Sharing Is Caring?
On May 15, I received a message from someone I’d never met. Let’s call her Jane because that’s not her name. I’d sent her my blog’s about page. She replied that she found my statement, “Hot girls excite me!” to be off-putting. I asked her why.
She said that statement could make women feel objectified. And that she thought it’d be useful for me to know she had that reaction.
I thanked her for the feedback. And I told her, “I didn’t mean to objectify women. All that statement meant was that I find some girls attractive. It was part of a larger point meant to explain that I’m human, but I spend a lot of time trying to make a positive impact.”
Jane replied, “That makes sense. It just sort of sounded like ogling women was a particular hobby or something.” I briefly tried to come up with a way to say something along the lines of, “As I said, I’m not a creepy pervert. I hope things go well.” But I couldn’t figure out a way to phrase that well. And it seemed like she understood my point. So I didn’t respond. Our conversation ended.
Afterward, I thought about removing “Hot girls excite me!” The other two reactions I’d received to that line were mild laughter and “I’m glad you’re not gay.” I assumed mild laughter or indifference would be the most common reactions.
So while I meant it when I told Jane I was thankful for her feedback, and I believed she was trying to be helpful, I thought her interpretation was a stretch. I felt that the only lesson I learned was that people I interact with are more politically correct than I realized. And they’ll look for ways to misinterpret a statement I meant literally.
I decided I didn’t think it was worthwhile to cater my blog to overly sensitive people. I kept, “Hot girls excite me!”
Then as I was lying in bed that night, I had a revelation. When I asked myself “Who is Utility Monster?” I tried to summarize myself as accurately as possible. Well, that’s not entirely true. I didn’t say something like I’m a collection of cells. But it’s not normal to list finding girls attractive like it’s a hobby. Only someone who writes their first three blog posts about their struggles with taking words too literally would do that!
So I think it’s reasonable for someone to assume I meant something more than what I literally said. Especially someone I’ve never met.
But I wasn’t especially worried by “Hot girls excite me!” I was more concerned about my next post.
(After publishing this post, I received more negative feedback about the phrase “Hot girls excite me!” The statement has been interpreted in ways I didn’t intend, more often than I expected. So I decided to cross out the line.)
My Next Post
Next week I plan to publish a post titled “My Effective Altruism Story.” It summarizes how the effective altruism (EA) movement has changed my life. It’s the type of post that’s most likely to be read by people already in the EA community. And most people in the EA community don’t know me.
As I drafted the post, I decided to look back at summaries I wrote of my diary entries. I wanted to authentically illustrate my feelings on the date I first read about effective altruism and the day before the first effective altruism conference I attended (EA Global SF 2018).
I was surprised by what I found. My memory wasn’t perfect.
Here’s the screenshot of my diary summary from the night before I went to EA Global.
I assumed I’d see something like, “I’m excited to meet people in the effective altruism community. I hope they’ll help me be more effective.” Before searching for the diary summary, I hadn’t remembered that I was so hormonal and/or love-sick that night. I hadn’t thought about the one-week crush I had on Freya four years ago either.
I originally decided to leave this entire note in the post. I hoped it would show or remind readers that my emotions at the time were more complex than what I could summarize in a few paragraphs.
Largely because of Jane’s comment, I’ve decided to blackout the line about having a crush on Freya. I may be being overly cautious. I doubt Freya would care if she saw that. While I decided the next day, per my June 8, 2018 diary summary, that she wasn’t a good romantic fit for me, I did like her for other reasons besides that I found her physically attractive. I don’t think she’d feel objectified anyway. I assume we’re on good terms.
So I don’t think that line is a big deal. But I don’t think it adds much to the post either.
I was more surprised by what I saw when I searched for my diary summary from the first day I read about effective altruism. It’s weirder.
Weirder
Yes, the line that I’m going to blackout in that post is the last one. Not only is it weird. It’s kind of nonsensical.
So to clarify, the Hungary delegate from 2005 refers to a girl I met at a Model UN conference. We’d planned to meet at the end of the conference delegate dance. But my school trip chaperone decided we wouldn’t go to the dance. And I’d never gotten her contact info.
If anyone wants to find a blonde, white girl whose name I think is Sarah, is from Annapolis, Maryland, went to the Washington Area Model UN Conference in 2005 and was in the committee that pretended it was a NATO / Warsaw Pact meeting in the 1960s, go for it. Ask her to meet me in San Francisco sometime. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.
And that line from my diary reveals that I don’t masturbate. At the time I wrote that diary entry, I’d only been doing that for 3 months. It was hard for me. I don’t jerk off because I think it helps me be productive. That’s based on my own gut. I’m not under the impression that any studies validate that intuition.
Anyway, I originally planned to leave that line in the post because I thought it’d be weird enough that it was mildly funny.
I figured that if anyone tried to shame me for that, I shouldn’t let myself care. I still feel that way. I want to be shameless.
Why Am I Publishing This Post?
I’m not entirely sure. As I just said, I want to feel more shameless. If I don’t let people’s judgments about harmless things I do hurt my feelings, that benefits me. I guess the person putting me down won’t get satisfaction from hurting my feelings. But I’m confident there’s a way for people to find happiness without putting others down.
And I think it’s often beneficial for me to show my vulnerability. I think sharing more about myself allows me to get more useful feedback.
Granted, I don’t think telling people that I once spent an hour trying to search online for a girl I knew for 2-3 days in 2005 accomplishes much.
Plus, I had no desire to share that information. I hadn’t even remembered it until I decided to look up my old diary summaries. And I have no plans to share any other diary summaries with people. I don’t think I have the mental strength to do that regularly and write honestly to myself.[1]
So maybe shamelessness is only a minor reason I’m publishing this post? There’s also a part of me that wants to be authentic and share the full story I originally intended to write before I worried about my image.
However, my “moral part” is telling me that’s a poor reason. It’s saying not to share information that won’t help me achieve my moral goals.
But maybe I don’t care about authenticity either? Or it’s a minor desire. When I was a teenager, I had a self-deprecating sense of humor. My guess is that it didn’t help my life. Maybe whatever’s left of my inner teenager is subtly convincing me to embarrass myself. The rest of me hopes that’s not the case.
Maybe I’m just leaning towards publishing this to make sure I continue to publish a blog post every Sunday?
So I don’t think any of my reasons for publishing this post are great. I could unpack them more. However, I doubt it’s worth the time. Maybe I’ll do that if I plan to write more stuff like this. But that won’t happen for at least two weeks.
And I doubt this post will cause much harm either. If it harms anyone, it’ll be me.
I hope I can feel comfortable sharing all my feelings someday.
(cross-posted from my blog: https://utilitymonster.substack.com/p/sharing-is-caring)
fyi, I am a girl and I also find the “Hot girls excite me!” line to be off-putting and it makes me go ugh. For me it isn’t that it makes me think ogling women is a big hobby of yours, but rather that you mostly value women for their “hotness”. And the term “hot” means a specific kind of attractiveness that is very expensive and high effort (as opposed to “cute”, “pretty”, “attractive”, etc). So it means you prefer women who spend a lot of time and effort on their appearances rather than liking women as people.
There is more reasons it’s uncomfortable, but that’s my initial 10 cents.
Thanks for the feedback. I didn’t think the word hot would be interpreted that way.
Most people intuitively interpret statements non-literally, through a frame of “why is this person saying this?” If you make a statement like “hot girls excite me”, a statement which most people by default would assume applies to any heterosexual male (not to mention a lot of women), then the default assumption is going to be that you mean something specific by it, because otherwise this could have been assumed from context without you needing to state it.
(In addition, the statement as literally written appears tautological, if you assume the word “hot” means “exciting”—i.e. it is just saying, “I’m excited by people who excite me”, and so is apparently semantically void.)
So from an information-theoretic standpoint, the phrase stands out as being intended to signal something, causing people to look for non-literal interpretations.
One way that people look for non-literal interpretations is to assume emphasis on some point, as a contrast. For example, reading the statement’s implication as “non-hot non-girls don’t excite me”, implying you prefer physically attractive immature or underage women, or that appearance is especially important to you.
Another way of non-literal interpretation is to take a statement like this in terms of “who says things like this?” (In my own mind the two stereotypes that immediately come to mind are the socially inept perv characters in anime, and the chads / jocks / frat dudes who say things like “no fat chicks” or, well, Donald Trump.)
I expect from your comments that you intended none of these communications, but that’s the sort of thing people will infer from a communication like that, since interpreting it literally makes zero sense as a social communication, because it provides no actual information about you as a person that couldn’t be inferred from gender and orientation.
I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as “looking for ways to misinterpret a statement you meant literally”. From where I’m sitting, this is 100% bad communication on your end. If you didn’t intend to communicate membership in a certain social group and/or preference for conventionally attractive immature females, you used the wrong phrasing. And it’ll continue to be the wrong phrasing, in the sense of getting you results you disprefer—i.e. people thinking you’re in one of those groups or otherwise oddly obsessed with said females.
If instead you wanted to convey something about yourself as a human being, it would be a good idea to communicate instead something unusual about yourself, rather than something that would likely be literally true for >50% of all human beings. (Taking the time to call out something that’d otherwise be assumable from context implies that you put unusual weight on it, from an information-theoretic standpoint.)
The above passage was my initial reaction to Jane’s statement. I meant to express that I realized it was reasonable for someone not to take “Hot girls excite me!” as I find some women attractive over the next few paragraphs. I guess I may not have been clear enough.
Also, I didn’t mean to convey I preferred underage or immature women by using the term girls.
And in reference to your other comment, I didn’t mean to be impolite by the term girls either. I’ll try to use the term women to refer to adult females in the future.
I think all of this is basically right except that I personally don’t at all get from his use of the word “girl” an implication that he’s particularly interested in underage females; referring to youngish women (by which I mean, maybe, up to about 30?) as “girls” is, alas, very common, especially when the context is how attractive you find them, and suggesting that maybe Matt is signalling that he prefers underage women is inflammatory enough that it seems better avoided.
I guess you wrote that not so much because you seriously think Matt is signalling a preference for the underage, or that others will think so, as because you hope that giving him a bit of a shock might help him avoid saying such creepy-sounding things. If so, then I think making that suggestion three times is really a bit much.
(I do think it’s pretty reasonable to take Matt as saying in part that he prefers younger women, but that’s not the same as preferring underage women and in particular doesn’t amount to suggesting that he’s aiming to commit what in our society is one of the most viscerally hated of all crimes.)
I grew up in a time where it was a frequent feminist talking point that adult women are not “girls”, and thus “girls” were—by implication—not adults.
I have edited my comment, however, to use “immature” rather than hammering the point over and over.
I never suggested such a thing, and am kind of confused as to why you think I did. But TBH I don’t really want to have that conversation so please don’t enlighten me. ;-)
I agree that the use of “girls” to mean adult women is regrettable, but it is widespread enough that someone referring to “girls” in that sort of way is much more likely to mean a youngish adult woman than an underage literal-girl.
The frequent feminists were not saying “everyone who uses the word ‘girl’ like that is actually talking about underage literal girls”, they were saying “of course the people using the word ‘girl’ like that are mostly talking about young adult women, and they shouldn’t do that because it’s rudely infantilizing and doesn’t take the personhood of those young adult women seriously”.
“You are treating adults like children and you should stop” is a very different criticism from “You are wanting to have sex with children”.
Since you asked not to be enlightened I shall refrain from doing so, but I will note that it seems to me that my meaning was pretty clear (and that the thing I meant was not so unreasonable that anyone should be pretending not to grasp it if in fact they did). My guess is that if it truly wasn’t clear before, it might be clearer now. Of course it’s not unusual for people to think their own meanings clearer than they actually are to others.
[EDITED to add:] My apologies; the previous paragraph is based on a misreading of what I was replying to; somehow I took pjeby to be claiming not to understand what I was saying he said rather than claiming not to understand what made me think he said it; I am afraid I don’t believe he doesn’t understand, after he chose to use the word “underage” three times. (Two of them have now been changed to “immature”, which makes the accusation less explicit but not much different in content.)
It was always 100% clear to me what you meant. I said I was confused as to why you thought it was what I meant, since, you know, it wasn’t. (And I even removed two instances of a relevant word from my comment in response to yours, to make it clear that wasn’t what I meant.)
And when I said “don’t enlighten me” (with a winky emoticon no less) it was a joke to lighten the part where I basically said, “please stop this line of discussion: I don’t want to participate in it, not least because it has nothing to do with what I was talking about.”
IOW, from my perspective you were the one who brought that subject into the conversation and I would much prefer you hadn’t, or at least took the hint to drop it once the interpretation was addressed by my edit.
Noted. It seems to me that you brought exactly that subject into the conversation, deliberately, in your comments to Matt, and I am not quite sure why you’re now apparently trying to pretend you didn’t.
I think “how could you possibly think I was saying X? by the way, please don’t answer” is an extremely rude rhetorical move, since it accuses your interlocutor of being incompetent or dishonest while also making them out to be unkind if they respond to your accusation.
(I did, as you presumably surmised, misread your feigned perplexity at how I could possibly have interpreted you to mean the exact thing you explicitly said three times, as feigned perplexity about what I meant. My apologies for that.)
So, I wrote a post using word A, you took that to mean word B and said so (or rather, implied it).
Since I did not intend to imply B, I edited the post to reduce usage of word A.
You are now presenting this as evidence that I must therefore have meant to use word B all along.
[insert Picard facepalm and/or Jackie Chan WTF face meme here]
This seems utterly nonsensical to me, especially since if I had used or even meant word B, an important argument in my original comment would make no sense. (The one about 50% of the population—which would obviously not apply if I meant word B!)
From the moment you claimed I was implying B, I made haste to avoid the misunderstanding and (hopefully) close the discussion. That’s all I’ve been trying to do since, because I don’t want to talk about B, and never did.
If you re-read my original comment, you will see that I never accused anyone of anything, nor even attributed any motivations to anyone. I only explained how various things could be misinterpreted.
In your replies, however, you’ve directly accused me of various things and attributed various motivations to me as well.
May I suggest you re-read this thread starting from an assumption that you are actually mistaken as to my motivations? Because if you do, you’ll see everything I have said and done is 100% consistent with the model “For personal reasons, I don’t want to talk about B and never did, so for god’s sake please stop replying to me about it.”
Please consider the possibility you may be mistaken.
In particular please note that all of your accusations and attributions are accompanied by pseudo-quotations in which you say things that are not at all what I said. For example, I wrote:
But you reframed this as:
Do you see how what I wrote and you wrote are different? I can see how you could reach the interpretation you did. But can you see how it’s different from what I intended to convey?
I am not presenting your editing as evidence that you must have meant B all along. When I say you’re “now pretending you didn’t” mean what I think you obviously always meant, I am not referring to that but to your explicit claims not to have meant that.
I have considered the possibility that I might be mistaken. I think that if I were actually mistaken then you would have removed all your uses of the word “underage”, not just two of the three. In fact, I think that if I were actually mistaken, you would never have used the word “underage” in the first place—a word that in this sort of context is basically only used to mean what you are now denying ever having meant.
I think there may be some residual unclarity about exactly what I think you were trying to do. I do not think you ever seriously believed that Matt was actually trying to say “I am attracted to underage girls”. I think you probably never seriously believed that any reasonable person would read what he wrote and take it to mean that. I think you saw him using the word “girls” in an objectionable way (I reiterate that I agree with you that it’s objectionable) and saw an opportunity to make him suffer for it by pretending to think that he was saying, or could credibly be taken as saying, that he is attracted specifically to underage girls, and thought something along the lines of “Ha! That’ll show him the error of his ways”.
I am aware that you have repeatedly claimed not to have meant anything of the sort. (At least, I think you have; it is possible that what you’re indignantly claiming not to have meant is not what I thought I was claiming you meant, and that we are talking past one another.) I am aware that I am accusing you of lying. I am aware that that is a serious accusation. But I do not see any possible circumstances in which someone who is not intending to say something like “ha, gotcha, you just said you are attracted specifically to underage girls” (again: not because you actually think that’s what he meant, but because treating that as a reasonable interpretation of what he meant has shock value) writes
And I do not see any possible circumstances in which someone who really isn’t trying to emphasize the “underage” bit goes on to use the word “underage” twice more in the next couple of paragraphs. Again, I appreciate that you have now replaced “underage” with “immature” but I don’t think the meaning is much different, and I think your original choice of words makes it pretty clear what your intentions were at the time when you wrote them.
Again: I appreciate that you do not think that Matt actually, in reality, prefers underage girls. I think, rather, that you were hoping to use the general opprobium faced by people who prefer underage girls as a lever to get him to recognize the wrongness of the way he said what he did. And I think you should not do that, because human brains are not very good at nuance and anything that is within ten miles of “Matt prefers underage girls” is liable to leave readers with a vague feeling that there is something sketchy and creepy and just slightly horrifying about Matt, and while I too dislike what he wrote and how he wrote it I don’t think he deserves that for it.
I think that what you now say about an important argument in your original comment making no sense itself makes no sense. The whole point of what you said about “50% of the population” was to exclude that meaning of Matt’s words. (Not necessarily to say that he didn’t mean it, but to say that he would and should be understood as having meant something else, because there would have been no point in saying something so obvious.)
I thought I was pretty careful to distinguish the things you call “pseudoquotations” from actual quotations. I do wish our language had a more effective way of saying “this thing here is being mentioned rather than used, but I am not attributing it to any other person”. If anyone read what I wrote and thought the things in quotation marks were actual quotations, then I screwed up and I am sorry. I do not think that my “pseudoquotations” are unfair when understood, as they were meant, as paraphrases designed to bring out particular aspects of what you wrote that I wanted to draw attention to. And I do not think that the example you selected to show how unfairly I paraphrased you is in fact unfair. Of course I “see how what I wrote and what you wrote are different”, but you did imply that there was no reasonable way to interpret you as having said X, and you did make it clear that you would be displeased if I explained what I interpreted you as having said X, and that’s all my paraphrase was trying to make clear.
Incidentally, would I be right in guessing that it’s you who have been downvoting all my comments in this thread? (To be clear, I vigorously endorse your right to do that if you think they are bad enough to deserve downvotes. I would just like to know because the conclusions I should draw from “the person I am arguing with is downvoting all my comments” and from “other people are downvoting all my comments” are different.)
I did not downvote all your comments in this thread—a fact that should already have been known to you before you wrote this one, if you had examined the vote counts. (I downvoted only two of them in an effort to end discussion of a topic I find offensive and upsetting, but that effort proved pointless by the time of your third reply, so I gave up.)
I did not imply that, you inferred it (incorrectly). I stated the obvious-to-me fact that I did not know how you’d come to misunderstand me (the truth at that time), and the fact that I didn’t want to know (although I later found out, as much as I would have preferred not to).
I would be, and am displeased. I’m displeased the entire conversation has taken place and wish I’d never said anything in the first place, so if that was your aim, you can consider your efforts successful.
At this point it’s pretty clear that you are not going to change your incorrect belief about my intentions, so there isn’t any point to me extending this conversation further. Similarly, it’s a practical impossibility for you to convince me I’m mistaken about my intentions, since I’m the only person who actually knows what I was thinking at the time.
I have considered trying to explain in more detail, to resolve the rather obvious (to me, now) point of confusion you have that leads to your incorrect conclusion, but that would require me to explicitly discuss a subject I vehemently do not wish to discuss, and based on your conduct thus far, I can only guess that it would encourage you to further discuss it.
If I were the sort of person to lightly throw accusations around, or attribute motives to people, there are plenty of things you have done in this thread that I could have made accusations about, or attributed motives to.
Instead, I’ve bent way over backwards trying to be polite in the face of what is, from my POV unwarranted belaboring of a subject that I’ve virtually begged you to stop replying to me about, because I find it distasteful at best and traumatic at worst.
(Which is how I know with 100% certainty that I never intentionally brought it up in the first place—I’m literally using “Word B” as a double-indirection to avoid mentioning the actual subject, and even the word referred to by “Word B” isn’t a word I’ve used myself in this thread, ever, even before my edits—you’re the only person who’s actually used word B. That’s how much I don’t want to talk about it.)
But it appears I can’t resolve your confusion around that without discussing the very things I don’t want to discuss, and you don’t appear willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. (Notice how that previous sentence at least says you don’t appear willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. That’s an example of me still giving you some benefit of the doubt, by saying what appears to me to be the case, rather than me asserting I know what’s going on in your head.)
So, I’m done with this conversation, other than to note that perhaps, in future, rather than making accusations and attributing motives to other people when you see a problem with their communication, you could instead simply suggest alternative wordings to avoid confusion.
For example, if you thought that my edited comment still gave the wrong impression, you could have just said so, rather than insisting you know what must be happening in my head. (For that matter, you could’ve avoided attacking altogether and simply phrased your original comment as a helpful suggestion to avoid confusion.)
Anyway, I’m done with this thread, and am unsubscribing from notifications for it, since neither my polite requests nor my downvotes have worked to stop the replies from coming.
I am, in fact, considering whether I should request the site moderators delete this entire comment thread, though I don’t know if that’s possible for me to do without having to talk about the subject I find upsetting. But if you were to report the thread yourself (and cite this consent from me to remove it), I would certainly not object, and would consider it strong evidence against the hypothesis that you’re now intentionally setting out to harass me by waving a sensitive subject in my face after repeated statements that I would prefer you stop doing so, beginning with literally my first reply to you, and repeated in my every reply since.
Also very willing to end this disagreeable conversation here.
I am not in the least “intentionally setting out to harass” you or anyone else.
I do not intend to report the discussion to the moderators and request that the thread be removed. (I think that is a thing that should only be done when what’s there is improper rather than merely disagreeable.)
[EDITED to add:] I should also say explicitly: I do consider it possible that I may be mistaken, even though it looks unlikely to me (as alas it usually does to mistaken people) and—though given your comments above you probably aren’t reading this—I should say for whatever obviously-slight value it has that, conditional on my in fact being mistaken, I apologize deeply for any distress this thread has caused you. (Conditional on my not being mistaken, I still regret any such distress but don’t think apologizing is the right response.)
A couple of remarks.
The “hot girls excite me” line would (I think) be less liable to read as creepy/objectifying/oversexed if it were more explicitly flagged as “this here is a list of ways in which I am just a normal human being with normal human goals and values and whatnot”, but doing that would arguably make things worse stylistically. I think it should probably go, and if you find yourself strongly inclined to leave it in then I suggest thinking hard about why. (Not because I have any specific opinion as to what the reason is, but I think it might turn out to be informative.)
You say you never masturbate because “it helps me be productive”. You might be right. But you might consider the possibility that there’s a connection between that and having a casual reminder of a girl you met 15 years in the past send you into a state of sufficient horniness to make you spend an hour trying to track her down online.
Yeah, “Hot girls excite me!” has been interpreted in ways I didn’t intend more often than I expected. I’ve crossed it out on my about page.
I hadn’t thought about your second point before. It’s possible you’re right. My gut says it could’ve been boredom and/or loneliness too. I can’t remember how I was feeling on that day.
As far as I can remember, I haven’t done anything else like searching for the Hungary delegate over the past 4.5 years. And, off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other potential unintended consequences of not masturbating. So for now, I don’t think it’s worth spending more time thinking about it.
Hi Matt,
Right before this out-crossed “Hot girls excite me!”, you wrote other things that interested you. I like to take scenic walks and hikes. I like to play with dogs.
Hot girls excite me!It might not be that significant, but semantically the first two sentences have “I” as the acting subject, the last one has you as the object, and ‘Hot girls’ is the acting subject. That in itself is a noticable difference.
So in line with the two before, if it had the same form it would stick out less. As it stands now it is vague, but sticks out as it is different, and moreover some of the possible interpretations are offensive, to many people. Because then it becomes “I like to [fill inn the blank] hot girls as they excite me”. Since it now is a [Fill in the blank] it is totally open for interpretation, and it might seem that you indirectly are saying that ‘anything’ could be in the blank, because you haven’t named it. And since “hot girls excite” are already culturally loaded, you have now opened up a can that is either or inbetween flowers and rainbows, water or rotten eggs. So, what is it..
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence