I would not actually say “Aaaaaaaugh.” in that situation. I’d probably say “Excuse me?” and then there would need to be a rather excellent recovery or I’d stop interacting with the person. (I’m granting for the sake of the exercise that I’d ask for a drink in the first place, even though in real life I don’t consume alcohol.)
(I’m granting for the sake of the exercise that I’d ask for a drink in the first place, even though in real life I don’t consume alcohol.)
Which is precisely why the offered hypothetical is worse than useless in this case.
Bear in mind that in the circumstance being discussed, asking for a drink is like asking someone to hand you $5 -- for no reason at all other than than that you asked, and the fact that they are a male.
To presume that you would react in a certain way, conditional upon first having done something so utterly foreign to you in the first place, is like saying what you’d do if the moon were made of green cheese, only ISTM you’d have a better chance of being right in that case. ;-)
Well, pretend the bar serves something I’d drink. Say I’d get a virgin pina colada. I could imagine asking for one of those. I might also ask girls, if the environment gave me high enough priors on them being bi/gay.
So, your moral compass allows you to use other people’s sexual preferences as a money pump?
(And no, that’s not a line, although now that I’ve said it, I suppose it could be reworked into a LW-friendly response to a drink request. Needs more humor, less judgment, though! Hm, maybe “Are you trying to exploit my hardware preferences as a money pump?” A little too double-entrendreish, though. These things are really situational, and not at all suited to cached responses.)
I can’t actually think of any situation where asking a question seems to me to be immoral. It can’t be a denotative falsehood, so it’s clear on the “lying” front; there’s nothing else obvious it could be that would be wrong. I suppose it could be mean, or impolite, but this doesn’t even appear to be that to me. I wouldn’t badger anybody about buying me the beverage, which would be mean.
This is a request which is slightly different from a question. Some requests are considered immoral when there is a power or status differential. University lecturers and students provide an example where some requests are widely considered immoral.
Point. Questions/requests that predictably create a sense of obligation in the hearer to do something they ought not feel obligated to perform may be wrong. I don’t think I can, let alone do, project enough power in a casual setting to make anyone feel obliged to buy me the liquid of my choice, although I suppose it’s possible I’m mistaken.
There is also an implied contract with most requests. Many people if asked to buy a stranger a drink will assume that agreeing to the request will result in an opportunity for conversation at least. If someone makes the request with an understanding of the implied trade and no intention of fulfilling their half of the bargain then that seems at least dishonest if not actually immoral.
I wouldn’t request a favor like this from someone I didn’t plan to have at least a short conversation with. (I would ask smaller favors, like that they tell me the time, or more urgent favors, like that they loan me their cell phone so I can call my ride, but a drink is neither negligible nor particularly important.)
I don’t think I can, let alone do, project enough power in a casual setting to make anyone feel obliged to buy me the liquid of my choice, although I suppose it’s possible I’m mistaken.
Refusing makes the guy look bad, unless he has a particularly adept response. The request becomes “buy me a drink, or go through status shenanigans to not look bad.” That’s not exactly obligation, but it is a form of social pressure.
Asking for $5 (well, probably $7-8 if it’s not a beer) isn’t exactly obligation, either. Is that a request you would make of both men and women? If not, why not? And how it is different to a request from a drink, other than the latter being wrapped up in more social frills (and combined with more social pressure)?
If anyone is saying “excuse me?” shouldn’t it be the person being asked for the drink (aka $7)? The only problem is that if men make this response, they look bad, due to the context-specific social power differential.
I would not ask a stranger for money unless I had an urgent, immediate need for it and no other way to get it. Asking for a drink seems different in much the same way that asking my friends for books instead of money on my birthday seems different. The drink provides a context for some sort of interaction; the money doesn’t.
The drink provides a context for some sort of interaction; the money doesn’t.
Which is precisely why it’s a status move: you are placing an implicit pricetag on your continued interaction, and therefore implicitly asserting that your status/value is such that you can demand a payment of tribute for nothing more than the chance of remaining in your good graces.
Whether this were your intention or not, it’s the situation the man is placed in, unless he has the cojones (and possibly training) to be able to refuse with impunity.
Or they are just showing a sign of desiring social interaction and they have culturally ingrained that the way to do so is to ask for a drink (disclaimer: I’ve never actually seen this occur). One may be assuming a lot more about unconscious status inquiring that is more in the category of just silly cultural norms.
Or they are just showing a sign of desiring social interaction and they have culturally ingrained that the way to do so is to ask for a drink
As I said in an earlier comment, there is almost no benefit to treating this possibility as a special case, especially since it is so cheap for her to claim that this is what she’s doing, even when it’s not.
Many women who are actually status-testing no doubt sincerely believe in their conscious model of their actions, and you cannot inexpensively separate them from the ones who are also correct!
One reason, by the way, why this situation is so useful for women as a test of a man’s social skills, is that it requires considerable social calibration to pull off a declination or negotiation that also acknowledges and continues the “game” in progress, rather than simply refusing to play.
I think that the women who’ve been involved in this thread have actually been modeling Roko’s original statement as though it’s a refusal to interact, when in fact to be functional it has to actually take the interaction up a notch, by giving a nod to something you’ve noticed about her, or something she said, etc. (IOW, men who think women want them to be mind-readers are only partly correct; they just want to know you’ve been paying attention)
But if this is what they are doing then the ideal response may be to actually buy a drink since at least in pop culture depictions of this sort of scenario (at least in movies I’ve seen) seems to be that the male is actually supposed to do that. Failure to do so might be interpreted as a lack of interest.
Failure to do so might be interpreted as a lack of interest.
Not compared to refusing in a way that shows you’re paying attention. A drink without attention isn’t nearly as flattering as the attention without the drink. And giving too much of either or both is counterproductive at Byrnema’s hypothetical level 2.
I’m a little mystified by your analogy, and what you are intending to show with it. Being treated like the birthday girl (or boy) is a form of special treatment that happens once a year. It’s not your birthday every time you go out, right? Giving birthday presents between friends is generally mutual, yet you’ve made no mention of the drink buying being mutual. Furthermore, giving birthday presents happens when people know each other and already have an interaction, rather than being a precondition for an interaction occurring.
Since getting presents on one’s birthday is a form of special treatment, doesn’t your analogy suggest that expecting/requesting drinks to be bought for oneself is an expectation/request for year-round special treatment? And doesn’t asking for drinks look even worse when we remember that buying birthday presents among friends in mutual, while women asking for drinks aren’t expecting to reciprocate and buy the guy a drink the next night?
I actually receive a fair number of gifts on non-special occasions too, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.
I haven’t mentioned buying a reciprocal drink, but this is largely because I have idiosyncratic neuroses about money, not because it wouldn’t occur to me as something appropriate to do.
I haven’t mentioned buying a reciprocal drink, but this is largely because I have idiosyncratic neuroses about money, not because it wouldn’t occur to me as something appropriate to do.
I’ve noticed something interesting about your “social processing” in these posts—your reasoning does not appear to include anything about what other people think or feel; in fact, it barely seems to include them at all! (For example, how would anyone you ask know whether you intend to reciprocate, or not?)
And I would guess that this apparent lack of consequential modeling of others’ visceral experience of you, would lead to other sorts of situations in which your NT friends/co-workers find you “weird”.
NTs pay lip service to deontological rules, but are mostly consequentialists with respect to their social behavior. As others here have pointed out, one of the key rules of NT social interaction is that everyone must show loyalty to the rules, while not being so clueless as to actually follow them or expect others to do so, when the real rules are about status and its consequences.
IOW, it’s insanely irrational to treat NT social interactions as being truly rule-driven. (By which I mean it’s irrational to think you will accomplish anything besides driving the NT’s insane!)
Unfortunately, it’s also similarly irrational/insane to try to convince non-NTs of this, unless they have some relevant personal experience. Me, I learned a little from a mentor in the business world who taught me how to see the power and affiliation subtexts of business interactions, but I’ve consistently erred on the side of assuming that those situations were special cases, and that I didn’t need to think like that with some group of trusted allies.
And in pretty much every case, I’ve found it to be a tragic error to assume that people are NOT playing games, no matter how sincerely they themselves believe they “really aren’t”. (When that’s really just the game of “not playing games”. Ever wonder why everybody claims to hate office politics, and yet it still exists?)
Geeks, of course, just use a different rulebook for their game, where (among other things) we get status for valuing “what you know” and “what’s right” over “who you know” and “what’s cool/popular/socially calibrated”. (However, this doesn’t change the game itself, just what the points get awarded for.)
I don’t know why in general. In my case, I hate surprises, and am pretty good at getting my friends to indulge this hate by not getting me things that I haven’t pre-approved. Since I’m neurotic about money and tend to not spend it unless it’s really, really important, this means that the average gift I get from a friend is more useful to me than the equivalent amount of money (which I’d basically never spend), especially since when I use the gift I think of the friend and get some utility from that.
I would not actually say “Aaaaaaaugh.” in that situation. I’d probably say “Excuse me?” and then there would need to be a rather excellent recovery or I’d stop interacting with the person.
That’s quite princessy behavior—worthy of a cute 10/cheerleader type! Go Alicorn!
Okay, this has me curious—is there actually a subset of pickup that is designed to tell me what to do, instead of telling people what to do to me? That would be news to me.
And apparently a “Playette FAQ” as well. (It makes heavy use of PUA terminology like “one-itis” and “IOI”, though.)
I haven’t really read ASFin almost 20 years, so I didn’t know about the Playette stuff. Funny story, though: I can attest to the value of the “whiff” technique in the Playette FAQ, because my wife used it in our first email and phone conversations, back in 1992… and well, um, it worked out pretty well for both of us. ;-)
That depends on what exactly your goal is. Typical men can boost their sexual attractiveness to women by changing their behavior far more than vice versa, so it’s unsurprising that there is a much greater body of expertise aimed at men in this regard. Also, getting sex is pretty much trivial for women and requires no particular skill. However, commitment and long-term relationship strategies are important and nontrivial for women too, and on better game-oriented blogs, I’ve often seen good discussions about the mistakes women make in this regard. Trouble is, realistic treatments of this issue tend to bring up even more ugly truths and end up sounding even less PC than the ordinary PUA stuff.
Like in everything else, humans make bad decisions due to biases in matters of mating and pairing too. However, these particular biases are male- and female-specific, and pointing out the latter is easily perceived by women as an affront to their sex, which makes realistic discussion very hard.
But since you’re asking, here are some instances of such biases. None of them are universal, but each is held strongly by non-negligible numbers of women and leads them to decisions they later regret. One example is when women overestimate the attractiveness of men they can realistically hope to attract for serious permanent commitment, given the higher attractiveness of men they can attract for temporary relationships and short-term flings without any real commitment on the man’s part. Another is when women underestimate the speed with which their looks and reproductive abilities deteriorate with age. Yet another is the refusal to acknowledge that women can be greatly attracted to some very nasty personality types of men, not despite them but because of them (google “dark triad”), which leads some women to entering disastrous relationships with such men. Then there are also many wrong beliefs about what personality characteristics of women are truly attractive and pleasant to men and apt to attract their loyalty and commitment in the long run.
There are other examples too, many of which would probably sound more controversial. Even these I listed can provoke much worse reactions when put in less abstract and detached terms, which is typically necessary when forming concrete advice.
This is a general comment about the PUA material I’ve read.
It comes off as lonely. There’s no hint of enjoying someone’s company, or hope that a someone could enjoy the writer’s company if not manipulated into it.
Yes. Sometimes I get a sense of simmering resentment underneath it all, especially on the subject of “nice guys” vs. “jackasses”.
What the PUA people call “day game” (approaching women in everyday life, instead of bars and clubs) can verge on the concept of enjoyable company, but from my limited reading on the subject they don’t seem to cover day game nearly as much. They say it’s more difficult than “night game”.
It’s a little like something in a famous essay by Eric Raymond on “good porn” vs. “bad porn”. (Just google on those phrases to find a copy—I don’t care to do that search from a machine at work.) Following a personally conducted scientific examination of porn pictures on the web, he concluded that men looking for porn are not looking for depictions of attractive young women posed as if about to have enjoyable sex with the viewer. The porn industry knows what sells, and pictures of that sort, that Raymond called “good porn”, formed only a small minority. They are looking for what he classified as “bad porn”: pictures of an absolutely joyless activity, all hard faces, cold stares, and fetishistic trappings.
ETA: Eric Raymond’s essay is on his own blog here, and he’s updated some of the links that were broken when I first read it, so you can see some of his experimental samples.
I find the resentment off-putting too, and as in any other area of human concern, there is indeed a lot of unjustified feeling of entitlement. However, it should be noted that the main reason for the resentment is the rules-hypocrisy. Many men are indeed too clueless to figure out the disconnect between the official attitudes and values that are professed piously in our culture and the actual rules of the status game that it’s taboo to discuss openly (so that such discussions are corralled off to disreputable venues like the PUA culture). Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
an you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
This isn’t about blame, it’s about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.
You’re sympathizing with the men, which is natural—without speculating about details, your experience is more like theirs. Try imagining dating one of them, or being in a relationship with them—if that’s too much of a strain, try imagining reading a forum of women who are that hurt and angry about men.
This isn’t about blame, it’s about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.
Fair enough. However, I would say that women tend to display at least two major biases when they encounter this sort of stuff. (I don’t think these biases completely account for the fear and revulsion you mention, but they do mean that it often goes too far.)
First, women often don’t take into account that they’re observing men’s in-clique behavior, which they rarely, if ever, see in real life. Many young men whom they’d perceive as decent, polite, overall good guys (and who indeed are that by any reasonable standards) sometimes spew out stuff that’s just as extreme when they loosen up over beers among their male buddies, complete with foul language, frustrated trashing of women who have hurt them, etc. It’s just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance, so when they’re caught off guard rambling, or when they’re writing anonymously on the internet, they tend to come off much worse than they really are.
Second, I understand that women might fear getting involved with a man whose attractive surface hides an angry, frustrated, manipulative PUA underneath, whose nasty nature will only later come to prominence. However, this fear is entirely out of proportion when you consider a similar, but much more prevalent and dangerous natural phenomenon. Namely, there are significant numbers of men around whose personalities are naturally fundamentally nasty but nevertheless wildly attractive to women—many of whom ruin their lives big time by pursuing relationships with such men. See, for example, the Dark Triad paper by Jonason et al. for a discussion along these lines, which is nowhere near a complete account of this entire phenomenon. This is realistically a far greater danger than encountering a PUA, who is anyway more likely to be just a regular guy who undertook some self-improvement than a monster lurking below a smooth surface.
From the PUAs I’ve known, they are unlikely to be wolves in sheep’s clothing… they are more likely to be sheep in wolves’ clothing. There are a few guys who are badly adjusted and have weird antisocial ideas in the local PUA group, and other guys make fun of them behind their backs.
Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?
As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern—the only specific advice I’ve seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who’s rude to waitresses.
Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?
I would say yes. I have a hobby of sorts that consists of exploring obscure corners of the web where various sorts of fringe people with unconventional (and often disreputable) ideas gather, and attempting to understand their perspectives in a detached manner, as free of bias as possible. As an example relevant for your question, I have read radical feminist websites where the level of anger against men far surpasses any venting against women you’ll see on even the worst PUA forums.
Now, my conclusion is that out of all these fringe groups, most of them just form their own echo chambers where they vent and reinforce their peculiar biases, but a small minority actually manage to come up with non-trivial accurate insight that is nowhere to be found in more reputable and mainstream sources. The PUA community just happens to be one such example. In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women’s community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it. (There are also communities full of angry venting men where, in contrast to PUAs, I’ve never seen any particularly interesting ideas.)
As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern—the only specific advice I’ve seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who’s rude to waitresses.
Trouble is, some very strong biases are present here, because the ugly and hard to admit truth is that some personalty types of this sort are attractive as such to many women—not all women, of course, and I won’t speculate on the percentage, but it’s certainly non-negligible. Note that I don’t mean the situations where such dark characteristics are hidden under a nice surface only to emerge later, but when they are truly attractive by themselves, causing irresistible urges in women to engage in dangerous, self-immolating adventures with such men. You can view it as a specifically female form of extreme akrasia, I guess. The prevailing bias, however, is to interpret all such situations as women having been manipulated by a wolf in sheep’s clothing, even when the wolf was howling and brandishing his fangs from day one, only to get an enthusiastic response.
In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women’s community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it.
I would love to read material from a female analogue to PUA. Looking back on past relationships I can see some patterns for behavior that ‘hooked’ me, but I’m sure I’m missing a lot of potentially valuable insights.
People often meet a person they like but can’t commit to romantically because of small ‘defects’ in the person’s behavior as it relates to the relationship. Personally, I’d be all in favor of my significant other using PUA equivalent methods on me, provided I was aware it and had studied the material myself (in the same way that I’m in favor of my significant other wearing certain clothing, etc).
So, two main upshots of wide dissemination of PUA style material: better understanding of myself, and heightened attraction to my partner.
You’re response in the subthread was more a list of biases exhibited by females (an interesting list though). What I’m looking for is a set of actionable techniques a woman can use in the context of a relationship to keep a man more interested.
The Rules is probably the best known example. I haven’t read it and don’t know whether there is any validity to the claims. I suspect there’s some truth in there but that it is not terribly rigorous or accurate.
I haven’t read this book either, but a significant piece of evidence against it is that one of the authors divorced her husband only a few years after it was published. Otherwise, I’ve seen it get mixed to negative comments on game websites, the principal complaint being that a man who lets himself be played by those rules may easily ipso facto signal low status to the point where he’ll destroy her respect for (and thus attraction to) him. Some of the tactics allegedly advocated by the book indeed sound that way, but I won’t pass any definite judgments since I haven’t read it.
What I’m looking for is a set of actionable techniques a woman can use in the context of a relationship to keep a man more interested.
Certainly such products exist (e.g. catchhimandkeephim.com, husbandscantresist.com) but I’m not familiar with any free online resources comparable to the vast assortment available for men. Catchhimandkeephim.com has some articles, but skimming through I found it difficult to judge how useful a woman would find this advice, as it sounded all very obvious and straightforward to me… but then, I’m a man, and the articles are about how men react and think. It’s possible that the information would be a revelation for someone who wasn’t a man. ;-)
There are many books giving that sort of advice, but I haven’t read any, so I can’t recommend them. Just from the titles and blurbs I’ve seen, it can be reliably concluded that many are very bad.
Anecdotally, I can say that in the best discussions of women’s relationship strategies and techniques I’ve ever read on game-related sites, I’ve never seen anyone point out a book or any other source of systematic advice whose message closely matches the best evidence-supported conclusions of these discussions. I see this as a strong piece of evidence against the whole existing literature. This is not that surprising considering that the best evidence-supported conclusions sound, to a large degree, highly un-PC and shattering lots of pleasant-sounding illusions.
Yes, it’s harder to do experiments on parts of the interaction that occur later down the line. I think that’s a lot of the reason that PUAs talk so much more about pickup than relationships (though PUA forums typically have active relationships boards): the conversion funnel of approaches to dating to relationships gets narrower and narrower. PUAs spend most of their time stuck at particular interaction points prior to relationships, such as getting numbers and women not calling them back, going on dates with women and not being able to kiss them, or only successfully attracting women who don’t quite meet their relationship criteria. I’ve noticed that once PUAs get all that stuff handled, they start talking about relationships more than the mechanics of pickup, and actually get really picky.
What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?
As for the Dark Triad, I don’t know what’s going on there. I tentatively assume that some people like danger, and what attracts some to motorcycles and mountain-climbing can also attract people to mates who have TROUBLE written all over them.
Alternatively, some women choose men like their fathers—they’re imprinted on a bad idea of what a man is.
Also, I hope it’s less common in the culture, but some women believe that they can turn a bad guy into a good one by being a sufficiently good wife. I’m not going to say it never happens, but making the attempt can be a powerful emotional hook.
It’s clear that how reliable people’s survival instincts are (and about what parts of their lives) vary tremendously, and I’ve never seen a substantial discussion of how the “this is good for me, that is bad for me” sense works.
You might find The Fantasy of Being Thin interesting.
Yes, I am familiar with this particular community. They do discuss some common biases in an interesting way, but ultimately, my conclusion is that they generate their own more severe ones, without adding much clarity to anything overall.
What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?
Well, that could be a topic for a whole book, not a mere blog comment. I’d rather not just drop concrete names and places I’ve found interesting, since without lots of painstaking explanations and disclaimers, it would send off a thunderous signal of affiliation with all kinds of disreputable people.
It’s just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance
This would be extremely surprising to me if true. This sounds like something that was true in the 1950s, but does this really match your experience today? In my experience, at least among people under 30 or so, there is no difference between how guys and girls act in social situations when there are, or are not, members of the opposite sex around. (Business or formal situations are different.)
Well, I have no evidence except anecdotal to present, but yes, this does match my experience. It surely doesn’t apply to all individuals, social groups, and occasions, but I observe it regularly, and I have to personally plead guilty to a certain degree of such inconsistency. Especially when, for example, a guy gets dumped or rejected and wants to vent a bit by rambling about the evilness of the girl in question, or women in general, it definitely seems likely to me that much cruder rants can be produced in an exclusive company of close, trusted male friends than otherwise.
In any case, even if this is true only for a minority of men, my main point still holds, i.e. there are non-negligible numbers of men around who, despite being perfectly respectable by all other criteria, engage in crude language about women and male-female relations on some occasions when no women are around to hear it. For this reason, women are often biased in that they tend to interpret such language, when observed, as unrealistically strong evidence of serious character flaws in the man in question.
Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
I have often been bitterly amused at how the “Yes, but...” speeches on the misogyny often perpetrated by Western socially/sexually deprived men, on the one hand, and the crime often perpetrated by lower-class Afro-Americans, on the other hand, often end up disquietingly similar.
And with good reason; in both cases, we have angry, alienated young men who are least able to cope with the systemic oppression of their social group, least willing to play by the rules that treat them unfairly, spiral into hatred and evil, bringing even more scorn upon their group and the peaceful advocates in it, and inadverently creating good conditions for the “natural-born” antisocial/immoral assholes who wear their colors.
“It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
-Martin Luther King
Sadly, for now the MRAs/gender egalitarians seem to be doing far worse than even American blacks—see the bitter split with feminism, and the inability of similarly-minded feminists and MRAs to leave behind the sectarianism. (This collective blog that HughRistik writes for is the kind of collaboration that I’d like to see way more of on the gender front.)
I think you have had your opinion coloured by encountering people in the anger phase of the denial, anger, acceptance progression of changing beliefs in the light of new evidence.
Depends where you look. Some of that stuff is indeed written in such tone, and it’s true that some of it advises sly and dishonest tactics. On the other hand, here’s the story of a man who saved his marriage by applying insights he gained on game websites (the blog might be NSFW for foul language, though it’s on the blogroll of Overcoming Bias): http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/relationship-game-week-a-readers-journey/
For me, that story seems awfully depressing. Nothing in the story suggested to me that the man loved his wife or that his wife loved him. Game may have permitted them to have a more harmonious marriage, and evidently better sex, but not a relationship that seemed based on mutual love and respect.
It may be that the marriage was just too flawed to begin with; it’s also possible, given that the writer was writing for Roissy’s blog, that he consciously left details and color about love out of his narrative. But from what he has actually written, he’s not describing the sort of marriage that I would want to be a part of.
Agreed. I also noticed that there was basically nothing about the wife’s individual personality. She could have been anybody, as long as she was gameable.
And the couple of tidbits that don’t sound dreadful and nasty to me, do sound like they are okay by accident—the theory sounds like bullshit, it’s just a stopped clock right twice a day. Example:
Panicking when one’s faithfulness is questioned is bad, but not because it’s “beta” and signifies fear of the wife or something—but because if the question causes panic, that might be because there’s cheating going on and he fears being caught. The post recommends teasing. That is better than panic (ymmv), but my guess would be that even better would be a perfectly calm and deadpanned: “No.” Or a longer sentence, but just as declarative: “I am not cheating on you.” No details or explanations or protestations. Presenting concrete evidence (unless asked for it!) might or might not hurt, but it probably won’t help, especially if you can come up with it too quickly—readily thought-of evidence could be planted, or might signify that you’ve already considered what to say if asked because there’s some reason to expect her to ask you wanted to be prepared for.
The post recommends teasing. That is better than panic (ymmv), but my guess would be that even better would be a perfectly calm and deadpanned: “No.” Or a longer sentence, but just as declarative: “I am not cheating on you.” No details or explanations or protestations.
The problem with this approach is that factual statements can be argued with, putting you back into the same place as before—i.e., having an argument where you’re being accused of something. The “agree and amplify” approach has the tactical advantage that it leaves the other person with no place to escalate to, and can be repeated more or less indefinitely.
(Note: I’m not commenting here on the (un)desirability of having an adversarial relationship like that to begin with, just pointing to a tactical advantage of the proposed “agree and amplify” over a flat assertion or denial. Another advantage, btw, is that it can actually make the accuser paradoxically feel listened to/accepted/validated in a way that disagreement does not. My wife has actually successfully used this tactic on me when I’ve been annoyed at some minor thing—the old, “yes, I did do that, and I did it just to annoy you” routine. ;-) )
I was generalizing. The examples of “before” conversations make it sound like he thinks he’s being accused of some sort of infidelity (however minor) and that he’s scared of being so accused.
As I mentioned once before but should mention again since you linked to his blog, Roissy is not representative of PUAs. He is like most of the worst things about PUAs, plus some other flaws of his own, all packed together. He’s attracted a lot of attention outside the seduction community, but virtually nobody inside it knows who he is or cares about him.
I think you’re making the mistake of judging him for his theatrics and shock-value approach. Once you get past the swaggering style, tune in to his sense of humor, and figure out which commenters are worth reading, I’d say his blog is by far the best place for all but the most technical discussions of all aspects of male-female interactions. This doesn’t mean I endorse all he has to say, of course, but the level of insight far surpasses the other game/PUA sites I’ve seen. (I don’t think it’s for nothing that Robin Hanson links to him.)
In particular, I’m struck by the quality of many commenters I’ve seen there through the years, though in this regard, the blog is past its prime (and even back in the past, you had to sift through the detritus of unmoderated comments to find the gems). What many people might find strange is that lots of the regulars there are women, some of them extremely smart and cultured, though it’s actually not surprising when you consider that it’s an environment where the usual rules-hypocrisy is thrown out the window.
All in all, there is certainly much there to be offended by, and in fact, for lots of that stuff, one is required to be offended by it according to the official respectable standards of our culture. Yet anyone striving to eliminate biases about these topics should find much of the insight offered there worthwhile.
I would not actually say “Aaaaaaaugh.” in that situation. I’d probably say “Excuse me?” and then there would need to be a rather excellent recovery or I’d stop interacting with the person. (I’m granting for the sake of the exercise that I’d ask for a drink in the first place, even though in real life I don’t consume alcohol.)
Which is precisely why the offered hypothetical is worse than useless in this case.
Bear in mind that in the circumstance being discussed, asking for a drink is like asking someone to hand you $5 -- for no reason at all other than than that you asked, and the fact that they are a male.
To presume that you would react in a certain way, conditional upon first having done something so utterly foreign to you in the first place, is like saying what you’d do if the moon were made of green cheese, only ISTM you’d have a better chance of being right in that case. ;-)
Well, pretend the bar serves something I’d drink. Say I’d get a virgin pina colada. I could imagine asking for one of those.
I might also ask girls, if the environment gave me high enough priors on them being bi/gay.
So, your moral compass allows you to use other people’s sexual preferences as a money pump?
(And no, that’s not a line, although now that I’ve said it, I suppose it could be reworked into a LW-friendly response to a drink request. Needs more humor, less judgment, though! Hm, maybe “Are you trying to exploit my hardware preferences as a money pump?” A little too double-entrendreish, though. These things are really situational, and not at all suited to cached responses.)
I can’t actually think of any situation where asking a question seems to me to be immoral. It can’t be a denotative falsehood, so it’s clear on the “lying” front; there’s nothing else obvious it could be that would be wrong. I suppose it could be mean, or impolite, but this doesn’t even appear to be that to me. I wouldn’t badger anybody about buying me the beverage, which would be mean.
This is a request which is slightly different from a question. Some requests are considered immoral when there is a power or status differential. University lecturers and students provide an example where some requests are widely considered immoral.
Point. Questions/requests that predictably create a sense of obligation in the hearer to do something they ought not feel obligated to perform may be wrong. I don’t think I can, let alone do, project enough power in a casual setting to make anyone feel obliged to buy me the liquid of my choice, although I suppose it’s possible I’m mistaken.
There is also an implied contract with most requests. Many people if asked to buy a stranger a drink will assume that agreeing to the request will result in an opportunity for conversation at least. If someone makes the request with an understanding of the implied trade and no intention of fulfilling their half of the bargain then that seems at least dishonest if not actually immoral.
I wouldn’t request a favor like this from someone I didn’t plan to have at least a short conversation with. (I would ask smaller favors, like that they tell me the time, or more urgent favors, like that they loan me their cell phone so I can call my ride, but a drink is neither negligible nor particularly important.)
Maybe you wouldn’t. I’m just giving an example of another way that a question/request could be seen to be immoral.
Refusing makes the guy look bad, unless he has a particularly adept response. The request becomes “buy me a drink, or go through status shenanigans to not look bad.” That’s not exactly obligation, but it is a form of social pressure.
Asking for $5 (well, probably $7-8 if it’s not a beer) isn’t exactly obligation, either. Is that a request you would make of both men and women? If not, why not? And how it is different to a request from a drink, other than the latter being wrapped up in more social frills (and combined with more social pressure)?
If anyone is saying “excuse me?” shouldn’t it be the person being asked for the drink (aka $7)? The only problem is that if men make this response, they look bad, due to the context-specific social power differential.
Yes, I said so elsewhere.
Right, my question here was whether you would ask both men and women for $7 on its own. I should have made that clearer.
And if not, how it asking for a $7 drink different?
I would not ask a stranger for money unless I had an urgent, immediate need for it and no other way to get it. Asking for a drink seems different in much the same way that asking my friends for books instead of money on my birthday seems different. The drink provides a context for some sort of interaction; the money doesn’t.
Which is precisely why it’s a status move: you are placing an implicit pricetag on your continued interaction, and therefore implicitly asserting that your status/value is such that you can demand a payment of tribute for nothing more than the chance of remaining in your good graces.
Whether this were your intention or not, it’s the situation the man is placed in, unless he has the cojones (and possibly training) to be able to refuse with impunity.
Or they are just showing a sign of desiring social interaction and they have culturally ingrained that the way to do so is to ask for a drink (disclaimer: I’ve never actually seen this occur). One may be assuming a lot more about unconscious status inquiring that is more in the category of just silly cultural norms.
As I said in an earlier comment, there is almost no benefit to treating this possibility as a special case, especially since it is so cheap for her to claim that this is what she’s doing, even when it’s not.
Many women who are actually status-testing no doubt sincerely believe in their conscious model of their actions, and you cannot inexpensively separate them from the ones who are also correct!
One reason, by the way, why this situation is so useful for women as a test of a man’s social skills, is that it requires considerable social calibration to pull off a declination or negotiation that also acknowledges and continues the “game” in progress, rather than simply refusing to play.
I think that the women who’ve been involved in this thread have actually been modeling Roko’s original statement as though it’s a refusal to interact, when in fact to be functional it has to actually take the interaction up a notch, by giving a nod to something you’ve noticed about her, or something she said, etc. (IOW, men who think women want them to be mind-readers are only partly correct; they just want to know you’ve been paying attention)
But if this is what they are doing then the ideal response may be to actually buy a drink since at least in pop culture depictions of this sort of scenario (at least in movies I’ve seen) seems to be that the male is actually supposed to do that. Failure to do so might be interpreted as a lack of interest.
Not compared to refusing in a way that shows you’re paying attention. A drink without attention isn’t nearly as flattering as the attention without the drink. And giving too much of either or both is counterproductive at Byrnema’s hypothetical level 2.
Sure, it may merely be unconscious entitlement, rather than a conscious status move.
I’m a little mystified by your analogy, and what you are intending to show with it. Being treated like the birthday girl (or boy) is a form of special treatment that happens once a year. It’s not your birthday every time you go out, right? Giving birthday presents between friends is generally mutual, yet you’ve made no mention of the drink buying being mutual. Furthermore, giving birthday presents happens when people know each other and already have an interaction, rather than being a precondition for an interaction occurring.
Since getting presents on one’s birthday is a form of special treatment, doesn’t your analogy suggest that expecting/requesting drinks to be bought for oneself is an expectation/request for year-round special treatment? And doesn’t asking for drinks look even worse when we remember that buying birthday presents among friends in mutual, while women asking for drinks aren’t expecting to reciprocate and buy the guy a drink the next night?
I actually receive a fair number of gifts on non-special occasions too, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.
I haven’t mentioned buying a reciprocal drink, but this is largely because I have idiosyncratic neuroses about money, not because it wouldn’t occur to me as something appropriate to do.
I’ve noticed something interesting about your “social processing” in these posts—your reasoning does not appear to include anything about what other people think or feel; in fact, it barely seems to include them at all! (For example, how would anyone you ask know whether you intend to reciprocate, or not?)
And I would guess that this apparent lack of consequential modeling of others’ visceral experience of you, would lead to other sorts of situations in which your NT friends/co-workers find you “weird”.
NTs pay lip service to deontological rules, but are mostly consequentialists with respect to their social behavior. As others here have pointed out, one of the key rules of NT social interaction is that everyone must show loyalty to the rules, while not being so clueless as to actually follow them or expect others to do so, when the real rules are about status and its consequences.
IOW, it’s insanely irrational to treat NT social interactions as being truly rule-driven. (By which I mean it’s irrational to think you will accomplish anything besides driving the NT’s insane!)
Unfortunately, it’s also similarly irrational/insane to try to convince non-NTs of this, unless they have some relevant personal experience. Me, I learned a little from a mentor in the business world who taught me how to see the power and affiliation subtexts of business interactions, but I’ve consistently erred on the side of assuming that those situations were special cases, and that I didn’t need to think like that with some group of trusted allies.
And in pretty much every case, I’ve found it to be a tragic error to assume that people are NOT playing games, no matter how sincerely they themselves believe they “really aren’t”. (When that’s really just the game of “not playing games”. Ever wonder why everybody claims to hate office politics, and yet it still exists?)
Geeks, of course, just use a different rulebook for their game, where (among other things) we get status for valuing “what you know” and “what’s right” over “who you know” and “what’s cool/popular/socially calibrated”. (However, this doesn’t change the game itself, just what the points get awarded for.)
Have you ever thought about why this is? The social dynamics of gift giving is a pretty interesting topic in itself.
I don’t know why in general. In my case, I hate surprises, and am pretty good at getting my friends to indulge this hate by not getting me things that I haven’t pre-approved. Since I’m neurotic about money and tend to not spend it unless it’s really, really important, this means that the average gift I get from a friend is more useful to me than the equivalent amount of money (which I’d basically never spend), especially since when I use the gift I think of the friend and get some utility from that.
That’s quite princessy behavior—worthy of a cute 10/cheerleader type! Go Alicorn!
Okay, this has me curious—is there actually a subset of pickup that is designed to tell me what to do, instead of telling people what to do to me? That would be news to me.
What, you mean girl game? Yeah, sure. It’s just not as big as guy game. ASF has a board for girls only.
*pokes around*
Meh. This reminds me of advice columns, only with worse punctuation.
And apparently a “Playette FAQ” as well. (It makes heavy use of PUA terminology like “one-itis” and “IOI”, though.)
I haven’t really read ASFin almost 20 years, so I didn’t know about the Playette stuff. Funny story, though: I can attest to the value of the “whiff” technique in the Playette FAQ, because my wife used it in our first email and phone conversations, back in 1992… and well, um, it worked out pretty well for both of us. ;-)
That depends on what exactly your goal is. Typical men can boost their sexual attractiveness to women by changing their behavior far more than vice versa, so it’s unsurprising that there is a much greater body of expertise aimed at men in this regard. Also, getting sex is pretty much trivial for women and requires no particular skill. However, commitment and long-term relationship strategies are important and nontrivial for women too, and on better game-oriented blogs, I’ve often seen good discussions about the mistakes women make in this regard. Trouble is, realistic treatments of this issue tend to bring up even more ugly truths and end up sounding even less PC than the ordinary PUA stuff.
Can you give a couple examples?
Alicorn:
Like in everything else, humans make bad decisions due to biases in matters of mating and pairing too. However, these particular biases are male- and female-specific, and pointing out the latter is easily perceived by women as an affront to their sex, which makes realistic discussion very hard.
But since you’re asking, here are some instances of such biases. None of them are universal, but each is held strongly by non-negligible numbers of women and leads them to decisions they later regret. One example is when women overestimate the attractiveness of men they can realistically hope to attract for serious permanent commitment, given the higher attractiveness of men they can attract for temporary relationships and short-term flings without any real commitment on the man’s part. Another is when women underestimate the speed with which their looks and reproductive abilities deteriorate with age. Yet another is the refusal to acknowledge that women can be greatly attracted to some very nasty personality types of men, not despite them but because of them (google “dark triad”), which leads some women to entering disastrous relationships with such men. Then there are also many wrong beliefs about what personality characteristics of women are truly attractive and pleasant to men and apt to attract their loyalty and commitment in the long run.
There are other examples too, many of which would probably sound more controversial. Even these I listed can provoke much worse reactions when put in less abstract and detached terms, which is typically necessary when forming concrete advice.
You’re bi, right? You could probably make use of much of the advice for straight men if you wanted.
I find it nasty to read. It’s not intended for me, even if I’d be interested in some of the people it’s about interacting with.
This is a general comment about the PUA material I’ve read.
It comes off as lonely. There’s no hint of enjoying someone’s company, or hope that a someone could enjoy the writer’s company if not manipulated into it.
Yes. Sometimes I get a sense of simmering resentment underneath it all, especially on the subject of “nice guys” vs. “jackasses”.
What the PUA people call “day game” (approaching women in everyday life, instead of bars and clubs) can verge on the concept of enjoyable company, but from my limited reading on the subject they don’t seem to cover day game nearly as much. They say it’s more difficult than “night game”.
It’s a little like something in a famous essay by Eric Raymond on “good porn” vs. “bad porn”. (Just google on those phrases to find a copy—I don’t care to do that search from a machine at work.) Following a personally conducted scientific examination of porn pictures on the web, he concluded that men looking for porn are not looking for depictions of attractive young women posed as if about to have enjoyable sex with the viewer. The porn industry knows what sells, and pictures of that sort, that Raymond called “good porn”, formed only a small minority. They are looking for what he classified as “bad porn”: pictures of an absolutely joyless activity, all hard faces, cold stares, and fetishistic trappings.
ETA: Eric Raymond’s essay is on his own blog here, and he’s updated some of the links that were broken when I first read it, so you can see some of his experimental samples.
Yes: It’s so bitter and so full of blame for the vast sea of women who didn’t respond as desired to “niceness”.
I find the resentment off-putting too, and as in any other area of human concern, there is indeed a lot of unjustified feeling of entitlement. However, it should be noted that the main reason for the resentment is the rules-hypocrisy. Many men are indeed too clueless to figure out the disconnect between the official attitudes and values that are professed piously in our culture and the actual rules of the status game that it’s taboo to discuss openly (so that such discussions are corralled off to disreputable venues like the PUA culture). Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
This isn’t about blame, it’s about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.
You’re sympathizing with the men, which is natural—without speculating about details, your experience is more like theirs. Try imagining dating one of them, or being in a relationship with them—if that’s too much of a strain, try imagining reading a forum of women who are that hurt and angry about men.
Fair enough. However, I would say that women tend to display at least two major biases when they encounter this sort of stuff. (I don’t think these biases completely account for the fear and revulsion you mention, but they do mean that it often goes too far.)
First, women often don’t take into account that they’re observing men’s in-clique behavior, which they rarely, if ever, see in real life. Many young men whom they’d perceive as decent, polite, overall good guys (and who indeed are that by any reasonable standards) sometimes spew out stuff that’s just as extreme when they loosen up over beers among their male buddies, complete with foul language, frustrated trashing of women who have hurt them, etc. It’s just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance, so when they’re caught off guard rambling, or when they’re writing anonymously on the internet, they tend to come off much worse than they really are.
Second, I understand that women might fear getting involved with a man whose attractive surface hides an angry, frustrated, manipulative PUA underneath, whose nasty nature will only later come to prominence. However, this fear is entirely out of proportion when you consider a similar, but much more prevalent and dangerous natural phenomenon. Namely, there are significant numbers of men around whose personalities are naturally fundamentally nasty but nevertheless wildly attractive to women—many of whom ruin their lives big time by pursuing relationships with such men. See, for example, the Dark Triad paper by Jonason et al. for a discussion along these lines, which is nowhere near a complete account of this entire phenomenon. This is realistically a far greater danger than encountering a PUA, who is anyway more likely to be just a regular guy who undertook some self-improvement than a monster lurking below a smooth surface.
From the PUAs I’ve known, they are unlikely to be wolves in sheep’s clothing… they are more likely to be sheep in wolves’ clothing. There are a few guys who are badly adjusted and have weird antisocial ideas in the local PUA group, and other guys make fun of them behind their backs.
Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?
As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern—the only specific advice I’ve seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who’s rude to waitresses.
NancyLebovitz:
I would say yes. I have a hobby of sorts that consists of exploring obscure corners of the web where various sorts of fringe people with unconventional (and often disreputable) ideas gather, and attempting to understand their perspectives in a detached manner, as free of bias as possible. As an example relevant for your question, I have read radical feminist websites where the level of anger against men far surpasses any venting against women you’ll see on even the worst PUA forums.
Now, my conclusion is that out of all these fringe groups, most of them just form their own echo chambers where they vent and reinforce their peculiar biases, but a small minority actually manage to come up with non-trivial accurate insight that is nowhere to be found in more reputable and mainstream sources. The PUA community just happens to be one such example. In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women’s community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it. (There are also communities full of angry venting men where, in contrast to PUAs, I’ve never seen any particularly interesting ideas.)
Trouble is, some very strong biases are present here, because the ugly and hard to admit truth is that some personalty types of this sort are attractive as such to many women—not all women, of course, and I won’t speculate on the percentage, but it’s certainly non-negligible. Note that I don’t mean the situations where such dark characteristics are hidden under a nice surface only to emerge later, but when they are truly attractive by themselves, causing irresistible urges in women to engage in dangerous, self-immolating adventures with such men. You can view it as a specifically female form of extreme akrasia, I guess. The prevailing bias, however, is to interpret all such situations as women having been manipulated by a wolf in sheep’s clothing, even when the wolf was howling and brandishing his fangs from day one, only to get an enthusiastic response.
I would love to read material from a female analogue to PUA. Looking back on past relationships I can see some patterns for behavior that ‘hooked’ me, but I’m sure I’m missing a lot of potentially valuable insights.
People often meet a person they like but can’t commit to romantically because of small ‘defects’ in the person’s behavior as it relates to the relationship. Personally, I’d be all in favor of my significant other using PUA equivalent methods on me, provided I was aware it and had studied the material myself (in the same way that I’m in favor of my significant other wearing certain clothing, etc).
So, two main upshots of wide dissemination of PUA style material: better understanding of myself, and heightened attraction to my partner.
I replied to a similar question in this subthread.
You’re response in the subthread was more a list of biases exhibited by females (an interesting list though). What I’m looking for is a set of actionable techniques a woman can use in the context of a relationship to keep a man more interested.
The Rules is probably the best known example. I haven’t read it and don’t know whether there is any validity to the claims. I suspect there’s some truth in there but that it is not terribly rigorous or accurate.
I haven’t read this book either, but a significant piece of evidence against it is that one of the authors divorced her husband only a few years after it was published. Otherwise, I’ve seen it get mixed to negative comments on game websites, the principal complaint being that a man who lets himself be played by those rules may easily ipso facto signal low status to the point where he’ll destroy her respect for (and thus attraction to) him. Some of the tactics allegedly advocated by the book indeed sound that way, but I won’t pass any definite judgments since I haven’t read it.
Manslations is pretty good.
Certainly such products exist (e.g. catchhimandkeephim.com, husbandscantresist.com) but I’m not familiar with any free online resources comparable to the vast assortment available for men. Catchhimandkeephim.com has some articles, but skimming through I found it difficult to judge how useful a woman would find this advice, as it sounded all very obvious and straightforward to me… but then, I’m a man, and the articles are about how men react and think. It’s possible that the information would be a revelation for someone who wasn’t a man. ;-)
There are many books giving that sort of advice, but I haven’t read any, so I can’t recommend them. Just from the titles and blurbs I’ve seen, it can be reliably concluded that many are very bad.
Anecdotally, I can say that in the best discussions of women’s relationship strategies and techniques I’ve ever read on game-related sites, I’ve never seen anyone point out a book or any other source of systematic advice whose message closely matches the best evidence-supported conclusions of these discussions. I see this as a strong piece of evidence against the whole existing literature. This is not that surprising considering that the best evidence-supported conclusions sound, to a large degree, highly un-PC and shattering lots of pleasant-sounding illusions.
Another piece is that, to the extent that the challenge for women is getting commitment, it’s simply harder to do experiments.
Yes, it’s harder to do experiments on parts of the interaction that occur later down the line. I think that’s a lot of the reason that PUAs talk so much more about pickup than relationships (though PUA forums typically have active relationships boards): the conversion funnel of approaches to dating to relationships gets narrower and narrower. PUAs spend most of their time stuck at particular interaction points prior to relationships, such as getting numbers and women not calling them back, going on dates with women and not being able to kiss them, or only successfully attracting women who don’t quite meet their relationship criteria. I’ve noticed that once PUAs get all that stuff handled, they start talking about relationships more than the mechanics of pickup, and actually get really picky.
You might find The Fantasy of Being Thin interesting.
What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?
As for the Dark Triad, I don’t know what’s going on there. I tentatively assume that some people like danger, and what attracts some to motorcycles and mountain-climbing can also attract people to mates who have TROUBLE written all over them.
Alternatively, some women choose men like their fathers—they’re imprinted on a bad idea of what a man is.
Also, I hope it’s less common in the culture, but some women believe that they can turn a bad guy into a good one by being a sufficiently good wife. I’m not going to say it never happens, but making the attempt can be a powerful emotional hook.
It’s clear that how reliable people’s survival instincts are (and about what parts of their lives) vary tremendously, and I’ve never seen a substantial discussion of how the “this is good for me, that is bad for me” sense works.
Yes, I am familiar with this particular community. They do discuss some common biases in an interesting way, but ultimately, my conclusion is that they generate their own more severe ones, without adding much clarity to anything overall.
Well, that could be a topic for a whole book, not a mere blog comment. I’d rather not just drop concrete names and places I’ve found interesting, since without lots of painstaking explanations and disclaimers, it would send off a thunderous signal of affiliation with all kinds of disreputable people.
This would be extremely surprising to me if true. This sounds like something that was true in the 1950s, but does this really match your experience today? In my experience, at least among people under 30 or so, there is no difference between how guys and girls act in social situations when there are, or are not, members of the opposite sex around. (Business or formal situations are different.)
Well, I have no evidence except anecdotal to present, but yes, this does match my experience. It surely doesn’t apply to all individuals, social groups, and occasions, but I observe it regularly, and I have to personally plead guilty to a certain degree of such inconsistency. Especially when, for example, a guy gets dumped or rejected and wants to vent a bit by rambling about the evilness of the girl in question, or women in general, it definitely seems likely to me that much cruder rants can be produced in an exclusive company of close, trusted male friends than otherwise.
In any case, even if this is true only for a minority of men, my main point still holds, i.e. there are non-negligible numbers of men around who, despite being perfectly respectable by all other criteria, engage in crude language about women and male-female relations on some occasions when no women are around to hear it. For this reason, women are often biased in that they tend to interpret such language, when observed, as unrealistically strong evidence of serious character flaws in the man in question.
I have often been bitterly amused at how the “Yes, but...” speeches on the misogyny often perpetrated by Western socially/sexually deprived men, on the one hand, and the crime often perpetrated by lower-class Afro-Americans, on the other hand, often end up disquietingly similar.
And with good reason; in both cases, we have angry, alienated young men who are least able to cope with the systemic oppression of their social group, least willing to play by the rules that treat them unfairly, spiral into hatred and evil, bringing even more scorn upon their group and the peaceful advocates in it, and inadverently creating good conditions for the “natural-born” antisocial/immoral assholes who wear their colors.
-Martin Luther King
Sadly, for now the MRAs/gender egalitarians seem to be doing far worse than even American blacks—see the bitter split with feminism, and the inability of similarly-minded feminists and MRAs to leave behind the sectarianism. (This collective blog that HughRistik writes for is the kind of collaboration that I’d like to see way more of on the gender front.)
I think you have had your opinion coloured by encountering people in the anger phase of the denial, anger, acceptance progression of changing beliefs in the light of new evidence.
Depends where you look. Some of that stuff is indeed written in such tone, and it’s true that some of it advises sly and dishonest tactics. On the other hand, here’s the story of a man who saved his marriage by applying insights he gained on game websites (the blog might be NSFW for foul language, though it’s on the blogroll of Overcoming Bias):
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/relationship-game-week-a-readers-journey/
For me, that story seems awfully depressing. Nothing in the story suggested to me that the man loved his wife or that his wife loved him. Game may have permitted them to have a more harmonious marriage, and evidently better sex, but not a relationship that seemed based on mutual love and respect.
It may be that the marriage was just too flawed to begin with; it’s also possible, given that the writer was writing for Roissy’s blog, that he consciously left details and color about love out of his narrative. But from what he has actually written, he’s not describing the sort of marriage that I would want to be a part of.
Agreed. I also noticed that there was basically nothing about the wife’s individual personality. She could have been anybody, as long as she was gameable.
And the couple of tidbits that don’t sound dreadful and nasty to me, do sound like they are okay by accident—the theory sounds like bullshit, it’s just a stopped clock right twice a day. Example:
Panicking when one’s faithfulness is questioned is bad, but not because it’s “beta” and signifies fear of the wife or something—but because if the question causes panic, that might be because there’s cheating going on and he fears being caught. The post recommends teasing. That is better than panic (ymmv), but my guess would be that even better would be a perfectly calm and deadpanned: “No.” Or a longer sentence, but just as declarative: “I am not cheating on you.” No details or explanations or protestations. Presenting concrete evidence (unless asked for it!) might or might not hurt, but it probably won’t help, especially if you can come up with it too quickly—readily thought-of evidence could be planted, or might signify that you’ve already considered what to say if asked because there’s some reason to expect her to ask you wanted to be prepared for.
The problem with this approach is that factual statements can be argued with, putting you back into the same place as before—i.e., having an argument where you’re being accused of something. The “agree and amplify” approach has the tactical advantage that it leaves the other person with no place to escalate to, and can be repeated more or less indefinitely.
(Note: I’m not commenting here on the (un)desirability of having an adversarial relationship like that to begin with, just pointing to a tactical advantage of the proposed “agree and amplify” over a flat assertion or denial. Another advantage, btw, is that it can actually make the accuser paradoxically feel listened to/accepted/validated in a way that disagreement does not. My wife has actually successfully used this tactic on me when I’ve been annoyed at some minor thing—the old, “yes, I did do that, and I did it just to annoy you” routine. ;-) )
The incident described in the piece doesn’t involve the possibility of cheating at all.
I was generalizing. The examples of “before” conversations make it sound like he thinks he’s being accused of some sort of infidelity (however minor) and that he’s scared of being so accused.
As I mentioned once before but should mention again since you linked to his blog, Roissy is not representative of PUAs. He is like most of the worst things about PUAs, plus some other flaws of his own, all packed together. He’s attracted a lot of attention outside the seduction community, but virtually nobody inside it knows who he is or cares about him.
I think you’re making the mistake of judging him for his theatrics and shock-value approach. Once you get past the swaggering style, tune in to his sense of humor, and figure out which commenters are worth reading, I’d say his blog is by far the best place for all but the most technical discussions of all aspects of male-female interactions. This doesn’t mean I endorse all he has to say, of course, but the level of insight far surpasses the other game/PUA sites I’ve seen. (I don’t think it’s for nothing that Robin Hanson links to him.)
In particular, I’m struck by the quality of many commenters I’ve seen there through the years, though in this regard, the blog is past its prime (and even back in the past, you had to sift through the detritus of unmoderated comments to find the gems). What many people might find strange is that lots of the regulars there are women, some of them extremely smart and cultured, though it’s actually not surprising when you consider that it’s an environment where the usual rules-hypocrisy is thrown out the window.
All in all, there is certainly much there to be offended by, and in fact, for lots of that stuff, one is required to be offended by it according to the official respectable standards of our culture. Yet anyone striving to eliminate biases about these topics should find much of the insight offered there worthwhile.