When faced with an uncertain uncomfortable situation the average nerd seeks out the rules to solve the situation.
I don’t think he’s the only person that starts to reading feminist writing to understand how to behave.
That kind of writing usually doesn’t help. It provides quite broad definitions of sexual harrasment and will in many cases increase the fear of acting wrongly.
In most cases it won’t get a guy to seek chemical castration, but most kids don’t complain when they get into programming at 11 years of age that they got a late start and their peer got it earlier.
When faced with an uncertain uncomfortable situation the average nerd seeks out the rules to solve the situation. I don’t think he’s the only person that starts to reading feminist writing to understand how to behave.
There is a genuine tension here. I don’t think we get to have the “enthusiastic consent, yes-means-yes!” ethic that most sex-positive feminists would want to apply in these matters, without also having some straightforward guidelines about what sexual scripts are both ethically unproblematic and genuinely likely to be effective. My fear is that sensitive, socially awkward males are the proverbial canary in the coalmine—they’re telling us that the whole project in its current form is on track to being a complete failure, with hard-to-foresee but potentially very bad consequences.
(What’s somewhat encouraging is that the non-redpill part of the PUA community—yes, it does exist—has been hard at work in crafting these sorts of ‘scripts’. However, PUA itself is quite controversial, so outright endorsement of this pursuit has not exactly been forthcoming. The best we can point to is some careful and nuanced assessments from the likes of Clarisse Thorn (see her “Confessions of a Pickup-Artist Chaser”).
When faced with an uncertain uncomfortable situation the average nerd seeks out the rules to solve the situation. I don’t think he’s the only person that starts to reading feminist writing to understand how to behave.
That kind of writing usually doesn’t help. It provides quite broad definitions of sexual harrasment and will in many cases increase the fear of acting wrongly.
In most cases it won’t get a guy to seek chemical castration, but most kids don’t complain when they get into programming at 11 years of age that they got a late start and their peer got it earlier.
There is a genuine tension here. I don’t think we get to have the “enthusiastic consent, yes-means-yes!” ethic that most sex-positive feminists would want to apply in these matters, without also having some straightforward guidelines about what sexual scripts are both ethically unproblematic and genuinely likely to be effective. My fear is that sensitive, socially awkward males are the proverbial canary in the coalmine—they’re telling us that the whole project in its current form is on track to being a complete failure, with hard-to-foresee but potentially very bad consequences.
(What’s somewhat encouraging is that the non-redpill part of the PUA community—yes, it does exist—has been hard at work in crafting these sorts of ‘scripts’. However, PUA itself is quite controversial, so outright endorsement of this pursuit has not exactly been forthcoming. The best we can point to is some careful and nuanced assessments from the likes of Clarisse Thorn (see her “Confessions of a Pickup-Artist Chaser”).