(Also, spontaneously all kinds of popular. If I'd known I could get this many people interested by hacking poly I might have done it sooner.)
The following is a public service announcement to all women who naturally like at least some shy nerds.
If you are (1) polyamorous and (2) able to directly ask men you find attractive to sleep with you (instead of doing the sheep dance where you freeze motionless and wait for them to approach) - or if you can hack yourself to be like that without too much effort - it is vastly easier than you imagine to acquire an entire harem of high-status and/or handsome nerds.
(For some but not all nerds, this may require that you be reasonably attractive. Most nerd girls I know are reasonably attractive and think they are not. So if you think that you're overweight and hideous and yet oddly enough nerds spend a lot of time talking to you at nerd parties, this means you are pretty.)
This concludes the public service announcement.
Worthwhile clarification: It is not necessary to ask them to sleep with you right off the bat. You could ask to snuggle.
Sure, and I also didn't mean to imply that this should happen on a first meeting, only at the point where you find yourself thinking, "Hm, I think I would prefer having sex with this person to not having sex with them," regardless of whether that takes a long or a short time.
Is there a trick to identifying gay male geeks? I find that sometimes I can go to four or five nerd parties and still have no idea about the sex lives of half the people there -- the shy male nerds I know tend not to talk about dating unless they're forced to. Maybe I'm going to the wrong parties.
Back when I was in the market, I found that asking male geeks whose sexual preference I didn't know on dates worked pretty well. Not, admittedly, the most efficient possible mechanism... and not entirely reliable, as it landed me a few dates with self-identified straight male geeks, which puzzled me... but still, it worked pretty well.
Of course, I only tried this for male geeks I was interested in dating, which may have introduced relevant selection biases.
as it landed me a few dates with self-identified straight male geeks, which puzzled me...
Isn't that just bizarre?! The same thing has happened to me.
Is it conceivable that some of them thought it was an invitation to socialize rather than a date?
Yeah, what? That's definitely not something I would have predicted. What were their detailed reactions?
I don't find that surprising at all. We don't have full conscious access to all our preferences: we can just make guesses based on previous data. Realizing that there are men of the same sex that you might be attracted to doesn't seem any different from realizing that although you generally dislike science fiction, there are some sci-fi stories that you enjoy.
Straight/bi/gay is a classfication scheme that often works, but by collapsing a sliding scale into just three categories it necessarily loses information. A person who is only attracted to people of the opposite sex, and a person who is attracted to people of the opposite sex and to 0.1% of people of the same sex are usually both lumped in the category of "straight".
I have occasional fantasies of men and enjoy some varieties of shounen-ai/yaoi, but I'm almost never attracted to men in real life, though there have been a couple of exceptions. I can never figure out if I should call myself straight or bi, though straight is probably closer to the mark.
Also, sexual orientation is not a static thing, but something fluid that may change throughout life. This is particularly the case for women, though possibly also for men...
Mostly Kaj said what I was gonna say.
In terms of detailed reactions... well, I could summarize the common thread as "If I were going to hook up with a guy it would probably be you, and I'm not unattracted, which is surprising, and, hey, sure, why not?" followed some time later by "Nah, straight."
I generally took it roughly in the same spirit that I make a point of tasting foods that I don't like when someone who does like it identifies a good example of it, just to see whether I still don't like it... because, hey, sometimes I discover that my tastes have changed while I wasn't looking.
That said, I far preferred the ones who were clear about that being their state. (In their defense, most of them were.)
So if you think that you're overweight and hideous and yet oddly enough nerds spend a lot of time talking to you at nerd parties, this means you are pretty.
Are you saying that nerd males do not talk to non-pretty nerd females for other reasons (i.e. they are smart and funny or whatever), or simply that they don't do it a lot?
That's a good question. I am hard pressed to think of any nerd females I've known well enough to observe them in any detail, who I would actually consider non-pretty. So to rephrase the test: If you go to nerd parties and male nerds who don't already know you seem to gravitate in your direction and then continue to be there despite not having an obvious personal stake in the ongoing conversation, this is because you are pretty.
Also, short of actually having half your face burned off a la Two-Face in the Batman series, being visibly smart and funny will boost your apparent prettiness by quite a lot.
I am hard pressed to think of any nerd females I've known well enough to observe them in any detail, who I would actually consider non-pretty.
I'm torn about saying this because this kind of message probably good for everyone's self-esteem and I think nerdy girls on average should be more confident, but... what's with all these pretty nerds? Is your standard for pretty relatively low or are you just really lucky? In my experience and in common stereotype nerds of both genders are, on average, less physically attractive than the rest of the population, once you control for socio-economic conditions that influence things like diet, hygiene and exercise. Good looking people tend to end up on anti-nerd life paths earlier in life, less good looking people have less of their time taken up by socializing leaving them with more time for nerdy activities and more incentive to develop other aspects of themselves (since they can't coast on physical attractiveness). I've consistently found that less physically attractive people are more intellectually interesting.
This doesn't mean your advice is bad- nerdy girls are awesome and totally are capable of getting together with lots of nerdy guys. But I don't think we need to mythologize the nerdy female this way and it seems a bit patronizing to pretend the self-assessment of nerdy women has no grounding in reality. Just like how not everyone gets to be smart, not everyone gets to be physically attractive.
Your standards are probably higher than mine? As far as I can tell, most women are attractive. I can think of ones who aren't but they seem like exceptions. You can kinda see why it would work that way.
As far as I can tell, most women are attractive.
Did you actually mean ‘most women’, rather than (say) ‘most women of fertile age’?
I'd agree with your observations, except: is it wise to control for socio-economic conditions? "Well, [he/she] is gorgeous, brilliant and kind, but that's probably all because of being born within a family with positive attitudes toward physical and mental fitness, being given the free time and economic wherewithal to self-improve, and being placed in peer groups that would encourage such improvement, so I guess it doesn't really count."
Life doesn't work like a D&D stat Point Buy system - although you're right that it's sometimes similarly possible to trade INT for CHA or vice versa, that doesn't make them inversely correlated. Some people are lucky enough to have more of both to begin with, and many people are lucky enough to grow up with influences that increase both.
On the other hand, even physical beauty is partially subjective. Maybe Eliezer's perceptions of it are subject to some sort of halo effect? The "known well enough to observe them in any detail" caveat seems to suggest a factor in that direction. Aside from effects of fashion, lighting, etc., real physical beauty is a superficial thing that you can judge with a glance, not something that only becomes apparent after the more important characteristics have shown themselves.
Weirdly enough, I know someone who had their face seriously damaged (albeit not to the ludicrous extent shown by Two-Face) and he reported that it actually made him much more sexually successful, since it gave him an instant conversation starter with just about anyone and the story of how he got it painted him in a very good light.
I think that even in the current cultural context one should still expect the impact of "battle scars" on physical attractiveness to depend strongly on the gender of the person displaying them.
A good point; that said, a surprisingly large number of heterosexual or bisexual males I know are very much attracted to signs of "toughness" in females, including scars, fighting ability, etc.
I always counsel young males with still-healing injuries that will leave scars to think of good stories. As for females, most straight men I know are attracted to signs of toughness that don't otherwise confound the usual health-and-fertility signs (skin and hair), so scars might not always work. But anecdotes from LW commenters are not likely to be representative of the general conversation. Many women I know in SoCal that have impressive degrees from awesome schools hide their credentials for fear of scaring off men, and are surprise than I am surprised. That's still the world we live in.
Even if you do have half your face burned off a la Two-Face in the Batman series, being visibly smart and funny will boost your apparent prettiness by quite a lot.
I find that most people have some things attractive about them. If they are interesting and kindly disposed toward me, it is not hard to focus on the attractive features, and blur out the less attractive features. It works very much like the affective death spiral, but with no real negative consequences.
Once you find enough things attractive about someone, you enter the spiral, and you begin to notice the very attractive square line of Harvey's non-burned jaw, and just don't even notice the scary skeletor burn face anymore, or you might even find little parts of it that start to look interesting to you.
Well, this all assumes a counter-fictional Harvey that doesn't go fully dark-side, or recovers at some point to something like his former moral and mental self.
And no matter who you are, there's someone out there who thinks you're hot.
(while talking about the Harry Potter movies, before she'd started on MoR)
Erin: ...I did like the fluffy things, though.
Me: Fluffy things?
Erin: I forget what they're called.
Me: (thinks for a bit...)
Me: Dementors? The flying corpses in shrouds?
Erin: Yeah! Dementors are cute.
Me: Puppies are cute. Dementors are not cute.
Erin: Puppies are food.
Me: Help me, I've been shipped to Bellatrix.
Are there any paperclip-maximizer-lovers? How about paperclip-maximizer's-humanoid-robot-lovers?
This this this. I've spent quite some time watching with amused detachment as several of my female friends bluster around this type of interaction without ever really understanding. My advice that "hey, acquiring sexual partners is really not hard if that's what you want" generally goes unheeded, but those who do "get it" end up being shocked as how easy things really are.
While "acquire" and "harem" are words quite conflicting with the spirit of polyamory (and I know you were kidding), it's a good point.
Though, as a flirty poly nerdy guy, I have no personal interest in this message getting out. :-)
No, I'm suggesting that "Actually, what's happening" should be "Sometimes what is happening". It isn't only the nerdy guys who aren't playing the game correctly. Sometimes nerdy girls don't signal correctly either, especially those with low self esteem. And that's ok, just something that can be improved on.
Well, sure -- but other people would likely have found him more interesting. Congratulations on things having worked out for you, of course, but there are a lot of other good people who each of you could have married.
Finding good romantic partners is very probabilistic. Does increased masculinity increase a man's expected attractiveness to a random person? I think that, for men who aren't already very masculine, it definitely does.
Thank you for writing this. I've been wanting to discuss rationality and relationships for some time now, but my first attempt had several problems with it you seem to have avoided or solved. For example, your intro paragraph disarms (for many people, hopefully) a few objections that my own post did not, for example "I don't like gooey personal details" and "You sound self-righteous, as though everyone should try to be like you."
Those who haven't tried polyamory may be curious to hear my own polyhacking story, told using a structure similar to the one Alicorn used. (Like Alicorn, I'm considering "willingness that one's sole partner have other partners" to be a "low-key flavor" of polyamory.)
Motivation
I grew up a sexually repressed evangelical Christian, and therefore didn't date until fairly late (19, I think). My first relationship was traditional and monogamous and a rollercoaster ride of drama. I felt attracted to other potential mates but fought to remain faithful, we both experienced sexual jealousy, I started to feel trapped… you know, the usual.
When the relationship ended I realized that that kind of relationship didn't suit me. I didn...
/old shouting half deaf man/: Stop cluttering the comment section useless content! When I was young people didn't have emotions, and the ones that did didn't show them.
Still, if we ever need a counter example to the idea of rationalists as emotionless robots we can wheel them out.
[Edit, Clarification: meant that affectionately/positively, but seem to have got downvotes so that may not have come across, sorry.]
I have the feeling that this may not be the best post to show people who are predisposed to dislike rationality.
Valuable post. Self-revelation is hard! I commend your account in this kind of forum. There are many considerations here, first and foremost of which is that emotional makeup a) differs greatly between people and b) is more set than we care to admit; i.e. not subject to hacking. If Alicorn's is to this degree, more power to her. Before the rest of my comment (as a mono): this is most emphatically NOT a moral judgment about polyamory. Consenting adults, will defend to the death your right, etc.
Other considerations (for someone like me, which maybe you are or are not):
I'm often on the defensive when polys talk to me, because there is a good bit of evangelism and insistence that monos are morally inferior, emotionally immature, etc. I didn't get that at all from Alicorn's post but it's out there, perhaps as a counteroffensive to monos who do express moral judgment. (Smart polys, police this so we can all have a real discussion!)
In my personal experience, many of the people who think they're capable of polyamory are not honest with themselves, and once a partner starts seeing someone else, they experience bad jealousy which they're uncomfortable admitting, because after al
In my personal experience, many of the people who think they're capable of polyamory are not honest with themselves, and once a partner starts seeing someone else, they experience bad jealousy which they're uncomfortable admitting, because after all they're not supposed to; they're poly!
This is true. Poly requires excellent communication skills to pull off successfully, even more so than ordinary relationships. I keep emphasizing that poly is not for everyone: not only because you need to be emotionally suited for it, but also because it often takes much more work than a mono relationship. For most people, poly is hard.
Captains of football teams and cheerleaders as the primaries. The rest of us, gazing adoringly upon them while we wait for our turn on Tuesday night. Then back to the romantic ghetto.
I've heard this claim before, but I can't help feeling that it's still thinking in a mono pattern even while trying to think about a poly world. The whole point of poly is that X dating Y doesn't necessarily make either X or Y unavailable to others. If the captain of a football team has five women, that means that he only has one-fifth as much time for each of them, meaning that t...
If the captain of a football team has five women, that means that he only has one-fifth as much time for each of them, meaning that they're likely to be available to others as well.
At first sight it seems that those women are 4/5 available for other men in the group. But this assumes that men and women have the same sex drive on average. If we assume that men have stronger sex drive, or that their sex drive increases significantly when many women are sexually available to them (I am not a biologist, but I think both of this is true), then there is less than 4/5 availability of these women for the rest of group.
In other words, to make all members of a poly society equally sexually satisfied, this society must have more women than men. With the same number of women than men, less successful men will be frustrated, even if all women are satisfied. (Of course, if you are a woman, or if you are the most attractive man in your poly group, this is not your problem.)
EDIT: In essence, "one fifth of time" does not equal "one fifth of sex". A woman may spend one fifth of her time having hot sex with the captain, and the remaining time in just-friends mode, or 90% just-f...
This is a little bit more complex.
Sexual desires are not a constant for each invidual person.
It seems (in the poly community) that awesome sexual experiences with one partner make one want more sexual things with the other partners rather than less.
I find that my (female) sex drive is incredibly mutable; I've been perfectly happy going a year with no sex, and at other times, in other circumstances (and with different available partners), been motivated to have sex daily. I suspect that the female sex drive is much more situational and partner-dependent than the male, and to model women as like men, but less horny, is a mistake.
Now I will do the Subjective Speculation Dance of Shame.
(electric slide) I like to shake my butt, I like to make stuff up (electric slide) Is there published data? Maybe! Doesn't matta! I'll pull it out of my butt! (butt shake!)
Explicit symmetrical polyamory has never emerged stably in history so far. It's worth asking why. Maybe this is coincidence; maybe something has changed now that will be more conducive, but I think it's worth pointing out.
Primates (including humans) raised in stable, supportive environments are more friendly, trusting, willing to take risks. Those who grew up desperately alone, or with only a few allies-of-convenience who might run off as soon as costs outweighed benefits or better prospects appeared elsewhere, are less friendly, trusting, and willing to take risks. This mechanism evolved because using either strategy in the opposite environment means being isolated from the support of your peers and/or murdered at a young age, which is strongly selected against. Polyamory requires a large population of friendly, trusting-and-trustworthy potential partners; modern economic and political developments have produced an environment (in some parts of the world, anyway) sufficiently stable and prosperous that such a population can emerge and thrive.
(Smart polys, police this so we can all have a real discussion!)
Telling members of a social minority you're not part of what every member of that minority must do to be worthy of your time and consderation as a member of the social majority, is neither reasonable, rational or realistic. Just FYI. It's like asking "smart" queers to police the tendency of certain (stereotyped) gay men you have in mind to flame it up, or come to that, asking atheists not to be so militant...
Yes, many poly folks do think they're more evolved. Yes, this is just embarrassing at best, and sanctimonious and preachy at worst. No, the rest of us are not accountable to shut them down so you don't feel squicked by the whole thing.
n my personal experience, many of the people who think they're capable of polyamory are not honest with themselves, and once a partner starts seeing someone else, they experience bad jealousy which they're uncomfortable admitting, because after all they're not supposed to; they're poly!
This is a perspective some poly types share, that jealousy and polyamory are not compatible. I've never quite understood it; I experience jealousy sometimes (and I'm in five serious...
Explicit symmetrical polyamory has never emerged stably in history so far. It's worth asking why.
As far as I know, explicit symmetrical anything hasn't existed for very long...
Captains of football teams and cheerleaders do not want to be the 'primaries' of lots of people. That's an awful lot of work. They also wouldn't make particularly good primaries - given that they are always so busy fucking other people. Furthermore, when it comes to 'primary' status they will want to reserve that for people who they gain status for being affiliated with - other elites.
Since I first read this about a year ago, it had had an interesting side effect. I am less able to enjoy fiction where the plot requires a monogamous assumption to function. Plots and Tropes like "Love Triangle", "Who Will Zie Choose?", "Can't Date Them, Not the One", and some "Cheating Spouse" and "Jealous Spouse" now seem weird and artificial to me (unless the poly option is considered and discarded).
I was never a huge fan of romance or romantic comedy, so this is no great loss. It is an interesting minor memetic hazard though.
By analogy with an Idiot Plot which dissolves in the presence of smart characters, a "Muggle Plot" is any plot which dissolves in the presence of transhumanism and polyamory.
Shortly after generalizing this abstraction, someone at a party told me the original tale of the Tin Woodsman, in which there are two men vying for the attention of a healer woman who gives them replacement metal body parts while constructing a whole new body out of the spares. In the end, she decides that the men she's been healing are mechanical and therefore unloveable, and goes off with the new man she's constructed.
"Ah," I said, "a Muggle Plot."
They're surprisingly common once you start looking. I originally generalized it while watching the romantic subplot in Madoka. Blah blah, not a real human, blah blah, love rival..
Plots which are just about people not being rational are a subspecies of "Idiot Plots". Plots which are about people not behaving like SF con-goers are "Muggle Plots".
I find this very interesting. Polyamory is something that I've toyed with intellectually for a while, but I have several ugh fields around it. Namely, and this one has been borne out by this very post, that "going polyamorous" seems like the kind of thing monogamous females do in order to acquire polyamorous males. Perhaps if one was a sufficiently status-y female, one would be able to convert the polyamorous male to being monogamous. Of course, this comes with all sorts of issues (namely, making the polyamorous partner unhappy). I just haven't been sufficiently convinced that being polyamorous would make me happy for any reasons other than using that polyamory to attract a high-status mate that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to attract. I, like you Alicorn, have been too long seduced by the monogamy aesthetic.
Now, I will try to imagine the conditions sufficient in order for me to hack myself into being polyamorous. I imagine that they would be thus:
I would have to decide, for myself, that I wanted to be polyamorous before meeting some polyamorous male that I desired. That is the only way that I can reasonably trust myself to make a decision in my own best interest.
That sucks. A compatible partner that is successfully poly is some evidence that poly could also work for you, as well as being something that brings the possibility to your attention. Yet by meeting them you have instead cut off the whole possibility. You'd be better if you never laid eyes on them! :P
This is just the way I like to relate to myself but I'd decide I was allowed to switch to poly if it was a good idea but that I'm not allowed to date poly-inspiration-X. For at least as long as a limerance period could be expected to interfere with judgement and also long enough that I could see if poly worked for me without the interference. That way my infatuation biases don't get to subvert my decision making either by temptation or by defensive reaction.
...I would have to be convinced that there was no asymmetry. I believe this is my primary repulsion to polyamory. I envision myself in a situation where I want primary access to a partner who does not similarly wi
Seriously... being poly doesn't add extra hours to the day!
You know, I had assumed that Time-Turners were invented by a Hogwarts Headmaster who despaired of getting the school schedules straight and one day before deadline stayed up until 6AM inventing the Time-Turner, and that he (gender coinflip-generated) succeeded because he was the first person to try for time travel just to get extra time and not to change the past, and that the invention within Hogwarts is why they get a traditional free pass on using them. But some polyamorous past wizard would be just as reasonable an inventor.
I like love pentagons and poly chains within the community. It creates a familial feeling. Of course nothing's actually gone wrong in my immediate poly family yet. You can easily see how this could go wrong.
Mono vanilla uptight people also have family members they have sex with. They're called "spouses". When someone mentions their spouse as part of their family, listeners rarely recoil in accusations of incest.
The relevant characteristic of marriage here is the long-term, committed relationship with frequent contact (not necessarily cohabitation). Close-knit poly communities have several of these per person.
If people who are indirectly related by such relationships (e.g. siblings-in-law) get along well and see enough of each other, they usually have familial feelings toward each other (unless the families I know are weird). The relationship being sexual on both sides rather than sexual on one side and blood on the other has no reason to change this.
Don't poly folks want to feel special to their partners?
Yes, but they don't need to have a monopoly in order to feel that their product is sufficiently differentiated.
Don't poly folks want to feel special to their partners?
Yes. Why would my being special to someone imply that they couldn't have sex and/or long-term relationships with people they found attractive?
I've found that my jealousy, though much lower than seems normal, still varies considerably. And it correlates, as far as I can tell, with general self-confidence. If I'm feeling down about myself I feel much more possessive and attached to significant others. When I'm feeling good about myself I've been fine with open relationships. Of course, that doesn't mean that variable explains all jealousy variation in the population. As for testosterone: anecdotally I haven't noticed anything when my testosterone level increased following a change in diet and exercise.
Don't poly folks want to feel special to their partners?
Yes. Which is part of why I allow competition. Personally, I find it easier to feel special when I know that my partner has other options, but still chooses to spend most/all of her time with me. I want my partner to be spending time with the person (or people) she is best matched with, even if it's not me. But if it is me, then I feel great, especially when I see my partner dropping one of her other options in favor of spending more time with me, or telling me that she enjoys spending time with me more.
As has been suggested by others: different people need different things to "feel special" in the sense you mean it here.
Some people have their sense of relationship-specialness diminished when their partner goes out to see a movie without them, or when their partner expresses the sense that someone else is attractive, or when their partner goes to the office instead of staying home with them, or when their partner chooses to spend holidays with his or her birth family, or when their partner socializes with someone other than them, or when their partner kisses someone other than them, or when their partner has sex with someone other than them, or when their partner establishes a long-term sexual or romantic relationship with someone other than them, or etc. or etc. or etc.
It's not particularly helpful to talk about what ought to diminish my sense of relationship-specialness. If I know what does in fact diminish it, and I can find a way of operating in the world that meets my needs given that (either by changing my preferences to suit my current environment, or changing my environment to suit my current preferences, or a combination), then I will feel more special than if...
Because seeing my partner being emotionally or physically intimate with someone else (or knowing they were, even without seeing it) = immediate non-specialness.
I don't know why you would say this, and I strongly disagree.
I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?
I apologize for rocking the boat, if I have.
Interesting benefit of polyamory: there's a lot less that can rock the boat (or sink it)! We enjoy a stability we did not have before.
I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?
I didn't understand this line of argument before I was poly, and I don't understand it now. Yes. Of course if you have multiple children they're individually less special to you! You have less time and energy for each, less brain-space to store facts about each, and you aren't even culturally allowed to have a favorite! There's a sense in which you "love them all equally", sure, but I'd be willing to bet that something like 75% of parents would be unable to claim that under Veritaserum.
As for why it should be different for lovers, the psychology about lovers and children is very different. It's a conceit of our current sensibilities that we even use the same word to refer to how we feel about those, our siblings, our pets, and ice cream. There is no reason in principle why we couldn't have been hardwired for extreme strict romantic monogamy and still love lots of children.
I just looked over my shoulder and asked. Turns out your question is a practical one - MBlume says he would go monogamous for me if I wanted. If he'd said this before I hacked poly, I wouldn't have hacked poly. (He wouldn't have said it then - he needed the information of how our relationship has gone for the past month.) Given that I'm now poly, and that we both have other partners/prospects who we'd be somewhat distressed to give up, I'm not planning to reverse the hack. It's a matter of hassle and loss aversion mostly. But I do find it meaningful that he would monogamize himself if I were not sufficiently superpowered to have rendered it unnecessary.
Sounds like a pretty definitive answer to the "You just went poly for the guy!" objection.
It does. Even though it doesn't refute the "You just went poly for the guy!" assertion at all. It could well fit with "I just went with poly for the guy and it is awesome! You should try it!"
and that it feeds the default human tendency toward monogamy.
From what I understand the default human tendency is is medium term monogamy (with cheating) combined with extreme promiscuity, particularly by the highest status males. Some polygamy thrown in too.
I think that "humans tend towards monogamy" and "humans don't tend towards monogamy" are both misleading, as they lump together two things which don't necessarily go together: being monogamous, and requiring monogamy of others. Instead, I'm inclined towards thinking that there's a tendency to require sexual/romantic monogamy from one's partner while still wanting to have sexual/romantic relationships with others.
Though some people seem to be strongly monogamous (in both senses of the word) by nature, others seem to be strongly non-monogamous (in both senses of the word), and some fall in between. So if there is a strong genetic component, there's also the possibility that some kind of frequency-dependent selection might be going on instead of just a universal tendency towards one thing.
But typically people don't sit around snuggling friends they aren't sleeping with or trying to sleep with.
I do this all the time. When I hang out with the correct subset of my platonic friends we casually flop onto each other and braid each other's hair and exchange backrubs. I have photographic evidence. One doesn't have to be weird about those things.
I platonically snuggle with some of my male friends too. And I have photographic evidence of some guys I know who are not dating each other snuggling, too.
I guess I don't know how typical it is. I don't know many normal people and suspect they're dull.
Works great! Primary relationship still strong, have also three other boyfriends (primary has two other girlfriends). I am well pleased :)
We got married almost a year ago :D. I can't keep track of who-all spouse is dating (it fluctuates a lot) but I have three other nodes on the Big Unruly Chart Thing, one of whom is also dating spouse. Going very smoothly :)
I find it odd that no one is discussing the wider societal implications of a greater adoption of polyamory in the sight of a much more important instinct than jealousy. Naturally I speak of female hypergamy and its effect on the distribution of losers and winners on the sexual marketplace among men.
I find it odd that no one is discussing the wider societal implications...
Having seen a number of previous LW discussions about sex, gender, and related matters, I have given up attempts to participate in any future ones. I suspect most other people who would have been likely to open such discussions in the past have reached similar conclusions. Whatever the exact reasons might be, this is one cluster of topics where this forum just doesn't seem capable of approaching reality closer than what one reads in mainstream venues, or of rational discussion that won't be smothered by ideological preconceptions, moralizing, and internet drama.
On occasions, when I see some particularly egregious nonsensical claims about these topics that go unchallenged (and perhaps even get strongly upvoted), I am strongly tempted to respond, but given the past record, I try hard to resist the temptation.
I find it odd that no one is discussing the wider societal implications
Well, for one thing, its a piece on polyhacking and luminosity -- trying to understand the degree to which one can successfully change one's preferences, and to the extent to which this is individually worthwhile. It's not an advocacy piece on polyamory.
That said, polyamory (and queerness in general) really does offer opportunities for people to step outside many kinds of sexual status competitions. If there is a standard relationship 'package' that most people will have with exactly one person, and if there is social pressure to conform to and excel at that kind of relationship, then I can make an intelligent guess about your status by seeing how well your partner fits the stereotypes. E.g., if your boyfriend has two left feet and works at Blockbuster, you must not be very good at attracting the rich, suave type that 'everybody' wants, and so I'm probably doing 'better' than you are.
By contrast, if there are several different acceptable types of relationships, and any given person will usually have multiple such relationships, then the math gets too fuzzy -- it may not even be obvious to me exactly who you'r...
Within the sort of of communities where polyamory is popular, I don't think it will be a big problem for the mating market. There is some evidence that highly intelligent people are more androgynous. If so, then sex differences may be less sharp between intelligent people, which anecdotally makes sense. If intelligent people are less gender-differentiated in general, then perhaps their sexual preferences are more similar, too. If there are less sex differences in mating preferences, then there is probably less sex differences in selectiveness and less hypergamy.
In poly nerd communities, I don't know if there is a winner-take all situation for men, but it's hard to tell, since the gender ratio is so skewed. Let's imagine a community with 10 men and 2 women. Under monogamy, woman #2 dates man #10, and woman #1 dates man #9. What happens under polyamory? Do both women date man #10? Or do they both date men #9 and #10? Or #8, #9, and #10? Those all seem like plausible scenarios, and in the last case, there are actually less male losers than under monogamy. With a high male:female ratio, the women have their pick of 80+ percentile men.
Of course, outside this particular androgynous phenotype, the differences between monogamy and polyamory are likely to be more stark. Average people are already doing plenty of non-monogamous mating, so we can consider how well it's going for them.
JulianMorrison:
Seems pretty obvious that hypergamy is what poor women do in societies that only let them gain control of resources through marriage. It's a rational adjustment to a sexist, unequal society, not some sort of instinct.
This is a hypothesis worth investigating, but how much data seems to support it? The research I've read supports the existence of hypergamy in both modern societies, and in pre-agricultural societies without high levels of gender inequality.
The Dalmia study cited on Wikipedia supposedly doesn't find women "marrying up," but since I can't read the full text I'm not sure how they were operationalizing "marries up." For instance, perhaps the study found that women don't marry up in wealth. But that doesn't mean they don't marry up in education, which is what this study found:
...Contrary to popular beliefs, the increased concentration of women at the top of the education distribution has not resulted in a worsening of the marriage market prospects of more educated women. The “success gap” declined substantially in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The marriage market accommodated the shift through a decline in hypergamy at the upper end of the ed
I'm not necessarily talking about marriage or women seeking material comfort here. I'm referring to the mechanisms of female and male sexual desire and how they on average differ in more than just the parameters of the physical attributes the sexes seek in mates.
For most women their sexual attraction is in itself partially dependant on how desirable she thinks other women find the male in question. It also depends heavily on his status. And status as we know is basically zero sum.
Evidence that I suspect says more about Tina Fey's past insecurities than about scarcity bias. She is hot enough that she would have been seen as such even in school. Unless American high schools really are like they appear in movies. The hot girl isn't hot until she has a makeover involving taking off her glasses and letting her hair down!
When I was in high school, most of the girls around me seemed to me to be as beautiful as anyone I ever saw on television or in the movies. Most high school girls are significantly hotter than the woman of median hotness in the population as a whole (getting older tends to make women less beautiful), so they would have to be even hotter than that in order to stand out.
Imagine two islands, each with some tiny population - let's say, 10 each. Nobody ever interacts with anyone off-island, and the resources and living standards are the same. Now if I told you that people on island 1 are higher-status than people on island 2, does that strike you as a nonsensical statement? To me, it does not; it means that there is more mutual respect on island 1. I think that parsing that as "status" is justified, because it's not synonymous with how nice they are to each other, how much they like each other, or any other such variable (though of course it would tend to correlate with those).
You may disagree, but you should consider whether a definition of status which is tautologically zero-sum is likely to be blinding you to positive-sum interactions that are best interpreted as status-related (as opposed to friendship- or kindness-related).
Historically male chances of successfully reproducing have been significantly smaller than female chances, at least this is what the difference in genetic legacy shows.
Also male variation is greater than female variation on practically any trait.
This together with our (perhaps culturally maintained) intuitions about unexceptional men being worth less than unexceptional women point to men being disposable.
producing that hypothesis pretends that a social misfeature [...] is somehow hardwired and thus blameless
You can't derive an ought from an is; the hypothesis that a trait is "hardwired" (that is, that there exists a biological predisposition towards that trait) does not imply that the trait is blameless. Failure to appreciate this point leads to confusion: in particular, we must be careful not to reject hypotheses that might be true, just because they are unpleasant or even horrifying to contemplate.
TV Tropes explains male gold diggers:
It's common for modern viewers to think of gold diggers as female, but this is only true in modern times. In historical eras where men controlled all their wives' money, and received dowries upon marrying, they were much more likely to be gold diggers than women. The actual term "gold-digger" is rarely applied to men however; a male gold-digger is normally called a "fortune hunter". If you go back far enough, you'll find that all gold diggers were men, because marriage was originally an agreement made between the groom and the bride's father, with the bride having little to no say in the matter. It's therefore common in historical texts for the male to be the gold digger, but it isn't always spelled out. An excellent example is in Emma, where Mr. Elton is never actually referred to as a gold-digger despite copious evidence that he is. Austen probably thought it too blindingly obvious to mention.
Polyamory, especially the "open mesh" kind, dissolves the question of whether there exists a better match, or (most of) the fear of losing a partner to someone better. It's no longer necessary to consider whether this match outranks alternatives you haven't yet encountered, for both of you. It's sufficient to consider whether it works in itself.
If the hypergamy hypothesis is correct this isn't so at all.
Also consider these stats from the CDC:
Percent of all women 15-44 years of age who have had three or more male partners in the last 12 months, 2002: 6.8%
Percent of all men 15-44 years of age who have had three or more female partners in the last 12 months, 2002: 10.4%”
“Median number of female sexual partners in lifetime, for men 25-44 years of age, 2002: 6.7 Percent of men 25-44 years of age who have had 15 or more female sexual partners, 2002: 29.2%
Median number of male sexual partners in lifetime, for women 25-44 years of age, 2002: 3.8 Percent of women 25-44 years of age who have had 15 or more male sexual partners, 2002: 11.4%
I'm struggling to come up with a reason why female and male average tendencies wouldn't differ from each other on this.
Women's unavoidable investment in reproduction for most of our history is something that rewards very different strategies between women and men in nearly any sexual marketplace conditions that I've so far thought of.
Let me translate in to overt. The following statement-reply pair:
I'm struggling to come up with a reason why female and male average tendencies wouldn't differ from each other on this.
You need to read "Evolution's Rainbow" and to a lesser extent, "Sex at Dawn". Neither are perfect but they are strong antidotes to this kind of "sexual strategies" thinking, which is heavily contaminated with cultural assumptions.
Is overwhelmingly strong evidence that your beliefs on this subject are not optimally correlated with reality.
Sure it is quite possible (and likely) that a lot of people are wrong about what sexual strategies are used. But not that there are sexual strategies and not that it should be startling to find that the sexual strategies turn out to be symmetric. It should be difficult for Konkvistador to think of reasons for that to occur, because it would be a miraculous coincidence.
I think the burden of proof is on one who claims that different things are equal. "Involve many partners" is extremely vague, it's not so fine-grained a similarity that for it to be a common strategy for both men and women would be miraculous, it's not a strategy at all any more than "theism" or "atheism" are philosophies.
If someone were to claim that Mercury has exactly as much mass as a moon of Jupiter plus or minus one kilogram, I wouldn't feel the slightest discomfort at not having a source to back up my expectation they'd be different, and I would not be convinced without a mountain of evidence.
Things don't magically align like that in nature. I could find out tomorrow that every study ever showing differences between men and women was too contaminated by culture to be useful, I'd still not believe that no significant differences exist. So long as I'm not claiming to know exactly what those differences are, I don't have the burden of proof.
Thank you for sharing this!
My own concern with being polyamorous is that having N times as many relationships seems like it will involve at least N times as much relationship drama, and the drama of one relationship seems to be about as much as I can handle. Much of the drama in long term relationships seems uncorrelated with jealousy, so it's far from obvious to me that poly relationships would involve systematically less drama.
I can only report from direct experience, and experience reported to me, that there certainly seems to be at least one geeky poly loose social web where this is said with a smile and a laugh... but is followed up with "you're welcome to contact them directly".
I have seen mostly-joking forms to do this in text, too. Yes, really. Again, while it's mostly not serious, there is a serious signal of "no skeletons in the closet".
I suspect this is more about a certain kind geeky attitudes and aptitudes than it is about poly. q.v. "geek flirt".
Oh, and I've also seen "references available on request" after an amicably resolved breakup. Again, within the sub-communities that have this geeky approach to sex and to relationships, it's a powerful signal.
(Enjoying the meta of posting this during a trip to the USA where I'm seeing LDRs, amicable exes and friends within these geeky sub-communities. There's a presentation in a tech conference in there somewhere too, but it's mostly about poly and friends-known-through-poly.)
Congratulations on the hack. I would have expressed doubt that this could work, and am correspondingly updating my priors.
[1] I'm counting willingness that one's sole partner have other partners (e.g. being an arm of a V) to be a low-key flavor of being poly oneself, not a variety of tolerant monogamy. I think this is the more reasonable way to divide things up given a two-way division, but if you feel that I mischaracterize the highly simplified taxonomy, do tell.
It happens that I agree with you on this, in fact I think tolerance of another's multiple entanglements is more important component of poly than the desire to oneself have multiple entanglements. In the poly circles I am aware of, there is no broad agreement on either of these points though. I thought I should mention that there are a non-trivial proportion of couples who self-ID as "one of us is poly and the other is not" where the poly one is involved with other people.
This is similar to the labeling disputes that occur when (say) two bisexual women are said to be in a "lesbian relationship". They might reasonably object that people will hear "lesbian relationsh