I signed on to read apprehensively, and found a lot of interesting insight. In particular, while it seems clear in retrospect, I’d never actually had the thought:
“The rule follows: for things that are private and rarely discussed, there may be a good deal of unacknowledged diversity.”
I also appreciated what I took as an implicit reminder that even what feels like a very large “n” to me might still be vanishingly small and skewed overall. There are lots of times that I feel like I’ve met over a hundred people who all felt the same way about the same question, and it’s nice to remember that could be a single bubble in a boiling chaotic pot, or a single dark-colored stone on a beach full of stones of all kinds.
There was one part which took me by surprise, and seemed to contradict the overall message of the post, and it was this:
“If he did I would consider him to be an utter boor, I would never hook up with him again, and I would complain to my friends and expect all my friends to be sympathetic.”
I couldn’t tell if that was meant to be a “mea culpa” counterexample, where you were showing a thought you would have before remembering the thing about different strokes for different folks, or whether that’s still your endorsed position.
If that’s still your endorsed position, I think you must be imagining a different sort of circumstance than I am, because in the circumstance I’m imagining that’s just way overreact-y and inappropriately harsh. I think what I’m drawing from that paragraph (which may be inaccurate) is a claim like “there is literally no way for someone to express any opinion or preference surrounding my pubic hair’s appearance that isn’t pushy or rude or uncalled for.”
And I have a pretty easy time imagining someone saying something (even unsolicited) that’s better said than swallowed and that I would advocate we should not have norms that strongly punish. In other words, I can see a range of things-a-person-might-say that would totally deserve the response you offered, but I can see a larger range of things-a-person-might-say where the example response you gave strikes me as 2-10x ruder.
The norm among people I date is that it is utterly inappropriate to express a preference about someone’s pubic hair unless you’ve been dating fairly seriously for at least a few months (and even then it’s definitely a-favor-they’re-doing-you rather than a-thing-you-have-the-right-to-expect) or they’ve explicitly solicited it. As to whether it’s a good norm—well, it’s the one I’m used to and I haven’t experienced another one, I have no complaints, but I can hardly compare it to others.
Perhaps the confusion is that in my particular dating pool it is not remotely uncommon for people to have sex with people they’ve just met. If I only had sex with people I’ve been dating for three months I’d consider it much more reasonable for them to have pubic-hair opinions.
I think it’s more that I parse “offer an opinion” as a pretty tame/neutral/soft action (which may be the crux). There are certainly opinions that are rude to hold and rude to offer, but “offer an opinion” as a class seems to me to describe something far less intrusive than e.g. “criticize,” “denigrate,” “ask that you change,” “make judgments about” or even “assert an opinion.”
(This is why I posited above that maybe we’re imagining different scenarios, although it’s seeming more like we’re imagining similar scenarios but just having different reactions to them.)
“Offer an opinion,” in my head, conjures up something like a person making a nonverbal :/ and then their partner making a nonverbal :? and then the first person saying “Oh, I just like it better when people don’t shave.” Or perhaps someone saying “I think it’d look beautiful if you grew this out.”
Presumptuous, to be sure, with the degree of presumptuousness depending heavily on tone and context and whether they’re alive and responsive to their partner’s reaction if indeed it was a hurtful overstepping of bounds. Certainly unambiguously rude, in a very real swath of possible cases.
(And of course, there are things that are much more presumptuous, that you might have meant to refer to with the polite handle “offer an opinion.”)
But to me, that’s a very different class than somebody, offhandedly and unsolicited, saying “You should shave.” Or “What, no hair?” Or “What a mess.” Or “Oh, never mind, [all of the reasons that made us think we were compatible and got us here in the first place are outweighed by] I’m turned off by that.”
I think it’s the norm in my subculture bubbles that if someone lightly oversteps the bounds of propriety by offering an unwanted and unsolicited opinion (as opposed to doing the stuff in the previous paragraph, which I think is better described by those other phrases), it’s absolutely unjustified to write them off entirely as a person, sum them up as an utter boor, and complain about them to multiple other friends, possibly people in the same social circles. That seems way disproportionate to me, and a serious escalation, and the sort of thing that reflects much worse on the “doxxer” than on the “boor.”
(And furthermore, it seems bad enough that it’s worth these words I’m spending on it; from the inside this doesn’t feel like making a mountain out of a molehill, it feels like pointing at something scary dangerous.)
I’m much more in agreement with you about the appropriateness of the described reaction in the cases that I’m filing under the categories “criticize,” “ask that you change,” etc., especially the part where you personally tag that person in your own head as “not worth dealing with” and never hook up with them again—that seems 100% justified, and something I’d explicitly validate if I were the friend being confided in.
Even then, though, unless the situation described to me is like 80th percentile bad or worse, I’d still try to uphold a “maybe we don’t talk crap about people who aren’t here to defend their honor?” norm. I think my sympathies end at the point where [my friend’s sovereignty over their body and their sex life] ends, and the space of [gossip and status moves and social attacks] begins.
If it’s something my friend feels others in the social space need to be warned about, for their own emotional and physical safety, that’s one thing. But if it’s someone who’s taking a private interaction, interpreting it through their own lenses, reaching an uncharitable judgment, and then spreading that judgment around as if it represents accurate truth (with accompanying social pressure on others to agree, in the form of an expectation that they be sympathetic!) without the transgressor even being aware of the damage that’s being done to them, and with no way for them to defend themselves or explain their perspective—
That sounds like a great way to build a toxic, fear-filled society where everyone’s judged behind closed doors for honest mistakes and small social slip-ups, and where anybody with anything approximating social anxiety has to just stay home entirely because who knows, if I ever think it’s safe to offer an opinion and it turns out I was misreading things and overstepping my bounds, I’ll be immediately rejected as a person and gossiped about in private.
(I reiterate that I still have, in my hypothesis space, that we’re just using the words “offer an opinion” differently, and that it may be that once I had a mental model of the thing you actually meant/have experienced, the space of disagreement collapses down to basically nothing. If you’re using the phrase as more of a gentle euphemism for people being rudely and unsolicited-ly critical, then I think we more like 90% agree. But if the cases I describe in paragraph 3 result in the response you described in the original post, I suspect we more like 70% disagree about norms of appropriateness and which harm is fundamentally worse/more corrosive. I’d also be surprised, in that case, that such disagreement came from the author of this post, which I read as being all about recognizing that others have different culture from you, and That’s Okay.)
I move in circles where asking “why is X bad” is as bad as X itself. So for the avoidance of doubt, I do not think that your comment here makes you a bad person.
I’m trying to imagine a conversation where one person expresses a preference about the other’s pubic hair that wouldn’t be inappropriate, and I’m struggling a little. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
A BDSM context in which that sort of thing is a negotiated part.
The two have been playing for a while and are intimate enough for that to be appropriate.
The other person asks, and gets an honest answer.
It sounds like none of these are what you have in mind; can you paint me a more detailed example?
That sounds like a great way to build a toxic, fear-filled society where everyone’s judged behind closed doors for honest mistakes and small social slip-ups, and where anybody with anything approximating social anxiety has to just stay home entirely because who knows, if I ever think it’s safe to offer an opinion and it turns out I was misreading things and overstepping my bounds, I’ll be immediately rejected as a person and gossiped about in private.
In the case that you did not write this facetiously, I regret to inform you that some people already live in such a world.
I know Ozy hangs out in places at least adjacent to it.
Yeah. I am aware that a lot of people already live in that world, and I even had a stereotype of Ozy being closer to those people than I, both in terms of knowing more such people/needing fewer steps to reach them, and also in terms of personally caring more about ameliorating that kind of issue. That’s why I was really surprised to see that dynamic popping up endorsedly in an otherwise very-opposed-to-that-sort-of-thing post.
I’ve been feeling sort of sad about how there was no further comment from them on this question. As noted above, it seems really really worth hashing out. I notice that, at this point, I’m essentially interpreting the lack of reply as a lack of defense.
I signed on to read apprehensively, and found a lot of interesting insight. In particular, while it seems clear in retrospect, I’d never actually had the thought:
I also appreciated what I took as an implicit reminder that even what feels like a very large “n” to me might still be vanishingly small and skewed overall. There are lots of times that I feel like I’ve met over a hundred people who all felt the same way about the same question, and it’s nice to remember that could be a single bubble in a boiling chaotic pot, or a single dark-colored stone on a beach full of stones of all kinds.
There was one part which took me by surprise, and seemed to contradict the overall message of the post, and it was this:
I couldn’t tell if that was meant to be a “mea culpa” counterexample, where you were showing a thought you would have before remembering the thing about different strokes for different folks, or whether that’s still your endorsed position.
If that’s still your endorsed position, I think you must be imagining a different sort of circumstance than I am, because in the circumstance I’m imagining that’s just way overreact-y and inappropriately harsh. I think what I’m drawing from that paragraph (which may be inaccurate) is a claim like “there is literally no way for someone to express any opinion or preference surrounding my pubic hair’s appearance that isn’t pushy or rude or uncalled for.”
And I have a pretty easy time imagining someone saying something (even unsolicited) that’s better said than swallowed and that I would advocate we should not have norms that strongly punish. In other words, I can see a range of things-a-person-might-say that would totally deserve the response you offered, but I can see a larger range of things-a-person-might-say where the example response you gave strikes me as 2-10x ruder.
Any interest in enriching my model?
The norm among people I date is that it is utterly inappropriate to express a preference about someone’s pubic hair unless you’ve been dating fairly seriously for at least a few months (and even then it’s definitely a-favor-they’re-doing-you rather than a-thing-you-have-the-right-to-expect) or they’ve explicitly solicited it. As to whether it’s a good norm—well, it’s the one I’m used to and I haven’t experienced another one, I have no complaints, but I can hardly compare it to others.
Perhaps the confusion is that in my particular dating pool it is not remotely uncommon for people to have sex with people they’ve just met. If I only had sex with people I’ve been dating for three months I’d consider it much more reasonable for them to have pubic-hair opinions.
I think it’s more that I parse “offer an opinion” as a pretty tame/neutral/soft action (which may be the crux). There are certainly opinions that are rude to hold and rude to offer, but “offer an opinion” as a class seems to me to describe something far less intrusive than e.g. “criticize,” “denigrate,” “ask that you change,” “make judgments about” or even “assert an opinion.”
(This is why I posited above that maybe we’re imagining different scenarios, although it’s seeming more like we’re imagining similar scenarios but just having different reactions to them.)
“Offer an opinion,” in my head, conjures up something like a person making a nonverbal :/ and then their partner making a nonverbal :? and then the first person saying “Oh, I just like it better when people don’t shave.” Or perhaps someone saying “I think it’d look beautiful if you grew this out.”
Presumptuous, to be sure, with the degree of presumptuousness depending heavily on tone and context and whether they’re alive and responsive to their partner’s reaction if indeed it was a hurtful overstepping of bounds. Certainly unambiguously rude, in a very real swath of possible cases.
(And of course, there are things that are much more presumptuous, that you might have meant to refer to with the polite handle “offer an opinion.”)
But to me, that’s a very different class than somebody, offhandedly and unsolicited, saying “You should shave.” Or “What, no hair?” Or “What a mess.” Or “Oh, never mind, [all of the reasons that made us think we were compatible and got us here in the first place are outweighed by] I’m turned off by that.”
I think it’s the norm in my subculture bubbles that if someone lightly oversteps the bounds of propriety by offering an unwanted and unsolicited opinion (as opposed to doing the stuff in the previous paragraph, which I think is better described by those other phrases), it’s absolutely unjustified to write them off entirely as a person, sum them up as an utter boor, and complain about them to multiple other friends, possibly people in the same social circles. That seems way disproportionate to me, and a serious escalation, and the sort of thing that reflects much worse on the “doxxer” than on the “boor.”
(And furthermore, it seems bad enough that it’s worth these words I’m spending on it; from the inside this doesn’t feel like making a mountain out of a molehill, it feels like pointing at something scary dangerous.)
I’m much more in agreement with you about the appropriateness of the described reaction in the cases that I’m filing under the categories “criticize,” “ask that you change,” etc., especially the part where you personally tag that person in your own head as “not worth dealing with” and never hook up with them again—that seems 100% justified, and something I’d explicitly validate if I were the friend being confided in.
Even then, though, unless the situation described to me is like 80th percentile bad or worse, I’d still try to uphold a “maybe we don’t talk crap about people who aren’t here to defend their honor?” norm. I think my sympathies end at the point where [my friend’s sovereignty over their body and their sex life] ends, and the space of [gossip and status moves and social attacks] begins.
If it’s something my friend feels others in the social space need to be warned about, for their own emotional and physical safety, that’s one thing. But if it’s someone who’s taking a private interaction, interpreting it through their own lenses, reaching an uncharitable judgment, and then spreading that judgment around as if it represents accurate truth (with accompanying social pressure on others to agree, in the form of an expectation that they be sympathetic!) without the transgressor even being aware of the damage that’s being done to them, and with no way for them to defend themselves or explain their perspective—
That sounds like a great way to build a toxic, fear-filled society where everyone’s judged behind closed doors for honest mistakes and small social slip-ups, and where anybody with anything approximating social anxiety has to just stay home entirely because who knows, if I ever think it’s safe to offer an opinion and it turns out I was misreading things and overstepping my bounds, I’ll be immediately rejected as a person and gossiped about in private.
(I reiterate that I still have, in my hypothesis space, that we’re just using the words “offer an opinion” differently, and that it may be that once I had a mental model of the thing you actually meant/have experienced, the space of disagreement collapses down to basically nothing. If you’re using the phrase as more of a gentle euphemism for people being rudely and unsolicited-ly critical, then I think we more like 90% agree. But if the cases I describe in paragraph 3 result in the response you described in the original post, I suspect we more like 70% disagree about norms of appropriateness and which harm is fundamentally worse/more corrosive. I’d also be surprised, in that case, that such disagreement came from the author of this post, which I read as being all about recognizing that others have different culture from you, and That’s Okay.)
I move in circles where asking “why is X bad” is as bad as X itself. So for the avoidance of doubt, I do not think that your comment here makes you a bad person.
I’m trying to imagine a conversation where one person expresses a preference about the other’s pubic hair that wouldn’t be inappropriate, and I’m struggling a little. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
A BDSM context in which that sort of thing is a negotiated part.
The two have been playing for a while and are intimate enough for that to be appropriate.
The other person asks, and gets an honest answer.
It sounds like none of these are what you have in mind; can you paint me a more detailed example?
In the case that you did not write this facetiously, I regret to inform you that some people already live in such a world.
I know Ozy hangs out in places at least adjacent to it.
Yeah. I am aware that a lot of people already live in that world, and I even had a stereotype of Ozy being closer to those people than I, both in terms of knowing more such people/needing fewer steps to reach them, and also in terms of personally caring more about ameliorating that kind of issue. That’s why I was really surprised to see that dynamic popping up endorsedly in an otherwise very-opposed-to-that-sort-of-thing post.
I’ve been feeling sort of sad about how there was no further comment from them on this question. As noted above, it seems really really worth hashing out. I notice that, at this point, I’m essentially interpreting the lack of reply as a lack of defense.