Whatever the supposed impact of not walking on eggshells is, it’s almost certainly dwarfed by other factors—the ones we probably can’t talk about without setting off the non-neurotypical gender advocates here.
You sound like you are quaking in your boots at the hypothetical reaction of these non-neurotypical women. They must be scary! Maybe, as a neurotypical woman, I can act as a mediator? Would you like to be able to suggest that we’d attract more women if we… used less math? Or like, more… fashion and makeup advice? What do you need to say?
You sound like you are quaking in your boots at the hypothetical reaction of these non-neurotypical women.
It’s not hypothetical. Discussion of effective methods of appealing to women have led to tremendous flamewars here. Indeed, that’s why it’s so rare to see mention of the very interesting PUA (“Pick up artist”, see LW wiki or google) phenomenon.
What do you need to say?
I’m really not the expert on this matter, but those who are knowledgeable about PUA have insight into how women see things, and virtually every insight from that field is offensive, at least when not watered down into corporatespeak. (Note: this does NOT mean trying to date women as a means of or result of drawing them in, but rather, that the appreciation of the real, rather than stated, female mindset that PUAs have will provide more general insights.)
So… you don’t have anything actually to suggest? I’m having a hard time figuring out how what I know of PUA could be applied to getting women to come to meetups. From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty specialized to getting women to sleep with you.
Maybe you should start by trying to figure out actual helpful suggestions, and then we can worry about whether people will be offended by them.
(BTW: my older brother is depressed by his lack of success with women. I’d like to point him toward some helpful seduction resources but 1) I don’t know how to do this without embarrassing him because, you know, it’s dating advice from his younger sister and 2) I know a significant subset of that stuff is really kind of misogynist and nasty, and I’d rather not support that. Anyone have any brilliant ideas?)
Maybe you should start by trying to figure out actual helpful suggestions, and then we can worry about whether people will be offended by them.
Good advice, I think. It is hard to tell (without an example) whether any gimmicks that work to get women into bed with you also work to get women to meetups. I would guess that any convincing way of communicating the message “Come on! It will be fun!!” would help with both.
Anyone have any brilliant ideas?
Call his attention to the stuff under the guise of soliciting a male opinion on whether it is offensively misogynist and nasty. Then let him make his own adult decisions as to whether he wants to make use of any of the information.
BTW: my older brother is depressed by his lack of success with women. I’d like to point him toward some helpful seduction resources but 1) I don’t know how to do this without embarrassing him because, you know, it’s dating advice from his younger sister and 2) I know a significant subset of that stuff is really kind of misogynist and nasty, and I’d rather not support that. Anyone have any brilliant ideas?
You might want to ask that question on a comment thread that isn’t hidden due to a downvoted parent.
There is at least one post on lesswrong that discusses non-misogynist PUA, you can find it as well as I can. I think HughRistik, for one, has stuff to say on this topic, if you can’t find the discussion you could try PMing him.
I like MarriedManSexLife for being non-misogynist, non-nasty, non-just-about-sex. It primarily focuses on marriage and long term relationships and less on starting relationships, but there’s plenty that would carry over. Start with the links at the top.
I do have things to suggest, but they were for narrower subgoals. (I was going to suggest something like, when it comes to being communities, that there needed to be some way to credibly signal that men have the same potential for commitment that they expect out of churchmen, but that’s not helpful for a nascent group that isn’t at the full community level yet.)
Maybe you should start by trying to figure out actual helpful suggestions, and then we can worry about whether people will be offended by them.
No, the problem with self-censorship is that you don’t get the chance to see the controversial speech in the first place, and if you’ve been here long, you know how muted such speech is going to be.
(BTW: my older brother is depressed by his lack of success with women. I’d like to point him toward some helpful seduction resources but 1) I don’t know how to do this without embarrassing him because, you know, it’s dating advice from his younger sister and 2) I know a significant subset of that stuff is really kind of misogynist and nasty, and I’d rather not support that. Anyone have any brilliant ideas?)
Like I said before, I don’t have expertise on PUA, but I do have expertise on the phenomenon—that of being unable to convey an understanding. Recent comment on the matter. For starters, the most common problem with women giving such advice is that they tell men what they want (i.e., if they already were attracted to a man, what would be “icing on the cake”) rather than what would work (i.e. what actually attracts them),
So, you should first make sure you have introspected on what exactly your desires are, to the point that when you say, “do this not that”, you know why he should do this rather than that, so that he can assimilate an actual understanding and be able to make such inferences without your help. (I remember a thread a while back that I won’t link where a woman was trying to give advice but it was clear she did not meet this standard and so failed to deconfuse anyone who wasn’t already deconfused.)
Your brother will not mind getting advice from his younger sister—men do far more self-debasing things to level up in this department—so long as your advice is actually effective (not the “icing on the cake” type I described above) and grounded in serious introspection rather than just giving socially acceptable platitudes.
Serious introspection is very important. One problem is that what comes to mind for behaviors correlated with attractiveness are those correlated with maximum attractiveness, and behaviors associated with maximum attractiveness are correlated with that because they are otherwise generally unattractive behaviors that are being conspicuously overcome by the maximally attractive.
Imagine a wolf pack in which the males fought for positions in the hierarchy. The lowest ranked make might signal his harmlessness to the other low-ranked males by failing to plant his feet when among the pack, thereby making himself disadvantaged in any fight, and we might find him frequently standing on three legs. The top male might conspicuously display his unconcern with challengers by failing to plant his fourth paw and spend a lot of time on three paws. Female wolves might reasonably advise a young wolf to model himself after the top wolf...but this would be naive. A young wolf modeling the three-paw stance would never be mistaken for the alpha wolf. So too a human should be wary of advice to “just be himself and not hide his emotions. like John Mayer”. That would be bad advice. (Wolf behavior made up on the spot by me [I think] as an analogy.)
I recommend browsing through this site and isolating those posts which will least make him feel bad, and sharing those.
I think there is plenty of potential to be tapped from this field—as long as it’s not coming from the wrong place.
What I’m concerned about is hard to describe, but what first springs to mind is what the opposite problem would look like.
Lets pretend we were a mostly-female group trying to attract men, and somebody suggested “well, we know what attracts men, ladies taking their clothes off!”
While I’m sure the membership would increase… it might not be quite the dynamic we’re aiming for. I think the same would happen if we tried to apply “attracting women” suggestions that are brought from the “only trying to have sex with them” subset of PUA
I am aware, though, as you have reiterated, that there are several fields of PUA that are more about understanding what women really want (even if they don’t know themselves).
I would actually, treally ruly (even though I’m a woman) be interested in hearing some suggestions based on knowledge gathered by these people.
Would you be willing to put in some work tracking down stuff in this subset of the field and coming up with some suggestions based on it?
(I remember a thread a while back that I won’t link where a woman was trying to give advice but it was clear she did not meet this standard and so failed to deconfuse anyone who wasn’t already deconfused.)
was this person doing this because she was a woman… or because she had a common lack of a particular social skill (just like many non-women)?
When I read comments like this, I’m reminded of this xkcd comic
Thanks to the people that replied. I still haven’t gotten around to sending any of this stuff to older brother… first I should probably get together with him socially (without my fiance) and bring the conversation around to it, so I can feel out how receptive he is. I got one useful reply via PM from someone who wants to be anonymous:
There are two people on this site who are very familiar with PUA stuff and not enormous gits. Wedrifid is not a self identified feminist but see this
I would ask both of them for advice. More viewpoints are better. I suspect you can’t give your older brother advice in a way that won’t make him feel bad.
Speaking from my own experience (as the brother who was obviously less successful than the younger brothers) if he’s in a bad enough situation the blow to his pride will be ignored in favour of inspecting the possibly useful advice.
I believe the PUA known as Juggler would be acceptable, as generally not a hideous misogynist. I know that the founder of the modern PUA subculture Mystery has changed the vocabulary in his guide, e.g. from “bitch shield” to “protection shield”. He’s probably not actively poisonous, torrent “Mystery Method”
If you can’t get anything else out of this the easiest things that are completely socially acceptable to say to your brother are
Exercise. You will feel better and look better. For maximum benefits for time spent lift weights, squats, benches and deadlifts. If you don’t have gym access, squats and press ups. NO SIT UPS. they fuck up your back,
Get a decent haircut. Note, this can include having your hair so short it’s not there, or so short it stands up. It must not look crap.
Learn to distinguish “This fits me” from “This doesn’t” when it comes to clothes. If he can do that and is willing to throw out all clothes that don’t fit he’s doing better than 50% of men. At least. For advanced classes he could go to reddit.com/r/MaleFashionAdvice
Being a cool, interesting guy who’s having a good time is attractive.
I suppose it could be taken to imply that all the other candidates are total gits? Not sure that’s what was intended. I dunno, not really in the habit of sanitizing other people’s words.
I am somewhat familiar with PUA literature and I think PUA has plenty of interesting and useful things to say, especially for stereotypically low status men. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much theory or advice that seems especially relevant to attracting women to do nonromantic things, so I don’t think there are huge obvious gains here.
You sound like you are quaking in your boots at the hypothetical reaction of these non-neurotypical women. They must be scary! Maybe, as a neurotypical woman, I can act as a mediator? Would you like to be able to suggest that we’d attract more women if we… used less math? Or like, more… fashion and makeup advice? What do you need to say?
It’s not hypothetical. Discussion of effective methods of appealing to women have led to tremendous flamewars here. Indeed, that’s why it’s so rare to see mention of the very interesting PUA (“Pick up artist”, see LW wiki or google) phenomenon.
I’m really not the expert on this matter, but those who are knowledgeable about PUA have insight into how women see things, and virtually every insight from that field is offensive, at least when not watered down into corporatespeak. (Note: this does NOT mean trying to date women as a means of or result of drawing them in, but rather, that the appreciation of the real, rather than stated, female mindset that PUAs have will provide more general insights.)
So… you don’t have anything actually to suggest? I’m having a hard time figuring out how what I know of PUA could be applied to getting women to come to meetups. From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty specialized to getting women to sleep with you.
Maybe you should start by trying to figure out actual helpful suggestions, and then we can worry about whether people will be offended by them.
(BTW: my older brother is depressed by his lack of success with women. I’d like to point him toward some helpful seduction resources but 1) I don’t know how to do this without embarrassing him because, you know, it’s dating advice from his younger sister and 2) I know a significant subset of that stuff is really kind of misogynist and nasty, and I’d rather not support that. Anyone have any brilliant ideas?)
Good advice, I think. It is hard to tell (without an example) whether any gimmicks that work to get women into bed with you also work to get women to meetups. I would guess that any convincing way of communicating the message “Come on! It will be fun!!” would help with both.
Call his attention to the stuff under the guise of soliciting a male opinion on whether it is offensively misogynist and nasty. Then let him make his own adult decisions as to whether he wants to make use of any of the information.
I agree.
For point #2, I would suggest http://www.authenticmanprogram.com/ as an example of non-misogynist, non-nasty, non-just-about-sex “PUA” material.
For point #1, if he’s specifically talked to you about it, maybe he’s not likely to be that embarrassed?
You might want to ask that question on a comment thread that isn’t hidden due to a downvoted parent.
There is at least one post on lesswrong that discusses non-misogynist PUA, you can find it as well as I can. I think HughRistik, for one, has stuff to say on this topic, if you can’t find the discussion you could try PMing him.
HughRistik is great!
I like MarriedManSexLife for being non-misogynist, non-nasty, non-just-about-sex. It primarily focuses on marriage and long term relationships and less on starting relationships, but there’s plenty that would carry over. Start with the links at the top.
I do have things to suggest, but they were for narrower subgoals. (I was going to suggest something like, when it comes to being communities, that there needed to be some way to credibly signal that men have the same potential for commitment that they expect out of churchmen, but that’s not helpful for a nascent group that isn’t at the full community level yet.)
No, the problem with self-censorship is that you don’t get the chance to see the controversial speech in the first place, and if you’ve been here long, you know how muted such speech is going to be.
Like I said before, I don’t have expertise on PUA, but I do have expertise on the phenomenon—that of being unable to convey an understanding. Recent comment on the matter. For starters, the most common problem with women giving such advice is that they tell men what they want (i.e., if they already were attracted to a man, what would be “icing on the cake”) rather than what would work (i.e. what actually attracts them),
So, you should first make sure you have introspected on what exactly your desires are, to the point that when you say, “do this not that”, you know why he should do this rather than that, so that he can assimilate an actual understanding and be able to make such inferences without your help. (I remember a thread a while back that I won’t link where a woman was trying to give advice but it was clear she did not meet this standard and so failed to deconfuse anyone who wasn’t already deconfused.)
Your brother will not mind getting advice from his younger sister—men do far more self-debasing things to level up in this department—so long as your advice is actually effective (not the “icing on the cake” type I described above) and grounded in serious introspection rather than just giving socially acceptable platitudes.
Serious introspection is very important. One problem is that what comes to mind for behaviors correlated with attractiveness are those correlated with maximum attractiveness, and behaviors associated with maximum attractiveness are correlated with that because they are otherwise generally unattractive behaviors that are being conspicuously overcome by the maximally attractive.
Imagine a wolf pack in which the males fought for positions in the hierarchy. The lowest ranked make might signal his harmlessness to the other low-ranked males by failing to plant his feet when among the pack, thereby making himself disadvantaged in any fight, and we might find him frequently standing on three legs. The top male might conspicuously display his unconcern with challengers by failing to plant his fourth paw and spend a lot of time on three paws. Female wolves might reasonably advise a young wolf to model himself after the top wolf...but this would be naive. A young wolf modeling the three-paw stance would never be mistaken for the alpha wolf. So too a human should be wary of advice to “just be himself and not hide his emotions. like John Mayer”. That would be bad advice. (Wolf behavior made up on the spot by me [I think] as an analogy.)
I recommend browsing through this site and isolating those posts which will least make him feel bad, and sharing those.
I think there is plenty of potential to be tapped from this field—as long as it’s not coming from the wrong place.
What I’m concerned about is hard to describe, but what first springs to mind is what the opposite problem would look like.
Lets pretend we were a mostly-female group trying to attract men, and somebody suggested “well, we know what attracts men, ladies taking their clothes off!”
While I’m sure the membership would increase… it might not be quite the dynamic we’re aiming for. I think the same would happen if we tried to apply “attracting women” suggestions that are brought from the “only trying to have sex with them” subset of PUA
I am aware, though, as you have reiterated, that there are several fields of PUA that are more about understanding what women really want (even if they don’t know themselves).
I would actually, treally ruly (even though I’m a woman) be interested in hearing some suggestions based on knowledge gathered by these people.
Would you be willing to put in some work tracking down stuff in this subset of the field and coming up with some suggestions based on it?
Just nitpicking but
was this person doing this because she was a woman… or because she had a common lack of a particular social skill (just like many non-women)?
When I read comments like this, I’m reminded of this xkcd comic
Thanks to the people that replied. I still haven’t gotten around to sending any of this stuff to older brother… first I should probably get together with him socially (without my fiance) and bring the conversation around to it, so I can feel out how receptive he is. I got one useful reply via PM from someone who wants to be anonymous:
Why the downvote?
Inflammatory language in the quote.
I suppose it could be taken to imply that all the other candidates are total gits? Not sure that’s what was intended. I dunno, not really in the habit of sanitizing other people’s words.
I am somewhat familiar with PUA literature and I think PUA has plenty of interesting and useful things to say, especially for stereotypically low status men. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much theory or advice that seems especially relevant to attracting women to do nonromantic things, so I don’t think there are huge obvious gains here.