Several studies have shown that it’s common for women to fantasize about being raped. I think it’s rare for men to do so, tho I don’t remember if the studies showed that. This is relevant though not conclusive information.
sockpuppet2
Karma: −8
Substitute in correlate for constitute (which is what I was already doing; I assumed “part of” meant “projection of my multi-dimensional evaluation onto non-misogyny dimension), and my point remains the same.
Similarly, women don’t necessarily want to be abused. But some quality that women want very much correlates strongly with being abusive. They have to figure out what it is, and give it up. Or keep it, and stop complaining.
I bet that [restated] female receptivity to mistreatment [/restated] goes way back in mammalian evolution. It’s common in mammals for “courtship” of a female to consist of a strange new male beating up and driving off the female’s mate, then killing her children, then immediately mating with her. Evolution must have programmed females to be sexually receptive to this. In a violent world, it’s in her genes’ best interests (if not her own) to make her mate with the winner.
I’m not allowed to respond to any other comments to mine, by the fascist group-norm-enforcing requirement to give up 5 karma that I don’t have. So I’ll respond to the comment below here:
To paraphrase a discussion that went on in a different thread a few months ago… Nerds in school don’t necessarily want to be bullied. But they do want to study physics and watch anime, which correlates strongly with being bullied. They have to give it up. Or keep it, and stop complaining.
That isn’t at all the same. The nerds want the bullies to leave them alone. It’s an involuntary association. The woman dating an abusive man chose that man, and could usually leave him if she chose to.
What people want and what they evolved to do are separate: Irrelevant. I’m making an evolutionary argument to support evidence from observation that women have a mate preference correlated with abuse.
I think the question these women need to ask themselves is, “What do I really want?”
I’ve had about a hundred close male friends over the course of my life. Not one whom I chose as my friend ever, to my knowledge, beat, abused, humiliated, or manipulated a woman in any of the ways described in this post.
If I can pick 100 men and score, as far as I know, 100% in picking non-misogynistic males, when that isn’t even a big part of my criteria, how can so many intelligent women fail when picking just one man? The only explanation I can think of is that it’s an even smaller part of their criteria. They want something else more than they want not to be abused.
I try to pick women who are also mentally healthy, but I don’t really get to pick. I can only respond to the ones who pick me. And I’ll date any woman who’s really good-looking at least once. That said, maybe a quarter of the women I’ve dated let me know that the kind of foreplay/roleplay that turned them on the most was for me to tie them up or pretend to rape them.
Lots of the men on LessWrong are those nice guys, and we know all these women complaining turned down lots of nice guys like us to pick the ones who would abuse them. We’ve watched time and time again as wonderful, smart women chose the biggest jerk in the room and we couldn’t understand why. Then they come back and complain that all men are bastards. And if we ever complain about it we get indignant condemnation.
Women, it is not hard to find a man who won’t abuse you, if that’s what you really want most.
Rationality is supposed to be about solving the problem. Telling men to be nice will never solve this problem. Women already have all the power they need to solve it themselves. If women stop having sex with men who mistreat women, men will stop mistreating women.
It’s a good post. It doesn’t give me any information about whether I’m wrong, because both “Most men are brutes” and “Females prefer self-centered males” predict that many women will have such stories.