+1 for this. It’s tremendously refreshing to see someone engage the opposing position on a controversial issue in good faith. I hope you don’t regret writing it.
Would your model predict that if we surveyed fans of *50 Shades of Grey*, they have experienced traumatic abuse at a rate higher than the baseline? This seems like a surprising but testable prediction.
Personally, I think your story might be accurate for your peer group, but that your peer group is also highly non-representative of the population at large. There is very wide variation in female sexual preferences. For example, the stupidslutsclub subreddit was created for women to celebrate their enjoyment of degrading and often dubiously consensual sex. The conversation there looks nothing like the conversation about sex in the rationalist community, because they are communities for very different kinds of people. When I read the stupidslutsclub subreddit, I don’t get the impression that the female posters are engaging in the sort of self-harm you describe. They’re just women with some weird kinks.
Most PUA advice is optimized for picking up neurotypical women who go clubbing every weekend. Women in the rationalist community are far more likely to spend Friday evening reading Tumblr than getting turnt. We shouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot of mating behaviors that women in one group enjoy and women in the other group find disturbing.
If I hire someone to commit a murder, I’m guilty of something bad. By creating an incentive for a bad thing to happen, I have caused a bad thing to happen, therefore I’m guilty. By the same logic, we could argue that if a woman systematically rejects non-abusive men in favor of abusive men, she is creating an incentive for men to be abusive, and is therefore guilty. (I’m not sure whether I agree with this argument. It’s not immediately compatible with the “different strokes for different folks” point from previous paragraphs. But if feminists made it, I would find it more plausible that their desire is to stop a dynamic they consider harmful, as opposed to engage in anti-male sectarianism.)
Another point: Your post doesn’t account for replaceability effects. If a woman is systematically rejecting non-abusive men in favor of abusive men, and a guy presents himself as someone who’s abusive enough to be attractive to her but less abusive than the average guy she would date, then you could argue that she gains utility through dating him. And if she has a kid, we’d probably like her to have a kid with someone who’s pretending to be a jerk than someone who actually is a jerk, since the kid only inherits jerk genes in the latter case. (BTW, I think the “systematically rejecting non-abusive men in favor of abusive men” is an extreme case that is probably quite rare/nonexistent in the population, but it’s simpler to think about.)
Once you account for replaceability, it could be that the most effective intervention for decreasing abuse is actually to help non-abusive guys be more attractive. If non-abusive guys are more attractive, some women who would have dated abusive guys will date them instead, so the volume of abuse will decrease. This could involve, for example, advice for how to be dominant in a sexy but non-abusive way.
+1 for this. It’s tremendously refreshing to see someone engage the opposing position on a controversial issue in good faith. I hope you don’t regret writing it.
Would your model predict that if we surveyed fans of *50 Shades of Grey*, they have experienced traumatic abuse at a rate higher than the baseline? This seems like a surprising but testable prediction.
Personally, I think your story might be accurate for your peer group, but that your peer group is also highly non-representative of the population at large. There is very wide variation in female sexual preferences. For example, the stupidslutsclub subreddit was created for women to celebrate their enjoyment of degrading and often dubiously consensual sex. The conversation there looks nothing like the conversation about sex in the rationalist community, because they are communities for very different kinds of people. When I read the stupidslutsclub subreddit, I don’t get the impression that the female posters are engaging in the sort of self-harm you describe. They’re just women with some weird kinks.
Most PUA advice is optimized for picking up neurotypical women who go clubbing every weekend. Women in the rationalist community are far more likely to spend Friday evening reading Tumblr than getting turnt.
We shouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot of mating behaviors that women in one group enjoy and women in the other group find disturbing.
If I hire someone to commit a murder, I’m guilty of something bad. By creating an incentive for a bad thing to happen, I have caused a bad thing to happen, therefore I’m guilty. By the same logic, we could argue that if a woman systematically rejects non-abusive men in favor of abusive men, she is creating an incentive for men to be abusive, and is therefore guilty. (I’m not sure whether I agree with this argument. It’s not immediately compatible with the “different strokes for different folks” point from previous paragraphs. But if feminists made it, I would find it more plausible that their desire is to stop a dynamic they consider harmful, as opposed to engage in anti-male sectarianism.)
Another point: Your post doesn’t account for replaceability effects. If a woman is systematically rejecting non-abusive men in favor of abusive men, and a guy presents himself as someone who’s abusive enough to be attractive to her but less abusive than the average guy she would date, then you could argue that she gains utility through dating him. And if she has a kid, we’d probably like her to have a kid with someone who’s pretending to be a jerk than someone who actually is a jerk, since the kid only inherits jerk genes in the latter case. (BTW, I think the “systematically rejecting non-abusive men in favor of abusive men” is an extreme case that is probably quite rare/nonexistent in the population, but it’s simpler to think about.)
Once you account for replaceability, it could be that the most effective intervention for decreasing abuse is actually to help non-abusive guys be more attractive. If non-abusive guys are more attractive, some women who would have dated abusive guys will date them instead, so the volume of abuse will decrease. This could involve, for example, advice for how to be dominant in a sexy but non-abusive way.