clinics, survey-takers, and much of the cisgender population.

Today, we have better access to transition treatment: while there is still gatekeeping, it is rare in the Anglosphere to be denied hormones because you’re gay, because you use your genitals during sex, because you’re a trans woman who wears pants, or similar. That leads more people to transition and more people to transition through a gender clinic instead of on the grey market.

Being transgender is also more socially acceptable in many ways. It is a double-edged sword; if people are more aware of transgender people, it is also harder to go stealth. But trans people tend to experience less housing discrimination, job discrimination, and familial rejection than they used to.

Trans people respond to incentives. It’s not true that gender dysphoria automatically leads to transition. Some gender dysphoric people have a choice between transition or suicide (although to be fair even in this case we would expect some of that population to show up in the suicide statistics instead). But if the cost of transition is high enough, many gender dysphoric people dissociate and depersonalize and are depressed, many gender dysphoric people live for the weekends or trips into the big city where they can be themselves, and many gender dysphoric people will have secret fantasies that they never tell anyone about. As transition becomes more accessible and socially acceptable, people are less likely to use non-transition coping mechanisms for gender dysphoria.

Equally important, I think, are the narratives which are available to frame our experiences. One of the reasons people identify as transmasculine instead of stone butch, or transfeminine instead of drag queens, is that these are the narratives we have to put our experiences into. The lines between gender-non-conforming people and transgender people are not as sharp as we’d like to believe or as would be politically convenient. We gender-non-conforming and gender dysphoric people are, often, an inchoate mass of feelings and desires and incoherent yearnings; it is often hard to know what we want as opposed to what we don’t want. We reach out to our communities for labels and identities and ontologies, and those labels and identities and ontologies wind up shaping what we desire. Of course they do. That’s how people work.

The same person, with the same desires, may identify as a butch lesbian, a radical feminist, a nonbinary person, or a queer trans man, depending on what segment and era of the LGBT+ community they are part of– and they might be equally happy and comfortable in each identity, if it is socially legible to their community. I think it’s a mistake to say that that person “is really” nonbinary, or “is really” butch, or “is really” a radical feminist. They have certain wants, certain needs, and certain ways of articulating those wants and needs are socially legible to their communities. (I wrote a similar process here, with regards to gray asexuality.)

As trans-related identities, labels, and ontologies displace their predecessors, and people are more likely to understand themselves from a trans-related framework, more people are likely to identify as trans and to transition (at least socially). To some extent, the incentives and labels explanations feed into each other: as more people come to understand themselves as trans, the conditions for trans people improve; as the conditions for trans people improve, more people come to understand themselves as trans. But I believe they are distinguishable and both play a role.

Book Post for June

Tags

becky chambers, cat valente, effective altruism, mary robinette kowal, ozy blog post, rebecca roanhorse, sex positivity, ursula k le guin

Non-Fiction

The Origins of Happiness: A book about the various things that are correlated with life satisfaction scales. In and of itself, this is an interesting topic. However, the author fancies themself a person who is Reforming Public Policy in order to Bring About A New Focus On Happiness, which makes the entire book epistemically dubious. Here are some criticisms not addressed by the author at any point:

1. A life satisfaction scale involves rating your life on a scale of 1 to 10. While this metric has some advantages (it lets people decide for themselves what factors they want to incorporate into their life satisfaction assessment), at no point does the author provide evidence that this metric is correlated with a common-sense definition of happiness. They also provide no reason to choose life satisfaction over other metrics, such as experiential happiness or “how happy are you?” questions, which often have correlations of different strength or even direction.
2. Correlation does not equal causation. People tend to report higher life satisfaction if they are married, but that doesn’t mean marriage increases life satisfaction. Perhaps happier people stay married for longer and miserable people are more likely to divorce, or perhaps both marriage and happiness are caused by some other factor, such as religiosity.
3. Life satisfaction may be compared against a reference class. If you mostly know people with very very good lives, you might consider your life mediocre, while if you mostly know people with terrible lives, you might consider your life very good– even if your life is the same in every way.
4. In particular, the author’s data suggests that being around richer people lowers life satisfaction, holding income constant. In fact, all the life satisfaction you gain from increasing your income a certain amount is exactly balanced by the amount of life satisfaction lost by the people around you. But this is a strange result: it implies that no one gains any life satisfaction at all from any of the things you can purchase with money, such as education, vacations, nice food, entertainment, health care, or financial security. Life satisfaction is only gained by having more than other people. All goods are zero-sum positional games. The author suggests deprioritizing increasing GDP, but does not suggest any of the more radical policies that are implied by this point of view. If life satisfaction is an accurate measure of wellbeing and nothing you can purchase with money affects wellbeing, why not ban vacations? They cost a lot of resources (e.g. flying planes spews a lot of carbon) and don’t actually make anyone any happier.
5. Depression is highly correlated with low life satisfaction ratings. But standard depression inventories ask many questions that are, essentially, life satisfaction questions, like whether you’re unhappy all the time and whether you think you’re a failure. Does this mean that the mental health condition of depression causes low life satisfaction (and thus that the best way to improve life satisfaction is to treat depression), or does it mean that if you define a mental health condition as “people who have low life satisfaction” it will turn out they all have low life satisfaction?

Addicted to Lust: A fascinating ethnography of porn use in the conservative Protestant subculture.

Conservative Protestants are less likely to use porn than the general population, although (like the general population) their use of porn is rising because the Internet is improving porn access. However, conservative Protestants who use porn face much more severe mental health consequences than people of other denominations or religions who use porn.

They face overwhelming shame, guilt, and stigma. Some are socially isolated because they can’t admit their porn use; this particularly affects women, who are believed not to be visual and not to be tempted by porn, and therefore have a hard time finding support and are often stigmatized as ‘unfeminine’ for needing it. Others find their entire moral life reduced to porn use: male ‘accountability groups’ often discuss only porn, masturbation, and lust without ever thinking about any of the other sins that men commit; some people even have difficulty thinking about anything they might do wrong that isn’t porn use. Porn users avoid volunteering, service, missionary work, or helping out at church because they think they’re too broken to be allowed to participate in Christian life. Many even avoid praying, reading the Bible, or participating in church services. One interviewee says:

[D]uring that time I become a burden to god, too. It’s like ‘yeah, I love you. And you know, I died for you. But really I’m just tolerating you right now because I made a commitment to myself and I have to.'”

Because porn use is conceived of within conservative Protestant culture as a form of cheating, spouses experience tremendous jealousy and betrayal when they find out. People can’t talk to their spouses about their porn use and get support in quitting, because it is perceived as such a betrayal; the deception can poison a relationship. The discovery of a spouse’s porn use often leads to threats or even the reality of divorce, even when the marriage is otherwise happy.

My takeaways from this ethnography are twofold.

First, the corrosive effects of purity culture are hard to overstate. When you make a single common sin a litmus test of how a person is doing morally, it is really bad for people. People experience feelings of guilt, shame, and worthlessness. They are isolated from friends and loved ones. It doesn’t even serve to make the person more ethical. Purity culture takes away your ability to see the moral life holistically. While you’re struggling with the fact that you jerk off to porn for fifteen minutes once a week, you might ignore the fact that you shout at your wife, or that you’re lazy at work, or that you go on luxurious vacations instead of helping the poor– all of which may very well be more serious sins. You can feel like you “don’t deserve” to do the things that give you strength to be a better person: the Christian avoids praying and reading the Bible, but a secular person might avoid therapy, journaling, meditation, reading inspiring books, going to meetups of people who share their values, etc.

Effective altruism has (so far) put a lot of thought into avoiding creating a purity culture, although often not in those terms. However, I think this is something well worth thinking about more.

Second, I have often had a hard time harmonizing my positive personal experience of porn with the research that suggests negative effects of porn use. Addicted to Love’s model, I think, explains this very well. The thing that causes negative effects of porn is not the porn itself; it’s the context and the use to which you put porn. Addicted to Love finds that porn use is correlated with depression if and only if you believe that pornography use is morally wrong. Doing things that go against your values makes you feel guilt and shame. If your partner feels betrayed by your pornography use or worries that it means you don’t find them attractive anymore, it is likely to make your relationship worse; watching porn together and using it as a springboard to discuss your sexual fantasies is likely to make it better.

You can expand this model further. A culture around porn which clearly discusses which aspects of porn are reality and which fantasy leads to accurate beliefs about sex; in the absence of such a culture, people might try unlubed anal sex. (Ouch.) In a sex-positive culture of experimentation and open communication, being interested in more sexual acts means you have more sexual variety; in a more sex-negative culture, it can lead to frustration and even sexual coercion. Isolating yourself in your bedroom to jerk off for four hours is different from writing a porny giftfic for a friend. Saying what effects porn has in the abstract is like saying what effects Marvel movies have in the abstract; you have to consider the individual, the culture, and their relationship to porn.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing: At some point Ursula K. Le Guin is going to really truly publish her last book, but apparently not yet. Conversations on Writing is an interview with Le Guin about writing; like all Le Guin’s writing, her compassion and wisdom is palpable, even when I disagree with her. By far the most delightful part of the book is a short story Le Guin wrote about Zombie Michael Chabon infecting literary writers with genre, but the rest is well worth your time.

An Informal History of the Hugos: This book is baffling. I have no idea what the target audience is. Jo Walton briefly talks about her opinions of the Hugo nominees for each year, lists off the titles of various books that might otherwise be nominated, and says whether she thinks the right one won. Since I have usually heard of half of the nominees and very few of the non-nominated books each year, this is incredibly boring.

Fiction 

Space Opera: This is… an incredibly weird book. It’s a Douglas Adams pastiche where aliens decide which newly contacted species are sapient by having them compete in galactic Eurovision; if they come in last place, they’ll get destroyed. Unfortunately, the list of musicians who might have a chance of not coming in last was generated by a time traveling alien who got confused, so only one of them is alive: a washed-up, drunken David Bowie/Freddie Mercury expy who hasn’t had a hit in a decade and has to get the band back together to save humanity.

Cat Valente is one of the best prose stylists in modern science fiction, and she uses all her talent to make Space Opera’s twee whimsy, with a core of jaded cynicism. This is the sort of book that drives me to metaphor. Reading the book is like eating twenty pounds of cupcake frosting: you enjoy the individual bites, but you eventually want something more substantial, and the whole experience makes you kind of sick. The book itself is like building the Statue of Liberty out of cheese: you set a goal and you accomplished it and it’s hard to come up with criticisms that aren’t ‘instead of doing this you should have done a different thing,’ but… maybe instead of this you should have done a different thing.

That said, I’m probably going to vote it #1 for the Hugos this year. I didn’t particularly like Space Opera, I don’t recommend it, but there’s something about “I thought the surprise mpreg reveal in the climax was superfluous” that captures the anarchic spirit of science fiction, and I think that’s what we should honor with our awards. And if it’s the sort of book you like you’ll really like it.

Trail of Lightning: Meh. I don’t like action heroes who are brooding and violent and angry and never talk about their feelings and you have to be SYMPATHETIC to them because they are TRAUMATIZED. Manpain bores me. It does not actually bore me any less if the person experiencing manpain is a Native American woman.

The Calculating Stars: I gave up in disgust after the first part, so take this review with a grain of salt, but: UGH. The author wants to write an alternate history where a giant meteorite landed on Washington D. C. in the 1950s, which kicked off catastrophic global warming, and the only way to save humanity is to go to a moon colony. Fine. Okay. I am willing to suspend disbelief about ‘moon colony’ being a better option than ‘geoengineering’ if only because of the Rule of Cool.

But the author clearly fails to think about the internal life of her villains for even a second. The president’s advisers respond to the protagonist’s report that catastrophic global warming is going to happen with spontaneous climate-change denialist tropes literally five minutes after she delivers it, even though this makes zero sense. No one would think it’s absurd and laughable that a meteorite that destroyed DC would have other catastrophic effects, and climate change denialism is a thing because fossil fuel companies have spent tons of money spreading doubt, a thing which they would have no reason to do in setting and which they could not possibly have pulled off in five minutes.

The protagonist, a former member of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) in WWII, is forbidden to fly a plane to rescue refugees because “nursing is more feminine,” despite the fact that this is literally the sort of thing the WASPs did in WWII and a meteorite just destroyed Washington DC. Women are forbidden from becoming astronauts because they will become hysterical in space; a female character points out that you can’t have a self-sustaining moon colony without women, but it is never discussed what the fuck the villains think about this obvious objection.

Look, I’m not saying that the villains’ behavior is completely unreasonable. (Okay, the climate change denialism is unreasonable and clearly just put in to make a political point.) Maybe the protagonist is forbidden from rescuing refugees by one guy, who’s not very competent at running a military and is only doing it because the entire hierarchy fell apart because DC got a meteor dropped on it, and who’s clinging desperately to normality in the wake of an abnormal situation. Maybe they’re planning to include women in later flights but don’t want to include them right away because they’re concerned about not having developed the safety equipment to deal with their hysteria. But you have to justify this! You can’t just be like “sexists are sexist because they are sexist, this is completely causeless behavior totally unaffected by circumstances or incentives.” That’s not how people work.

Record of A Spaceborn Few: Record of a Spaceborn Few is set on a former generation ship, a few generations after first contact, which currently orbits around a star. The sociological worldbuilding is rich and complex. A great deal of care and thought has been put into the sort of society a generation ship would have: the religious beliefs, the tensions, the economics, the leisure activities, the social arrangements.

It would be misleading to say nothing happens. Many things happen. But there is not very much in the way of plot. It is essentially the events that happen over the course of a particularly interesting few months in the lives of a dozen ordinary people on the generation ship. It is a slice-of-life story; it is as interested in parenting struggles and teenagers fighting with their best friends as it is in starship accidents or the alien ethnographer studying the human colony.

I have literally been craving this book for the past fifteen years. (I really really want it in post-apocalyptic, but you can’t have everything.) If slice-of-life SF with rich sociological worldbuilding is your thing, you’ll really love it.

Link Post for June

Tags

disability, effective altruism, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality, wild animals

Social Justice

“Being taught by Milton Friedman makes you less likely to give long sentences on certain kinds of criminal activity, particularly around like drug crimes.”

Simultaneously “I understand why this was your best choice in this situation” and “aaaawkward”: “To top it all off, reports that Disney had been “browning up” some actors on set… drew a swift response from Disney, noting… that “diversity of our cast and background performers was a requirement and only in a handful of instances when it was a matter of specialty skills, safety and control (special effects rigs, stunt performers and handling of animals) were crew made up to blend in.””

A man whose mother has a severe intellectual disability discusses his relationship with her.

[cw: child sexual abuse] Why Honduran women are being driven to the US border. (Sample excerpt: “When doctors told [12-year-old] Sofia she was pregnant and explained that pregnancy meant she was going to have a baby, Sofia, in her soft, small voice, asked whether she could have a doll instead.”)

From the ‘social model of disability’ files: “In theory, a social definition of infertility—one laid out in terms of intentions and identities rather than diseases and disabilities—circumvents these problems. But it creates complexities of its own. Last year, researchers from Yale and the University of Haifa, in Israel, shared the results of a study in which they asked a hundred and fifty women who have frozen their eggs to explain their motivations. The overwhelming majority of the women cited what might be called “man problems,” including divorces, breakups, and male partners who weren’t yet ready to have children. It takes a conceptual leap to see a recent divorcée and a woman with endometriosis as equally infertile, but Campo-Engelstein argues that they are “similar enough that they should be treated the same.””

Effective Altruism

Is effective altruism growing? “Overall, the decline in people first discovering EA (reading) and the growth of donations / career changes (doing) makes sense, as it is likely the result of the intentional effort across several groups and individuals in EA over the past few years to focus on high-fidelity messaging and growing the impact of pre-existing EAs and deliberate decisions to stop mass marketing, Facebook advertising, etc. The hope is that while this may bring in fewer total people, the people it does bring in will be much higher quality on average.”

The uses of life history classification in understanding wild animal welfare. A thoughtful and nuanced review. (I’m cited!)

A foundational result on the question of how much wild animals suffer is wrong. I am mentioning this 10% because it’s cool and 90% to brag about my role as a catalyst here. (I complained at everyone I could find that this result didn’t make any sense because I was bad at math, and then it turned out to not make any sense because it was wrong.)

Rethink Priorities has an excellent in-depth summary of the evidence that invertebrates suffer, which incidentally explains a lot of really foundational issues related to animal consciousnes in general. Check it out!

Rationality (Practice)

Visualizations of different meanings of probability.

This LW post makes an interesting point about the difference between the norms and goals of science, but I’m mostly linking for the worldbuilding about ALIEN SCIENCE.

People view things as abstractions rather than as atoms, which causes them to miss ways they can interact with things to reach their goals. My summary is boring but the list of examples is very interesting and I really do recommend checking it out.

Subtle errors people make with the concept of conservation of expected evidence.

Weird situations with reasonable explanations, or “why 90% sure is way less sure than you think it is.”

List of examples where one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. Again, the list of examples is incredibly interesting and much better than my summary.

The uses of divination.

Moral realism and moral nonrealism lead to very similar behavior for different reasons.

Rationality (Community)

I don’t agree with everything Ray Arnold wrote about the village versus the mission, but I think he crystallizes for me some important distinctions about the rationality community and moves the interminable conversations about rationalist community norms forward.

Again mostly of interest to rationality community people: rabbit hunts and stag hunts as a metaphor for community participation.

Parenting

Why you should sometimes change your mind after saying ‘no’. I follow this advice personally. My son Viktor only knows a few words and therefore has a hard time expressing preferences without crying. A strict ‘no giving in to crying’ rule would basically mean I couldn’t reassess my decision based on the strength of Viktor’s desires. I am probably going to enforce a ‘no giving in to tantrums’ rule once he’s old enough to express preferences with words, but until then ignoring his communication just seems unethical.

Just Plain Neat

Overzealous cleaner ruins artwork worth 690,000 pounds.

Types of loneliness.

The Secret Rebellion Of Amelia Bedelia, The Bartleby Of Domestic Work.

This is so profoundly my shit that I honestly can’t believe it’s a real article: Georgette Heyer’s crossdressing novels as forced masculinization sexual fantasies.

Why AO3 is one of the best-organized sites on the Internet. “One wrangler, who goes by the handle spacegandalf, pointed me to the example of a character from an audio drama called The Penumbra Podcast who didn’t have an official name in text for several episodes after he was introduced. Yet people were writing fanfic—and trying to tag it by character—before they had any name to tag it with. Because spacegandalf had listened to this podcast—AO3 deliberately recruits and assigns tag wranglers who are members of the fandoms that they wrangle for—they had the necessary context to know that “Big Guy Jacket Man Or Whatever His Name Is” referred to the same person as his slightly more official moniker “the Man In the Brown Jacket” and his later, official name, Jet Sikuliaq (and that none of these names should be confused with a different mysteriously named character from a different audio drama, the Man in the Tan Jacket from Welcome to Night Vale).”

This was recommended to me as one of the best profiles ever written, and it really is: the story of Ricky Jay, one of the greatest living magicians.

Traditional Sexual Ethics Are Impossible In The Modern Day

Tags

ozy blog post, sex positivity

The recent and thought-provoking Slate Star Codex sequence on cultural evolution has led me to think about traditional sexual ethics, and the fact that it is literally impossible to do them in the modern day.

There are three large changes that have occurred in the past few hundred years, which affect sexual ethics. The first and most obvious is the invention of birth control, which permits people to separate (penis-in-vagina) sex and babies.

It is easy to overstate the importance of birth control. Many effective methods of birth control, such as homosexuality and outercourse, were known since the Paleolithic. The Oneida Community reportedly had a typical use pregnancy rate of 0.5%, more effective than modern birth control pills, with male continence; this is a method known since Biblical times. (Of course, the Oneida Community may have had particularly motivated users, and widespread use may have been less effective.)

Nevertheless, giving people more birth control methods with fewer side effects and no chance of not using them in the heat of the moment likely changes many things about sexual ethics.

Second, children are now a net financial drain on their families. In the developed world, children are always a financial cost for 18 years, and often for longer than twenty; they rarely pay their parents back. However, historically and in the developing world, children often began making a financial contribution as young as seven. It is difficult to estimate how many children are/were involved in child labor and how large their contributions to the household were. However, even today, in large families, teenagers who are not sent to school can often pay for themselves through chores and taking care of younger siblings; there is no reason to believe this was not true in the past. (I am interested in more detailed data and am happy to edit this section with more.)

Finally, and most importantly, child mortality.

Our World In Data provides some interesting graphics about child mortality in the past two hundred years. In summary: in 1800, while there is little data, the best estimates suggest that about 40% of children died before age five. In 2019, in rich countries, less than one percent of children die before age five.

Forty percent is a lot of children. Consider a fairly ordinary traditional Catholic family of five children: in 1800, they would only have had three. A family of ten would, in 1800, only have six children. Even the Duggars’ nineteen children would only have been eleven.

But high child mortality rates affect more than family size. That forty percent isn’t evenly distributed among families; some may bury seventy percent of their children, perhaps because of a series of epidemics or a bad crop year. If all you care about is one of your children surviving to take care of you in your old age, and the mortality rate is less than one percent, you have one child. However, if the mortality rate is forty percent and unevenly distributed, you may have to have many more than two kids to have a chance one of them survives to adulthood.

(The evidence is suggestive that decreasing child mortality tends to decrease fertility, in part for this reason.)

What this means is that practicing truly traditional sexual ethics is literally impossible.

You could stop using birth control, and people do. (Catholics use natural family planning, but natural family planning is itself a fairly recent invention. You could, fortunately, do extended breastfeeding for a break in between pregnancies.) In theory, it is required that you educate your children. In practice, you can homestead in a state that doesn’t check up on homeschoolers much and put your children to work farming or watching their younger siblings as soon as they’re able. It wouldn’t be doing right by your kids– it turns out some knowledge of writing and math and history and science is useful for being alive in the 21st century– but you could do it.

But child mortality is a bitch. “Not using birth control” is unpopular, and “educationally neglect your children in order to live on a homestead” is unpopular, but “forty percent of your children die” is more unpopular than either of those. There exist some religions that don’t use modern medicine, but you’re never going to get particularly widespread uptake.

But even if you are a Christian Scientist homeschooler who doesn’t use birth control, you’re still not going to get to the environment that traditional sexual ethics evolved for. Many of that forty percent died in epidemics, and most of the diseases they died of have been eradicated in the United States due to vaccines. You are never, ever going to have three of your children die of smallpox in a single month.

These changes are generally agreed upon to be good things among both sexual liberals and sexual conservatives. No one wants forty percent of their children to die. Child labor is generally unpopular. While some social conservatives disapprove of birth control, most social conservatives do not.

But it means that you can’t make the argument “the sexual ethics of 1800 are good because they are traditional and worked for hundreds of years.” Our situation is very very different from the situation in 1800. Children are financial drains instead of investments; children are almost certainly not going to die; it is possible to separate PIV from reproduction with a good deal of reliability.

This is not, of course, to say that the traditional sexual ethics of 1800 are incorrect for modern humans. It may well be that we would all be happiest if divorce and sodomy were illegal, no one used birth control, having sex before marriage if you’re a woman made you a fallen woman, and men are technically not supposed to have sex outside marriage but in practice seeing a prostitute is a common vice among urbanites. But this proposition– in the current situation– has at best a few decades of track record. It cannot take advantage of the argument from tradition, any more than can the proposition that we would all be happiest if gay marriage were legal, divorce were unstigmatized, many people were poly, and birth control is the default.

We knocked over the Chesterton’s Fence, because Chesterton’s Fence was driven through the heart of millions of children and subjected them to a horrible painful death. Now we have to figure out sexual ethics in a fencefree world. Chesterton’s Fence does not apply.

How To Write Values Dissonance

Tags

ozy blog post, writing

[cw: Rape. Literally the entire post consists of an extensive discussion of societies in which rape is legal and not frowned upon and the justifications they may have for their existence. If that doesn’t sound like your thing, then skip this post.]

Occasionally, one might wish to write a story where the characters have values that the readers don’t (values dissonance). Values dissonance can add a lot of realism to your worldbuilding. Every historical culture approved of some things that 21st century Westerners disapprove of, and disapproved of some things that they approved of; it is likely that future cultures would do the same. Similarly, there’s no reason for secondary worlds to agree with us about everything. Values dissonance can also serve a variety of interesting thematic purposes.

Unfortunately, it’s very easy to write values dissonance in a way that doesn’t work at all. I am going to criticize the novella Three Worlds Collide by Eliezer Yudkowsky for several reasons: I like it; I have met him and am aware that he was definitely trying for values dissonance and not doing a poor job of advocating for beliefs he holds; the values dissonance is all in a particular passage which can be easily excerpted; and the book is freely available online.

The passage containing values dissonance is the following:

The Confessor held up a hand.  “I mean it, my lord Akon.  It is not polite idealism.  We ancients can’t steer.  We remember too much disaster.  We’re too cautious to dare the bold path forward.  Do you know there was a time when nonconsensual sex was illegal?”

Akon wasn’t sure whether to smile or grimace.  “The Prohibition, right?  During the first century pre-Net?  I expect everyone was glad to have that law taken off the books.  I can’t imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then – flirting with a woman, teasing her, leading her on, knowing the whole time that you were perfectly safe because she couldn’t take matters into her own hands if you went a little too far -”

“You need a history refresher, my Lord Administrator.  At some suitably abstract level.  What I’m trying to tell you – and this is not public knowledge – is that we nearly tried to overthrow your government.”

“What?” said Akon.  “The Confessors?”

“No, us.  The ones who remembered the ancient world.  Back then we still had our hands on a large share of the capital and tremendous influence in the grant committees.  When our children legalized rape, we thought that the Future had gone wrong.”

Akon’s mouth hung open.  “You were that prude?”

The Confessor shook his head.  “There aren’t any words,” the Confessor said, “there aren’t any words at all, by which I ever could explain to you.  No, it wasn’t prudery.  It was a memory of disaster.”

“Um,” Akon said.  He was trying not to smile.  “I’m trying to visualize what sort of disaster could have been caused by too much nonconsensual sex -”

“Give it up, my lord,” the Confessor said.  He was finally laughing, but there was an undertone of pain to it.  “Without, shall we say, personal experience, you can’t possibly imagine, and there’s no point in trying.”

There are three fundamental problems with the passage here.

First, it gives me absolutely no sense as a reader about how a society with legalized rape works. For example, here are some of the questions I have as a reader about how this society works, with possible answers and further questions:

• Am I at risk of rape when I’m walking down the street?
  • Yes.
    • What if I have an important appointment, or I’m giving birth?
    • Is ‘I was busy getting raped’ an acceptable reason to delay something or are you supposed to build in time for that?
  • No, because everyone carries pepper spray at all times.
    • Is it legal, or will you be arrested for assault?
    • How does that affect relationships with strangers? Do you have to be continually on your guard that someone might attack you?
  • No, because everyone has been genetically modified to be demisexual.
    • How does that affect other relationships? Casual sex?
    • Is it assumed that the rare non-demisexuals are all rapists?
  • No, because raping strangers is still illegal, only raping acquaintances is legal.
• Is assault legal?
  • Yes, only if you’re committing a rape at the time.
  • Yes, in general.
  • No, rapes happen using voluntarily ingested drugs/alcohol or social coercion.
• How often does rape happen? What percentage of people have been raped?
  • Everyone; it happens on about one in three dates.
  • Everyone; it happens about once in your life.
  • About one in five people; rapists are rare, but you know several people who have experienced rape.
  • Almost no one; we’re genetically engineered out antisocial behavior, and rape is only legal to add a little extra thrill to kinky sex.
• Is there a way to opt out and say you’d prefer raping you be illegal actually?
• Is there social stigma on rapists?
  • Yes; rape is considered morally wrong but is not illegal.
  • Yes; rape is considered kind of shameful because it implies you can’t get laid the normal way.
  • Rape is completely unmarked. No one notices or cares whether you’ve committed rape.
  • If you’re a rapist it’s VALID. If you’re not a rapist it’s VALID. STOP QUESTIONING PEOPLE’S SEXUAL CHOICES!!!!!!!
  • Actually, rapists are considered to be sexy, thrilling bad boys/girls.
• Is there social stigma on rape victims?
  • Yes; you shouldn’t have led them on.
  • Yes; you should have been able to defend yourself.
  • Being a rape victim is completely unmarked. No one notices or cares whether you’re a rape victim, including the victim.
  • Rape is an unfortunate thing that happens to people sometimes, like a chronic illness.
  • Being a rape victim is high status and sexy.
• What happens if you rape someone and you or they get pregnant?
  • Either party can force the other person to get an abortion; both people need to consent for a child to be created.
  • Rape victims can force rapists to get an abortion, but not vice versa.
  • Rapist has to raise the kid.
  • Rape victim has to raise the kid.
  • Who raises the kid is decided by something else
  • You are now married and have to be coparents.
  • Rapist has to pay punitive child support as a penalty for not using birth control.
  • Rapist is fined for nonconsensual child creation.
  • Rapist and rape victim are fined for irresponsible child creation.

And so on and so forth.

These are all very different societies! Eliezer has provided us with any details about how ‘rape is legal’ works– apparently women commit rape as often as men do or more often, rape seems to be something that occurs centrally in a date context– but not nearly enough to understand what it is like to live in a society where rape is legal.

Second, Eliezer provides only the most half-assed justification for why anyone would think this is a good idea. “It makes dates more exciting if you might get raped during them” is the beginning of a justification. But the reader is left with obvious questions. What about the very common preference to feel comfortable and safe on a date? Is that preference uncommon in this universe? Is it considered invalid for some reason? (Why?) Do people who share this preference have some way of getting it met (e.g. particular dating websites)?

In our world, rape is traumatizing. Are people in this society so jaded that running a risk of PTSD is worth it for hot dates? Do they believe (whether or not it’s true) that sexual trauma from rape is caused by thinking sex is something special instead of an ordinary recreational activity? Do they believe rape is only traumatizing because people believe it is traumatizing? Do they have incredibly good PTSD treatment such that being raped results in only a week or two of disability?

To be clear, you don’t have to have a good reason for a particular policy to be enacted. “Rape of people with no political influence is legal” has a perfectly understandable rationale: the people with political influence like committing rapes and are at no risk of becoming rape victims. But you need a reason that makes sense within human psychology.

Finally, I believe good values dissonance, where you really inhabit the alternate perspective, results in the values-dissonant position being appealing. What’s good about the policy? What might make people support it?

One way to make a policy appealing is making the tradeoffs of our current policy salient. For example, research suggests that between a third and half of all women have sexual fantasies in which they are raped. One might imagine a woman from the society where rape is legal arguing that it’s absurd to criminalize her fulfilling her own most cherished sexual fantasy; she is an adult making her own choices, and forcing her to confine her fantasies to her imagination or roleplay is fake consensualism. If she wants to let anyone who likes rape her, she should be allowed to do so.

Another strategy is to play into cognitive biases and moral intuitions that the reader already has. In the example above, I appealed to the reader’s concern for bodily autonomy and distaste for paternalism. A similar strategy might be to criticize making marital rape illegal on the grounds of a right to privacy, which presumably the reader agrees you have.

Making the values-dissonant policy appealing is obviously not necessary to write values dissonance well. But I think it’s worth considering when you’re writing values dissonance.

In Eliezer’s specific case, of course, making Legalized Rape World appealing was necessary, because the setting of Three Worlds Collide is supposed to be better than our current world and the purpose of the rape section is to convey that the better world would contain many things we find morally horrifying (as our ancestors would find gay marriage and integration morally horrifying). If Legalized Rape World is not appealing at all even a little bit, that section has failed in its purpose (as I would argue it did).

Appealing values dissonance allows the reader to understand why people in the past believed evil things. Many people in the past were involved with things we presently consider atrocities and human rights violations: slavery, footbinding, legalized marital rape, the murder of gladiators for public entertainment, animal cruelty, rape as a weapon of war, the slaughter of innocent civilians, and so on and so forth. Presumably this is not because the people of the past lacked the moral fiber we have today; their character and “baseline goodness” is likely similar to our own, and indeed many people who owned slaves or were cruel to animals were otherwise morally admirable. I believe fiction has an ability to build empathy in us for aspects of the human experience which are very distant from our own, and (sadly) being a person who is not exceptionally evil but is complicit or even actively participates in atrocities is a common part of the human experience.

Further, appealing values dissonance may bring to the reader’s attention that certain thought processes they themselves use may be suspect as a means of morally reasoning. I believe this can be a powerful tool for causing readers to question their own moral intuitions. If they can be made to sympathize with things they find appalling due to their feeling that anything disgusting is evil, or their desire for the guilty to be punished, or their sense that people far away don’t matter as much as those who are nearby, perhaps these intuitions are in general suspect.

Also, it’s often intellectually interesting and a fun stretch as a writer, which can be its own justification. Art for art’s sake and all that.

How does one learn to write values dissonance?

In my experience, there is no substitute for reading smart people you disagree with, especially people who believe strange or morally repugnant things. (Presumably conversation would be better, but befriending people who believe morally repugnant things comes with its own problems.)

Old books are sometimes your friend, but not always. For example, Thomas Malthus takes “birth control is worse than a bunch of people dying in a famine” as an axiom with which he does not expect anyone to disagree, which is less than helpful for writing a society which thinks birth control is worse than famine. Better to read the writings of modern traditional Catholics, who have to defend their beliefs. Old books often defend their beliefs with claims the modern reader would find unconvincing. While “the divine right of kings exists because all kings are descended from Old Testament patriarchs” may have been convincing in 1680, it is unlikely to appeal to the modern reader. Conversely, modern people who believe weird things likely defend their beliefs with reference to modern ideas of autonomy, self-determination, fulfillment, etc.

On the other hand, many repugnant beliefs– such as slavery being legal– are difficult to find defenses of in the modern day, and it is necessary to make do with old books. Old books may also help to create a more genuinely alien moral culture, which is desirable for some worldbuilding.

It is important to choose authors you can respect. It is easy to choose authors that make dumb arguments, but that will not result in a society that rings true. (Perhaps that is the issue with Three Worlds Collide; “all rape should be legal” is not a position typically defended by people who make good arguments, so it is difficult to crib from others.)