That’s such a strange comment. It seems like he was an especially sensitive young man who had a weird psychological reaction to reading radical feminist writings.
Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison.
That’s sad, but it surely must be an extremely uncommon problem. Not many young men read radfem tracts to begin with. Having that kind of extreme reaction must be very rare.
Aaronson’s description felt very familiar to me, describing my middle and early high school years pretty well. In my case this didn’t involve reading radical feminist writing, just paying attention to what adults said about how people were to treat each other.
(And despite having had several relationships and now being married I’ve still never initiated a relationship, mostly out of really not wanting to come off as creepy.)
Scott was probably one of the few people to actually believe what he was told about sexual harassment. For example, if you tell 18-year-old men that they are “bad” if they stare at a beautiful woman whom they are not in a relationship with, most will think you’re being silly. If Scott, however, thought this was a commonly held belief I can understand why it would cause him extreme anxiety.
I don’t think he read radfem with 12. Fear or being scored at when a girl finds out that a low status guy loves her doesn’t need any radfem literature.
He read that literature because from his perspective it was the obvious way to deal with the problem.
That’s sad, but it surely must be an extremely uncommon problem.
How sure are you of that claim? What percentage would you guess if we would ask a similar percentage at a LW census?
Nervousness about expressing romantic interest is of course quite common, especially for nerdy/low-status people. But Scott seems to have had highly exaggerated fears (arrest, expelled from school, etc.) His reaction was so extreme that he even sought chemical castration. That was an extreme, abnormal response.
My interpretation was that Scott was blaming feminism for worsening his emotional problems:
Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.
Because of my fears—my fears of being “outed” as a nerdy heterosexual male, and therefore as a potential creep or sex criminal—I had constant suicidal thoughts.
He does seem to me to be blaming feminism for worsening his problems. I think it’s worth pointing out that 99% of the mental torment he went through was baseless. I was a nerdy male and I asked girls out in high school/college with no problems except getting rejected a few times. (The trick is to not ask out girls who are massively higher in status than you.)
Nervousness about expressing romantic interest is of course quite common, especially for nerdy/low-status people. But Scott seems to have had highly exaggerated fears (arrest, expelled from school, etc.) His reaction was so extreme that he even sought chemical castration. That was an extreme, abnormal response.
I agree that it’s out on the tail of the distribution, but I don’t think it’s a very wide distribution. Fear of those specific consequences is rare; general fear and anxiety severe enough to seriously impact quality of life, up to and including risk of suicide, is not nearly as rare. Social anxiety is, after all, a relatively common problem. I mean, here we are in a subthread on another website with a pretty small user base, and you have three “me too” responses within 12 hours.
The kind of feminist ideas Scott talks about are really important in the general case. But they are also predictably harmful to people predisposed to a certain kind of anxiety. To steal an analogy I’ve seen elsewhere: telling a hypochondriac that they should pay more attention to their health is probably harmful, even though that’s a good message for the general population. A little more nuance can help—like emphasizing the target (“interact with women as full human beings”, “maintain your health”), not just the direction required to reach the target (“worry more about making women uncomfortable”, “worry more about possible symptoms”). Because some people have overshot the target, and need to come back the other direction.
This isn’t to say “nerdy men should get a free pass on being creeps” or something dumb like that. But it would be great to have more activists/therapists/bloggers/etc that aren’t actively, viciously anti-helpful about it.
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”).
My interpretation was that Scott was blaming feminism for worsening his emotional problems:
So, I think a common underlying model of “feminism,” though more specifically of “social justice” in general, is that it goes like “environment → negative emotions → better environment.” It seems to me pretty obvious that the first link happens.
That’s sad, but it surely must be an extremely uncommon problem.
It sounds like Aaronson had an uncommonly severe version, but the general form of the problem doesn’t seem exceptionally rare, among the subpopulation in question.
Figuring out what we can usefully do about it, without trading one problem for another, that’s the hard part.
(Part of me also wants to point out that exactly how uncommon it is doesn’t matter very much, due to a perhaps irrational fear that someone wants to say “well, it’s not common” and then forget the problem exists.)
That’s such a strange comment. It seems like he was an especially sensitive young man who had a weird psychological reaction to reading radical feminist writings.
That’s sad, but it surely must be an extremely uncommon problem. Not many young men read radfem tracts to begin with. Having that kind of extreme reaction must be very rare.
Aaronson’s description felt very familiar to me, describing my middle and early high school years pretty well. In my case this didn’t involve reading radical feminist writing, just paying attention to what adults said about how people were to treat each other.
(And despite having had several relationships and now being married I’ve still never initiated a relationship, mostly out of really not wanting to come off as creepy.)
Scott was probably one of the few people to actually believe what he was told about sexual harassment. For example, if you tell 18-year-old men that they are “bad” if they stare at a beautiful woman whom they are not in a relationship with, most will think you’re being silly. If Scott, however, thought this was a commonly held belief I can understand why it would cause him extreme anxiety.
I don’t think he read radfem with 12. Fear or being scored at when a girl finds out that a low status guy loves her doesn’t need any radfem literature.
He read that literature because from his perspective it was the obvious way to deal with the problem.
How sure are you of that claim? What percentage would you guess if we would ask a similar percentage at a LW census?
Nervousness about expressing romantic interest is of course quite common, especially for nerdy/low-status people. But Scott seems to have had highly exaggerated fears (arrest, expelled from school, etc.) His reaction was so extreme that he even sought chemical castration. That was an extreme, abnormal response.
My interpretation was that Scott was blaming feminism for worsening his emotional problems:
He does seem to me to be blaming feminism for worsening his problems. I think it’s worth pointing out that 99% of the mental torment he went through was baseless. I was a nerdy male and I asked girls out in high school/college with no problems except getting rejected a few times. (The trick is to not ask out girls who are massively higher in status than you.)
I agree that it’s out on the tail of the distribution, but I don’t think it’s a very wide distribution. Fear of those specific consequences is rare; general fear and anxiety severe enough to seriously impact quality of life, up to and including risk of suicide, is not nearly as rare. Social anxiety is, after all, a relatively common problem. I mean, here we are in a subthread on another website with a pretty small user base, and you have three “me too” responses within 12 hours.
The kind of feminist ideas Scott talks about are really important in the general case. But they are also predictably harmful to people predisposed to a certain kind of anxiety. To steal an analogy I’ve seen elsewhere: telling a hypochondriac that they should pay more attention to their health is probably harmful, even though that’s a good message for the general population. A little more nuance can help—like emphasizing the target (“interact with women as full human beings”, “maintain your health”), not just the direction required to reach the target (“worry more about making women uncomfortable”, “worry more about possible symptoms”). Because some people have overshot the target, and need to come back the other direction.
This isn’t to say “nerdy men should get a free pass on being creeps” or something dumb like that. But it would be great to have more activists/therapists/bloggers/etc that aren’t actively, viciously anti-helpful about it.
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”).
So, I think a common underlying model of “feminism,” though more specifically of “social justice” in general, is that it goes like “environment → negative emotions → better environment.” It seems to me pretty obvious that the first link happens.
It sounds like Aaronson had an uncommonly severe version, but the general form of the problem doesn’t seem exceptionally rare, among the subpopulation in question.
Figuring out what we can usefully do about it, without trading one problem for another, that’s the hard part.
(Part of me also wants to point out that exactly how uncommon it is doesn’t matter very much, due to a perhaps irrational fear that someone wants to say “well, it’s not common” and then forget the problem exists.)