Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in an ideal world, we’d invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention.
We did. It’s called dressing provocatively.
It’s just it got ruined when a bunch of people decided to complain about people wolf-whisling those wearing the bracelet.
It’s just it got ruined when a bunch of people decided to complain about people wolf-whisling those wearing the bracelet.
Alternate hypothesis: Not everyone dressing in the way that you call “dressing provocatively” intends to dress that way with any such goal like that in mind. Large amounts of how people dress are culturally dependent, and many women dress for complicated reasons involving internal signaling to other women, not to men. These are only the most basic issues at hand.
And some people will wear red bracelets because they like the color red, and they like bracelets—or they’ll start wearing red bracelets because -other- people wear red bracelets and it’s the “in” thing to do (internal signaling to other women). And then other people will wear red bracelets to show solidarity with those who object to being catcalled while wearing red bracelets, and then the whole signaling gig is up.
I guess that in the hypothetical Prismattic was thinking of, there would be common knowledge that people who wear red bracelets enjoy wolf-whistles, so that wearing a red bracelet and not enjoying wolf-whistles would amount to lying. (Think of it like the rings people in the early 20th century in Ireland wore on their lapels in order to communicate that they were able and willing to speak Irish.)
Highly culturally dependent though on what constituted dressing provocatively. In much of the Middle East for example, dressing provocatively consists of having one’s face or hair uncovered if one is a woman. Even in some parts of the US similar standards apply. Look for example at Kiryas Joel. Even within the same small cultural group things can get complicated (if you want to have some real fun, get a bunch of Modern Orthodox Jews together and ask them what constitutes dressing provocatively, and you’ll see an extremely wide range of answers). And that’s before the other issues of signaling, practicality (e.g. it is hot out so I’m going to wear less), or other issues. And even the same people can have different notions of what counts as dressing provocatively depending on the social setting (e.g. walking down the street or at a beach). This is different than the ring which is substantially less ambiguous. And such signals do sometimes work in sexual or gender contexts, look at the signal systems used by much of the gay community (e.g. earrings and hankerchiefs).
The earring signal has been completely destroyed by straight people who got earrings because it was cool, and… handkerchiefs? What?
A quick Googling immediately informs me why I haven’t encountered this. This code wouldn’t work where I grew up; Hispanic gangs use colored handkerchiefs as their own form of signaling.
...and apparently my white handkerchiefs I always carry with me signal that I’m into masturbation. Huuuh. Oh well.
Getting back on track, the lack of cultural unity was not in fact generally a problem a few decades ago, before the internet. Each community could have its own standards and this wouldn’t pose too much of an issue, and this is more or less the way things worked. This system dissolved long before television, which was heavily regulated (hell, they weren’t allowed to show belly buttons), became able to seriously impact standards of provocative clothing.
(I’m not arguing those were “the good old days” by any stretch of the imagination, mind. I’ll take society as it exists today. But certainly we had this kind of signaling capability before and it was dismantled.)
Even at the time and within communities that nominally observed it, the handkerchief code was so convoluted as to be generally considered more of a joke than a real thing.
(I’m not arguing those were “the good old days” by any stretch of the imagination, mind. I’ll take society as it exists today. But certainly we had this kind of signaling capability before and it was dismantled.)
I think we’re blowing things out of proportion here. Clothing, and appearance more generally, has widely-recognized signaling value in sexual matters, even today. It’s just that the signals involved are quite a bit fuzzier than ‘dressing provocatively means that wolf-whistling is welcome’. And it’s not even clear that this is a bad thing.
Apart from wedding/engagement rings, can you name a single piece of clothing [eta: or ensemble, vaguely-defined or otherwise] with a widely-recognized heterosexual sexual signal? By widely recognized, I expect that at least half of all men, and at least half of all women, would know what it means?
Getting back on track, the lack of cultural unity was not in fact generally a problem a few decades ago, before the internet. Each community could have its own standards and this wouldn’t pose too much of an issue, and this is more or less the way things worked. This system dissolved long before television, which was heavily regulated (hell, they weren’t allowed to show belly buttons), became able to seriously impact standards of provocative clothing.
I think you are overestimating pre-internet uniformity here. If for example one spent time in Crown Heights one would have Orthodox Jews, generic African-Americans (mainly Christian), and some Muslim African-Americans. Each group has different ideas of what would constitute provocative clothing. Or to use a different example: when I was an undergrad I was involved in an interfaith Jewish-Muslim group. One thing that struck me was that among many of the Orthodox Jews, women wearing pants was considered what you would probably call provocative, but hair covering wasn’t an issue. In contrast, for many of the Muslim women, the reverse held (pants fine, uncovered hair immodest).
I’m not sure what your point is with those two quotes. Are you trying to say that OrphanWilde already addressed what I was saying? If so, the points are different: Orphan was discussing was how distinct groups have different standards. The point I was making that in small geographic areas one can have a large number of groups with different standards that all have to interact with each other. And the example of the Modern Orthodox showed, even within a small, superficially uniform group, there can be a lot of variation.
The earring signal has been completely destroyed by straight people who got earrings because it was cool,
Either those straight people by wearing those earrings were deliberately lying about their sexual orientation (which doesn’t sound likely to me), or there wasn’t actual common knowledge about the earrings’ meaning.
That assumes that the straight people in question cared about what their piercings signaled. Given the culture of the group which popularized ear piercings in men, I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption.
Well, if I really don’t care about whether people will mistake me for a gay man, I won’t complain when they do mistake me for a gay man, either, so there’s no problem (except for the momentary confusion in gay men who were going to hit on me).
Not for you. There -is- a problem for gay men, who are no longer able to reliably interpret the signal. It directly raises the odds of rejection on the average approach based on that signal.
I wouldn’t care about gay men momentarily mistaking me for gay, because there is an immediate opportunity to correct the misapprehension. Attractive women mistaking me for gay, on the other hand, would be problematic. If they never strike up a conversation in the first place, you never get the chance to clarify.
I’m not sure that’s a problem. I’ve heard that women are more likely to start conversations with men they think are gay because they won’t get hit on. There are PUA techniques based to initially pretending to be gay.
I had linked “common knowledge” to the wrong place, sorry. (Fixed now.) Do you mean that not only everyone (within a given society, except for tiny minorities of non-neurotypicals and the like) knew that people dressing provocatively were communicated that they enjoyed wolf whistles, but also that everyone knew that everybody knew that, and everybody knew that everybody knew that everybody knew that, and so on, so that someone dressing provocatively would immediately lose all plausible deniability?
Less specifically (that is, not referring to “wolf whistles” in particular), and more “a majority” than “every single person above -.5 sigmas of social consciousness”, but yes. Hell, even as recently in the 90′s, there was a difference between the way married people and available people dressed. Clothing is declining as a useful sexual signal.
I’m not sure what using plausible deniability as a social metric serves in this case. People who wear a red bracelet without knowing what it means should be admonished, in a society in which the bracelet serves as a signal, not punished.
It’s more a case of people arguing for their right to wear red bracelets without getting cat calls.
Or possibly even women wearing red bracelets hoping to get cat calls from high status/attractive males, getting cat calls from geeks and using the plausible deniability to complain.
We did. It’s called dressing provocatively.
It’s just it got ruined when a bunch of people decided to complain about people wolf-whisling those wearing the bracelet.
Alternate hypothesis: Not everyone dressing in the way that you call “dressing provocatively” intends to dress that way with any such goal like that in mind. Large amounts of how people dress are culturally dependent, and many women dress for complicated reasons involving internal signaling to other women, not to men. These are only the most basic issues at hand.
And some people will wear red bracelets because they like the color red, and they like bracelets—or they’ll start wearing red bracelets because -other- people wear red bracelets and it’s the “in” thing to do (internal signaling to other women). And then other people will wear red bracelets to show solidarity with those who object to being catcalled while wearing red bracelets, and then the whole signaling gig is up.
This is the reason we can’t have nice things.
I guess that in the hypothetical Prismattic was thinking of, there would be common knowledge that people who wear red bracelets enjoy wolf-whistles, so that wearing a red bracelet and not enjoying wolf-whistles would amount to lying. (Think of it like the rings people in the early 20th century in Ireland wore on their lapels in order to communicate that they were able and willing to speak Irish.)
I think you’re missing some dry social commentary there: This is exactly how dressing provocatively was at one time regarded.
Highly culturally dependent though on what constituted dressing provocatively. In much of the Middle East for example, dressing provocatively consists of having one’s face or hair uncovered if one is a woman. Even in some parts of the US similar standards apply. Look for example at Kiryas Joel. Even within the same small cultural group things can get complicated (if you want to have some real fun, get a bunch of Modern Orthodox Jews together and ask them what constitutes dressing provocatively, and you’ll see an extremely wide range of answers). And that’s before the other issues of signaling, practicality (e.g. it is hot out so I’m going to wear less), or other issues. And even the same people can have different notions of what counts as dressing provocatively depending on the social setting (e.g. walking down the street or at a beach). This is different than the ring which is substantially less ambiguous. And such signals do sometimes work in sexual or gender contexts, look at the signal systems used by much of the gay community (e.g. earrings and hankerchiefs).
The earring signal has been completely destroyed by straight people who got earrings because it was cool, and… handkerchiefs? What?
A quick Googling immediately informs me why I haven’t encountered this. This code wouldn’t work where I grew up; Hispanic gangs use colored handkerchiefs as their own form of signaling.
...and apparently my white handkerchiefs I always carry with me signal that I’m into masturbation. Huuuh. Oh well.
Getting back on track, the lack of cultural unity was not in fact generally a problem a few decades ago, before the internet. Each community could have its own standards and this wouldn’t pose too much of an issue, and this is more or less the way things worked. This system dissolved long before television, which was heavily regulated (hell, they weren’t allowed to show belly buttons), became able to seriously impact standards of provocative clothing.
(I’m not arguing those were “the good old days” by any stretch of the imagination, mind. I’ll take society as it exists today. But certainly we had this kind of signaling capability before and it was dismantled.)
Even at the time and within communities that nominally observed it, the handkerchief code was so convoluted as to be generally considered more of a joke than a real thing.
I think we’re blowing things out of proportion here. Clothing, and appearance more generally, has widely-recognized signaling value in sexual matters, even today. It’s just that the signals involved are quite a bit fuzzier than ‘dressing provocatively means that wolf-whistling is welcome’. And it’s not even clear that this is a bad thing.
Apart from wedding/engagement rings, can you name a single piece of clothing [eta: or ensemble, vaguely-defined or otherwise] with a widely-recognized heterosexual sexual signal? By widely recognized, I expect that at least half of all men, and at least half of all women, would know what it means?
I think you are overestimating pre-internet uniformity here. If for example one spent time in Crown Heights one would have Orthodox Jews, generic African-Americans (mainly Christian), and some Muslim African-Americans. Each group has different ideas of what would constitute provocative clothing. Or to use a different example: when I was an undergrad I was involved in an interfaith Jewish-Muslim group. One thing that struck me was that among many of the Orthodox Jews, women wearing pants was considered what you would probably call provocative, but hair covering wasn’t an issue. In contrast, for many of the Muslim women, the reverse held (pants fine, uncovered hair immodest).
ಠ_ಠ
The reply:
I’m not sure what your point is with those two quotes. Are you trying to say that OrphanWilde already addressed what I was saying? If so, the points are different: Orphan was discussing was how distinct groups have different standards. The point I was making that in small geographic areas one can have a large number of groups with different standards that all have to interact with each other. And the example of the Modern Orthodox showed, even within a small, superficially uniform group, there can be a lot of variation.
Sorry I thought you were pointing out something Orphan had acknowledged already—that’s a different point. Retracted & upvoted.
Either those straight people by wearing those earrings were deliberately lying about their sexual orientation (which doesn’t sound likely to me), or there wasn’t actual common knowledge about the earrings’ meaning.
That assumes that the straight people in question cared about what their piercings signaled. Given the culture of the group which popularized ear piercings in men, I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption.
Well, if I really don’t care about whether people will mistake me for a gay man, I won’t complain when they do mistake me for a gay man, either, so there’s no problem (except for the momentary confusion in gay men who were going to hit on me).
Not for you. There -is- a problem for gay men, who are no longer able to reliably interpret the signal. It directly raises the odds of rejection on the average approach based on that signal.
I wouldn’t care about gay men momentarily mistaking me for gay, because there is an immediate opportunity to correct the misapprehension. Attractive women mistaking me for gay, on the other hand, would be problematic. If they never strike up a conversation in the first place, you never get the chance to clarify.
I’m not sure that’s a problem. I’ve heard that women are more likely to start conversations with men they think are gay because they won’t get hit on. There are PUA techniques based to initially pretending to be gay.
I had linked “common knowledge” to the wrong place, sorry. (Fixed now.) Do you mean that not only everyone (within a given society, except for tiny minorities of non-neurotypicals and the like) knew that people dressing provocatively were communicated that they enjoyed wolf whistles, but also that everyone knew that everybody knew that, and everybody knew that everybody knew that everybody knew that, and so on, so that someone dressing provocatively would immediately lose all plausible deniability?
Less specifically (that is, not referring to “wolf whistles” in particular), and more “a majority” than “every single person above -.5 sigmas of social consciousness”, but yes. Hell, even as recently in the 90′s, there was a difference between the way married people and available people dressed. Clothing is declining as a useful sexual signal.
If the minority who doesn’t know something is large enough, you don’t lose plausible deniability by doing that.
I’m not sure what using plausible deniability as a social metric serves in this case. People who wear a red bracelet without knowing what it means should be admonished, in a society in which the bracelet serves as a signal, not punished.
It’s more a case of people arguing for their right to wear red bracelets without getting cat calls.
Or possibly even women wearing red bracelets hoping to get cat calls from high status/attractive males, getting cat calls from geeks and using the plausible deniability to complain.