Is being sexy for your homies?

[-]GayHackRat2y8639

Alternate hypotheses:

* Women are annoyed by compliments from men because they get a ton of them (and mostly they do end up being attempts to manipulate), and men are overjoyed by compliments from women because they get very few of them. (This does leave open, why do men compliment women so much more than the other way around?)

* In general, gender norms are mostly enforced within-gender - it's mostly men telling their sons to "man up" and men telling other men what's effeminate, and mostly women telling their daughters to "act like a lady" and policing fashion faux pas

* Several points here may be at least as well explained if you drop the genderedness - losing friends due to a primary relationship is bad regardless of the genders involved, being well-liked and high-status is attractive regardless of your gender and the genders of the people liking you,

* The bonobos apparently use sex to strengthen bonds, but your argument is about strengthening bonds through non-sex with your non-sexually-compatible friends, so idk how those are related

* The "postmodern feminist push for equality of the sexes" has been damaging to the status quo, but I don't think that should necessarily be th... (read more)

[-]GayHackRat2y397

Also, just as a data point, some parts of the OP that were presented as obvious but don't resonate with my experience at all (I am AFAB and identify as non-binary but am generally perceived as a woman)

* "it's still kind of suss and not a good sign if nearly all of someone's friends are of the opposite sex" - I've never had many female friends and men seem to find me attractive anyway (less so since I cut my hair short, though)
* "in order to be respectful it is absolutely necessary that I address the attraction question" - I'm not even capable of determining whether I'm attracted to someone I don't know well yet (but I think this is atypical for any gender, which is why it's called demisexual)
* I do not experience an obvious difference/shift when imagining a bakery staffed by one gender vs co-ed

Sorry if this comes across as super nit-picky! To counterbalance, here are some points I (genuinely!) liked and agreed with:

* "modern dating sucks because people are directly looking for mates", general support for community-building - people are way more isolated in contemporary Western cities than in pretty much any other time and place, and this seems pretty bad, we're highly social animal... (read more)

[-]AnthonyC2y173

Also yeah I think the deal is less that women want someone to protect them and more that they want someone to do just general physical tasks - needing to be protected almost never comes up in day-to-day life but needing to move a heavy object or do grimy repair work comes up all the time

Speculation: This is interesting. Suppose in a tribe it's the strongest men most likely to be called on to defend others in the rare times it's needed. In that view , the buff gym bro's existence could be valuable primarily to less-buff men: he's making himself less (or at least no more) attractive to women, while (being perceived as) reducing physical risk to other men in his tribe from outside threats. In contrast, it wouldn't exactly be helpful for a woman to tie herself to the man in her tribe most likely to die violently.

7Valentine2y

Ah yeah, oops, I noticed that possible confusion and forgot to say something about it. The fact that the bonobos use sex to reassure each other is purely incidental to why it came to mind for me. The structure of interest was more "Our tribe just encountered a potentially rare resource, so let's focus on reaffirming our tribal bonds before we even orient to the resource." Like for men, they could focus on just maximizing appeal to women… but that'd heat up competition between them. So maybe instead there's a draw to affirming male bonds. Being useful to other men. Working on being a more functional member of the male cluster. Likewise for women. The main factor in picking a mate isn't getting a guy to want to have sex with her. It's in making sure she's well-supported while having children. If there's competition between the women for attracting a specific man, that can create rancor in their ranks, and that can weaken all their children's support. So there's maybe a natural draw to focus on bonding with other women first precisely because they're the competition. Slightly different dynamic as with the men, but roughly the same overall effect.

4jimmy2y

The frequency explanation doesn't really work, because men do sometimes get excess compliments and it doesn't actually become annoying; it's just background. Also, when women give men the kind of compliments that men tend to give women, it can be quite unwanted even when infrequent. The common thing, which you both gesture at, is whether it's genuinely a compliment or simply a bid for sexual attention, borne out of neediness. The validation given by a compliment is of questionable legitimacy when paired with some sort of tug for reciprocation, and it's simply much easier to have this kind of social interaction when sexual desire is off the table the way it is between same sex groups of presumably straight individuals. For example, say you're a man who has gotten into working out and you're visiting your friend whom you haven't seen in a while. If your friend goes wide eyed, saying "Wow, you look good. Have you been working out?" and starts feeling your muscles, that's a compliment because it's not too hard for your friend to pull off "no homo". He's not trying to get in your pants. If that friend's new girlfriend were to do the exact same thing, she'd have to pull off "no hetero" for it to not get awkward, and while that's doable it's definitely significantly harder. If she's been wanting an open relationship and he hasn't, it gets that much harder to take it as "just a compliment" and this doesn't have to be a recurring issue in order for it to be quite uncomfortable to receive that compliment. As a result, unless their relationship is unusually secure she's less likely to compliment you than he is -- and when she does she's going to be a lot more restrained than he can be. The question, to me, is to what extent people are trying to "be sexy for their homies" because society has a semi-intentional way of doing division of labor to allow formation of social hierarchies without having to go directly through the mess of sexual desires, and to what extent people are

1David Joshua Sartor2y

Ideally you'd try to have a separate bakery with reversed gender-roles.

[-]Rubix2y6741

> And if maybe this is key to why (...) feeling sexually safe at a job has been such a royal pain these last many years

...reads like a mistake a feminist would not have made.

(Implicit assumption: "postmodernism" was coined in 1980 and "postmodern feminism" the mid-90s, and most people who talk about gender ideology date it to the last 10-20 years, so I'm assuming that's the time period you're referring to by "last many years".)

Men feel a little less sexually safe at work than they did sixty years ago, and women feel vastly more sexually safe. My grandmother, and the other women her age I've been close with, have stories about their bosses making explicit crude comments about them, groping them at work, and the like. In the story I remember most clearly, the boss didn't try to hide his behavior, because everyone agreed this was a normal liberty to take with your female employee. If she had complained, she would have been not only punished and likely fired, but also criticized by her coworkers for being precious about the situation.

I think separating the sexes into distinct classes ("kitchen staff are one sex and serving staff are another") wouldn't output a separate-but-equal situation; it would instead output a society that subjugates women overtly (again).

[-]Valentine2y254

...reads like a mistake a feminist would not have made.

I guess maybe I'm not whatever you mean by "a feminist" then…?

I read you as meaning something a little like "You should have known better. You would have if you'd been the right kind of person. So you're the wrong kind of person."

I mean… okay? Sure? I guess you can believe that if you want?

But also… doesn't that make the conversation harder?

(And sorry if I'm misreading you here. I don't mean to trap you in a meaning you didn't intend if I'm missing you here. It just seems worth naming explicitly in case I am roughly catching your emotional tone right.)

(Implicit assumption: "postmodernism" was coined in 1980 and "postmodern feminism" the mid-90s, and most people who talk about gender ideology date it to the last 10-20 years, so I'm assuming that's the time period you're referring to by "last many years".)

I didn't mean anything formal. I was mostly reflecting on how #metoo seemed to imply women feeling pretty unsafe in workplaces and everywhere else for quite a while. And in the wake of #metoo guys feeling like their own sexuality was like Russian roulette.

So I guess I was gesturing at roughly the last decade or so.

I didn't... (read more)

[-]the gears to ascension2y150

I read it as "because you do not seem to be a feminist, it is understandable that you made this mistake; however, that presents an opportunity for skill increase".

I would recommend reading Angela Davis to get an idea what's referred to here, note that as someone who can barely read books for ADHD reasons I have not actually done this. There are probably others to recommend but if it's gonna be one I'd start with her.

6the gears to ascension2y

Not genetically, but there's a lot of social structure pushing towards it that is still self reinforcing. Women have better bargaining power against it now but the authority structure still leans male, and when women are allowed into it they are still checked to ensure they align with the male authority egregore. There's a name feminists use for this, but I'm tabooing it for clarity.

[-]Valentine2y3012

That's the narrative for sure. I wonder if it's mostly just a stale holdover and doesn't really apply though.

Like, misandry is vastly more blatant and serious these days from what I can tell. Getting emotional or social support as a man is a joke. There's a whole totally weirdly okay joke set that basically goes "What are women better at than men? XYZ…. What are men better at than women? Stupid pointless stuff, being wrong, yada yada, hahaha!"

There's a ton of stuff like this, like with child custody & paternity, or suicide patterns… but all this gets shoved into an eyerolling box of "MRA" or whatever. So it's un-talk-about-able.

I wonder if men are actually way more restricted in what they can do these days than women are. I don't know. But it sure seems plausible to me!

So I question whether it's really an anti-women pressure. I suspect it's more like, there's gender warfare going on, and we seem to have figured out how to culturally attack one direction of it pretty well, but we haven't stopped the war.

And having the suggested solution be even more women's rights just… doesn't seem like it's looking at the real problem.

At least to me.

[-]the gears to ascension2y190

Yeah like I said (ie, I know it was insufficiently clearly but don't worry, I didn't mean what you thought I did), women have much better bargaining power but men are still in the structure that egregorically wishes it was in control of women, resulting in men getting starved out. The solution has to look like men's liberation. (Which is a subreddit you may find interesting.) The male authority-hierarchy egregore was never male only; it was men and women coordinating to put a tree of male authority in charge of everyone, with the men on the bottom getting control of women as a reward for obedience, and women on the bottom not getting starved out of society from banks and jobs and etc as a reward for obedience. Women are in various stages of pushing back on that but that structure relies on men being obedient to other men while acting independent and strong, so now men are simply starved from both below and above. The solution has to look like looking sideways and not putting men below other men.

Note that I'm specifically talking about the structure of authority, not the structure of aesthetic culture in general any time it doesn't weigh on what support authority does or doesn't get.

6M. Y. Zuo2y

Can you lay out the argument(s) for this? I've seen this sentiment a lot on the internet but they always stall out past the ought-to-be statements.

5the gears to ascension2y

I'm going to answer as a series of definitions. I felt I wasn't giving enough examples and asked chatgpt & claude for more, but skip those lines if they're redundant, I've labeled them. Let me know if this isn't the kind of argument you were hoping to see; I'm more or less expanding what I previously said rather than saying something different, so I'm sort of expecting to be told "compile errors on lines 3, 7, and 8", so just let me know which parts aren't entirely valid local reasoning steps and I'll try to rectify them, because I'm sketching a fairly large argument that would require compiling pages and pages of cited examples if I wasn't eliding some details which I think are obvious enough from typical anecdotal experience. Also, I will explicitly note - this is zooming in on one network of cultural aesthetics and power structures I believe exists, and it is not the only shard of society that can be described usefully. Each of these parts exists somewhat independent of the others, but I claim several of these patterns support each other. * tree of authority: me: the network of positions of command in economy and governance. near the top (root) of this tree would be lawmakers, heads of state & their administrations, judges, police, military command, boards of directors, ceos & c-suites, bosses, decisionmakers, *illionaires, etc. In one sense it'd be more like a forest of command trees than a single command tree, but ultimately it all grows from the root of states' monopoly on destructive power. a member of the tree of authority would refer to the people who have are in the structure, such that they have incentive to ensure that the tree of command authority continues to exist (as opposed to people simply not giving or accepting commands at all, due to not strictly needing anything) and continues take the shape of (some number of) trees rather than more dynamic or flat graphs. that is, a member of the tree of authority would be someone who participate in a la

4M. Y. Zuo2y

How does listing out a large list of personal definitions, alongside what an LLM supplies, help in formulating an argument? It seems like it will make it more difficult, instead of easier, to get even a convincing outline down if you use any definitions other than the widely accepted ones as recorded in major dictionaries, such as the OED, Merriam-Webster, etc... I don't want to discourage you but wrangling this such that even a coherent, falsifiable, non self-contradictory, sketch of an outline emerges, seems really unlikely.

6the gears to ascension2y

what do you want, then? typically one defines terms in a logical argument. shall I rename the terms to "variable 1" and "variable 2" to make it less ambiguous..? I could reduce word count significantly but it seems like you wanted me to expand on what I'd said previously, so I wrote some overviews of the moving parts I see and asked an llm to give specifics that can be checked for.

8Self_Optimization2y

Weighing in here because this is a suboptimality I've often encountered when speaking with math oriented interlocutors (including my past self): The issue here is an engineering problem, not a proof problem. Human minds tend to require lots of cognitive resources to take provisional definitions for things that have either no definition or drastically different definitions in their minds outside this specific context. Structuring your argument as a series of definitions is fine when making a proof in a mathematical language, since comprehensibility is not a terminal goal, and (since each inferential step can be trusted and easily verified as such) not a high-priority instrumental goal either. But when you're trying to accurately convey a concept and it's associated grounding into someone else's mind, it's best to minimize both the per-moment attempted deviation from their existing mentality (to maximize the chance that they both can and will maintain focus on your communications) and the total attempted deviation (to minimize the chance that the accumulated cognitive costs will lead them to (rightly!) prioritize more efficient sources of data). This gives us a balance between the above two elements and the third element of making the the listener's mind be as close as possible to the conveyed concept. The efforts of all involved to maintain this balance is key to any successful educational effort or productive argumentative communication. PS: If you're familiar with math education, you may recognize some of it's flaws/inefficiencies as being grounded in the lack of the above balance, by the way. I'm not an expert on the subject, so I won't speak to that.

2M. Y. Zuo2y

To use more standard definitions in order to not make things more difficult for yourself? Your free to ignore this 'want' of course, and use your own personal definitions for a bunch of concepts, but I'm not going to be able to help you along, nor likely will any other passing reader, since only you would know what's what.

1the gears to ascension2y

I mean, outside of labeling the parts of what I'm trying to describe, what is it you want out of a description? what is the datatype of "argument" that you want - evidence? logical derivation from an already shared evidence base? it seems to me that we can just erase away the names of the definitions I gave, and then what I gave is... both of those things. so I'm trying to figure out what it's missing that you want to see, other than "fewer unnecessary words such as new names of terms".

1M. Y. Zuo2y

Can you explain what this means? Assuming it's just asking for what the request was, then; the outline of a potentially convincing argument. It's unclear what 'datatype of "argument"' means either, you can see already how difficult it is to have substantial discussions if one party could potentially use words with differing meanings and/or custom terminology. But I'll assume 'datatype of "argument"' just means 'type of argument', otherwise you'll have to explain it too. If so, you are free to pursue any line that seems promising. It could be a statistical analysis, it could be a purely formal logical derivation, it could be inferences, induction, etc... I'll stick to answering just the first two questions to keep the comment chain easily readable.

0the gears to ascension2y

Claude again, I've added strikethrough to parts I disagree with or are not relevant to how this affects men directly - strikethrough therefore does not mean it doesn't happen, just that it's not relevant to my point. italic here means I added it, note that how much these things happen is open to investigation and should not necessarily be assumed simply from argumentation to be enough to matter:

2ChristianKl2y

I think it's worth distinguishing between factors where businesses simply optimize to make as much profit as possible from issues involving gender. If you don't do that then your thesis about gender isn't falsifiable.

3the gears to ascension2y

It's late here so I'll reply with some thoughts in 24-48h, probably. night

[-]GayHackRat2y236

at best, separating the sexes into distinct classes would result in a situation that sucks for any kitchen-gender people that would rather be serving staff, and vice-versa. And we should expect there to be a lot of such people, because in general the variance within the sexes is greater than the variance between the sexes.

7antanaclasis2y

A way of implementing the serving-vs-kitchen separation that avoids that problem (and actually the way of doing it I initially envisioned after reading the post) would be that within each workplace there is a separation, but different workplaces are split between the polarities of separation. That way any individual’s available options of workplace are, at worst, ~half of what they could be with mixed workplaces, regardless of their preference. (Caveat that an individual’s options could end up being less than half the total if there is a workplace-gender correlation overall (creating an imbalance of how many workplaces of each polarity there are), and an individual has a workplace-gender matchup which is opposite to the trend, but in this case at least that individual’s lesser amount of choices is counterbalanced by the majority of people having more than 50% of the max choices of workplace fitting them.)

4Viliam2y

In theory this would be a great solution; in practice I would expect coordination problems, as most (almost all?) people who start companies would simply go with the majority model. Analogically to the current situation where people often say "if you believe that X are discriminated against in industry Y, why don't you make an Y company that would employ only X?" That sounds like a reasonable proposal -- people cannot discriminate against X at workplace if everyone at the company is X, and if you are the only company providing great working conditions for X, you should be able to pick the greatest talent without having to pay them more. Sounds like win/win! And yet, calls to make such companies are not answered by examples who already did that. So this proposal sounds like something that people approve verbally, but no one wants to do the experiment with their own company.

7Ebenezer Dukakis2y

Maybe it's worth factoring out gender separation from gender roles. Curves is a gym that's just for women. Does it have the effect of exacerbating gender inequality? (If so, in which direction?) Would a gym that's just for men exacerbate gender inequality? The obvious story I can think of here is that a mono-gender space gives one gender the opportunity to coordinate against the other. So insofar as women have been rising in status relative to men, perhaps Curves helps a bit on the margin. However, I think social media really throws a wrench in the works here. People are way more comfortable talking politics on social media, and many social media communities are de facto mono-gender. Especially those that focus on gender issues. It seems like social media is where the vast majority of the gender-based coordination is nowadays. In theory, I like the idea of people feeling more freedom to form mono-gender groups IRL. In practice, I'm worried it would cause even more gender tribalism, because people would get an even greater fraction of their information about the other gender from heated online discussions, as opposed to real-life interactions. I'm especially worried about a growing gender-based political divide among the younger generation that's constantly on youtube/tiktok/etc.

[-]eukaryote11mo*5219Review for 2023 Review

Didn't like the post then, still don't like it in 2024. I think there are defensible points interwoven with assumptions and stereotypes.

First: generalizes from personal experiences that are not universal. I think a lot of people don't have this or don't struggle with this or find it worth it, and the piece assumes everyone feels the way the author feels.

Second: the thing it describes is a bias, and I don't think the essay realizes this.

Okay, part of the thing is that this doesn't make a case or acknowledge this romantic factor as being different from, like, friendship. Like, in the people-at-work case, you might also do someone a favor at work because you like them as a buddy, which is not necessarily the same as whether they're a good worker or it's a strategic thing for you to do, or whatever - you're inclined to give your friends special treatment. Even in straight same-gender groups, people will end up being friends and having outgroups.

Anyway, you have to be careful reasoning out of "what your in-built stereotypes say". This is sometimes relevant information, totally. But A) your in-built stereotypes are not everyone else's in-built stereotypes, even within your c... (read more)

3Valentine11mo

I was not proposing that.

2eukaryote11mo

Fair enough. You did write and which made it sound like you thought this would be a good idea.

1Valentine10mo

Nah. I could have been more precise while spitballing. (For some definition of "could". I don't know how to be freeform playful/creative while carefully scrutinizing each detail of what I say for precision and accuracy.) But I meant all that more in the spirit of "Huh, I wonder if evolution did something like this and we've been assuming it didn't. That'd make some sense of why some of our social reform efforts go wonky in these particular ways." I don't know what would be good for us to collectively do. I aspire to have good questions. Good answers would be nice, but I think those mostly fall out of seeking and pondering good questions.

[-]Ape in the coat2y4617

I was mostly nodding along the first part of the post, but I think that in the secod part you are making a crucial mistake by uncritically assuming that traditional culture around gender is a direct result of our evolutional history and not a goodharted reaction to it with all kind of indirection, misgeneralisation and lost purposes in between.

I'm reminded of a story I heard long ago about bonobos. Supposedly if you toss a big pile of food into the middle of a bonobo tribe, they start fucking each other before getting to the food. The issue being that if there's any possibility of there not being enough food for everyone, that could result in the bonobo tribe fracturing in fights, and they don't want that. So they start by affirming their bonds with each other.

If you have a group of men who rely on one another for survival, and then they encounter a Helen of Troy… this could spell disaster for all of them.

Men and women were not historically two separate groups whose survival depends only on relying on the other members of the gender ingroup. If anything, it's the opposite. Men need women to pass on their genes and vice versa. In natural conditions men and women were part of t... (read more)

4Rana Dexsin2y

That last reminds me of Gwern's “The Melancholy of Subculture Society” with regard to creating a profusion of smaller status ladders to be on.

[-]Viliam2y3517

I agree that strictly non-sexual social places are more efficient at... whatever their goal is... simply because people are not distracted by sexual games. One way to achieve that is to have groups of the same sex... assuming heterosexuality, or at least assuming that homosexuality is sufficiently repressed. But another way is to explicitly make sex taboo... that is, repressing sexuality in general. (Not everywhere, just at that one place.)

Something like that effectively happens at the modern workplace; we are supposed to behave asexually. But there is nothing intrinsically modern about this; people were also supposed to behave asexually in a medieval church. The main difference was, church was only on Sunday morning, work is 40 hours a week. You had plenty opportunity to meet people outside the church. The opportunities to meet people outside a 9-5 job are more limited.

Another example: when you are in a group therapy, you are expected to behave asexually there. (Otherwise, it might turn into an orgy. Or a massacre. Or both.) Sometimes the rules say that you should not try to approach sexually the participants even a few weeks or months later, although there is obviously no way to ... (read more)

[-]RamblinDash2y3322

I feel like, for certain coed social spaces, the cultural expectation of universal monogamy actually does (did?) a lot of work. If I (married man) am hanging out with some other married woman, we have Common Knowledge of each other's unavailability. In my subjective experience, it breaks the attraction->desire link. And it's desire that seems to add all the social tension, not attraction per se.

9Viliam2y

Yes. In certain situations (where sexual attention would be undesired) married people (who don't have a reputation of cheating on their partners) are perceived as more trustworthy, because it would be more socially costly for them to break the rules. Polyamory of course throws this all out of window.

7RamblinDash2y

This is part of what I'm getting at, but you seem very focused on the outside perceptions of the married people in that situation. I'm saying that the subjective experience of being one of the married people in that situation is different and, imo, usually better and more comfortable. Including in situations like a party where single people might be open to sexual attention.

3jefftk2y

This is also how it feels to me, and at least for me my being permanently monogamously partnered is sufficient.

2Valentine2y

Yeah, this matches my experience.

[-]weft2y261

It seems like you are assuming historic gender segregation, eg men go out and go hunting together, women stay nearby gathering, etc.

There has been a lot of recent evidence that this isn't so cut and dry, but rather that we were applying our own modern lens while interpreting the past.

Specifically, newer evidence is showing gender parity or near-parity in participation in large game hunting. For example I recall that there were many graves that were assumed male because they were warrior or hunter graves, containing weapons and the like. But when they went back and tested them, something like 30% of them were female.

A handful of sources:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/science/anthropology-women-hunting.html#:~:text=In cultures where hunting was,to hunting as they aged.

2PrePostFacto2y

The quality of the newer evidence regarding sex differences in hunting - most of which is apparently not new evidence but rather reinterpretations of old evidence - is at least open to debate. It's worth considering the arguments and criticisms noted here: https://datepsychology.com/sex-differences-in-hunting/

[-]Gordon Seidoh Worley2y*224

There's a lot in this post, so thoughts on just one part of it.

For men, their primary gendered psychology need seems to be something vaguely like respect. For women, their primary gendered psychology need seems to be something like commitment. This plays out in lots of interesting ways when you look at how men interact with each other, how women interact with each other, and how men and women interact in mixed company.

This simply story explains many things:

Men like to do things that make them feel powerful and worthy of respect, even if it's simulated.
Men try to cling to respect and many male pathologies are the result of trying to game respect.
Women like to be part of committed relationships, and form strong bonds with other women to mutually get that, even though they also want commitment from one or more men.
Women have analogous pathologies that result from trying to game commitment.
Mismatches in the dating marking happen due to misalignments:
- Men want women to respect them, and do things to try to earn the respect of women,
  - but the things men do to try to earn respect aren't always things women will actually respect, and this results in frustration and resentment when men feel li

... (read more)

[-]Ann2y229

As a bisexual woman who strongly favors male peer groups and friendships, I'm unsure if I can help at all in moving towards truth without taking it personally.

7Valentine2y

FWIW, I meant something less like "Pretend it doesn't matter to you personally, please don't feel emotional responses" and more like "There's zero intention of attacking something precious here, I hope you can feel that and can engage in a way that's not attack-and-defend; let's honor all the precious things together in our pursuit of truth."

[-]cousin_it2y2110

I wonder whether women have basically always been the main tenders of the social fabric.

This doesn't sound right. The social fabric of male friendships used to very much exist. It disappeared very recently, lots of people still remember it.

And I don't think integrated workspaces are to blame. The USSR had integrated workspaces, but still much more friendship than exists now.

My best guess is that the economy got too good at meeting people's needs, allowing people to opt out of doing "social fabric" kinds of things. Which is maybe what each individual person wanted all along, but they didn't expect everyone else to opt out too.

[-]Raemon2y228

Yeah, I felt a kind of haunting horror of inevitability when I read this similar comment awhile back. For one example, it used to actually be important for a friend to bring you soup when you were sick, and now InstaCart just works better on most dimensions.

7Viliam2y

Also: The other side of the tidal wave

[-]momom22y1912

A lot of the argumentation in this post is plausible, but also, like, not very compelling?
Mostly the "frictionless" model of sexual/gender norms, and the examples associated: I can see why these situations are plausible (if at least because they're very present in my local culture) but I wouldn't be surprised if they are a bunch of social myth either, in which case the whole post is invalidated.

I appreciate the effort though; it's food for thought even if it doesn't tell me much about how to update based on the conclusion.

[-]Viliam2y16-3

As I started reading, my first hypothesis was that women often rely on the opinions of others. As a man, if I am trying to attract a woman, she will probably check with her best friend, whether the friend approves of me. If the friend thinks that I am unworthy, too bad. Thus, to increase my chances, I should impress the friend first. But there is a chance of misunderstanding; either of them may conclude that I am actually interested in the friend, and that may ruin my chances with the first woman. So the safest approach is to impress the men nearby. If I succeed, they will provide the evidence that I am worthy, and the woman I am interested in may act on that evidence. Even if she asks her best friend, the friend may be influenced by the attitude of the other men.

(But this doesn't work with the genders reversed. Men typically want beautiful women, and they evaluate it by looking at them; they don't care what other women think about who is hot. So why would women care whether other women see them as hot?)

The second hypothesis is that dating is an inherently risky business, especially for men. If I start talking to a woman some other guy also wants, he may react by punching me. So th... (read more)

[-]GayHackRat2y194

> dating is an inherently risky business, especially for men

I don't want to start an oppression olympics, but it feels important to note that the risk to women of men getting violent or stalkerish at some point in the dating process is much higher than the risk to men of another man attacking them for being interested in the same woman. (and I think this has always been true, including in the ancestral environment)

1Viliam2y

Oh, I agree! I was focusing on the part why would it make sense to seek approval from the same sex. (I think that in the ancestral environment, some stalkers would get beaten up by other men. But that would not be universally reliable, and would depend on social status.)

[-]Jacob Falkovich2y163

This article made me realize a truth that should've been obvious to me a long time ago: the main benefit I get from polyamory is close female friends (where I don't have to worry about attraction ruining the friendship), sex and romance are secondary.

[-]Valentine2y184

FWIW, my experience on this was… mixed.

My easiest time having female friends was in an implicitly monogamous context, when I was married, and my wife and I were exclusive. It was super easy. Like a switch in my brain could just filter out the attraction question. It's like it was as addressed for all women the way it's always addressed for all men.

It became way messier when she & I opened up our marriage. Then the sexual dynamic between me and her felt to me like it depended on whether I could find other female partners. I don't know if she really felt this way! But for me there was a real concern: When we were exclusive, other women not being into me was just expected. But when we were open, I feared other women not being into me was a sign she should focus on mating with other guys.

So there was a sense, for me, of increased pressure that I needed to find more partners even if my wife was the only woman I was interested in!

This increased stress on my female relationships.

Now, in an implicitly poly context, this isn't a huge problem. "Might we fuck?" is a lot more okay a question to explore.

But it became a question we had to explore, basically every time, at least on my end, at... (read more)

9Jacob Falkovich2y

When my wife and I just opened up, I did feel jealous quite regularly and eventually realized that the specific thing I was feeling was basically this. It felt like an ego/competitive/status loss thing as opposed to an actual fear of her infidelity or intent to leave me. And then after four years together it went away and never came back. Now I actually find it kinda fun to not explicitly address "might we fuck?" with some friends, just leave it at the edge of things as a fun wrinkle and a permission to fantasize. A little monogamous frisson, as a treat.

8AnthonyC2y

This feeds into my longstanding expectation that the world would be better if everyone were bi- or pan-sexual, polyamorous, openly accepting of these facts, and more self-aware in general so that we could at least all discuss the meta-level rules we're operating under.

8Valentine2y

Uh… maybe?

6Viliam2y

Or maybe we couldn't, because we would be too busy trying to impress potential mates (i.e. everyone). :D

4GayHackRat2y

Maybe true, but I think it's even more likely that the world would be better if everyone were asexual, or at least did not have such a high sex drive that it causes them to do things they don't endorse

3johnvon2y

Just a reminder that if everyone were asexual, the species would become extinct in short order :).

[-]the gears to ascension2y152

It's still possible to feel romantic attraction without sexual attraction, and to want kids without wanting the act that created them for its own sake. While not the norm, this is a way I can imagine instantiating the thing Oxytocin suggested.

0Richard_Kennaway2y

It is better to master one's urges than to either cut them off or be their slave.

4Adrià Garriga-alonso2y

Folks generally don't need polyamory to enjoy this benefit, but I'm glad you get it from that!

2AnthonyC2y

I actually wonder about the breakdown here. I agree many don't. I don't, though really I have few friends in general. But some do. I don't think there's very many people in the modern world that are in the extreme Mike Pence "I will never let myself be alone with a woman who isn't my wife" category of enforcing such boundaries (though some religious communities still have such rules!). But if you watch the start of When Harry Met Sally, I think a sizeable chunk of people do still lean closer to Billy Crystal's position than Meg Ryan's.

1Rebecca2y

Why would attraction ruin the friendship?

[-]metachirality2y121

I feel like just "gender" would be better than "physical sex" here. For instance, I'd expect trans women to fall in the female cluster (although being trans intersects with that in ways that strain this model but it still rounds to what I said so)

[-]Kaj_Sotala2y107

Interesting speculation!

But… I mean, think of a bakery of all (straight) men.
Then think of the same bakery, but it's all (straight) women.
Then imagine the same bakery, but it's mixed sex.
Can you see what happens?
Even if there's no attraction going on in the last case, the fact that there could be dramatically changes the unspoken dynamics. It's just not as stable as the other two.

I feel like you have some implicit additional assumptions WRT what you mean by "stable", here.

Like, are we talking about an ordinary bakery where someone is the owner and they hire staff to work there? In that case, if "stable" means something like "rate of staff turnover", I wouldn't expect the gender mix to significantly affect the stability. I'd expect it to be much more driven by things like ordinary working conditions, how well the staff were paid, etc..

(I also have the intuition that a single-gender environment would be less stable in the sense of being somehow "more stale" and "less alive" than a mixed-gender one, and thus less stable in the long-term, though that may very well just be my personal discomfort with single-gender environments.)

4Valentine2y

True! I think I meant mostly an intuition about how sexual stuff adds drama that isn't relevant to (say) baking. Huh. Well, I guess it depends a lot on the social scene! Like, I don't think a football team would feel more alive if you mixed in girls. Even if you somehow navigate the thing about major physical differences between the sexes. There's something about the way the locker room culture there can be masculine that's actually part of the bonding. And I think having a girl or two mixed in there could add some rivalry that'd have to be sorted out to be a functional team! But yeah, if it's a group of programmers, it might actually work better to have mixed sexes. Vague intuition here. Though I notice that I picked this example in part because physical sex can be made way, way less relevant in that context. (E.g., it's possible to have a team of programmers that don't even know one another's sex and interact purely remotely and over text. That's just not gonna work in a football team.) All of what I'm saying here is spitballing and not very careful. Just playing with ideas. Thanks for pointing out the questions here!

[-]CronoDAS2y85

There's a theory that one thing that women find sexually attractive in men is having a high position in the (male) status hierarchy. Consider Christian Grey, powerful billionaire, and also the many older (and old-fashioned) stories in which the heroine's desirable love interest is a Prince. As Henry Kissinger supposedly said, "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac"...

5frontier642y

Strong agree. The post as I read it says: * Women choose preferred mates based on the guy's position in hierarchies. * Men choose preferred mates based on the gal's beauty. And this is stated explicitly pretty often in a lot of what I read.

[-]AnnaSalamon10mo70

A man being deeply respected and lauded by his fellow men, in a clearly authentic and lasting way, seems to be a big female turn-on. Way way way bigger effect size than physique best as I can tell.
…but the symmetric thing is not true! Women cheering on one of their own doesn't seem to make men want her more. (Maybe something else is analogous, the way female "weight lifting" is beautification?)

My guess at the analogous thing: women being kind/generous/loving seems to me like a thing many men have found attractive across times and cultures, and seems to me ... (read more)

[-]Valentine11mo50Review for 2023 Review

This was fun to look back on a year later.

I like how thoroughly I owned it. How it's clearly wild speculation that tries to weave together some questionable observations. I also like the questions it raises. I remember how the basic hypothesis — that sexual signaling maybe evolved largely to aim at one's own sex in the human social context — helped me to notice some interesting questions I hadn't picked up on before. (E.g., why does slut-shaming seem to more target women who doll up for the male gaze instead of women who are actually pretty openly DTF when... (read more)

[-]Jacob Falkovich2y43

I spent a long time figuring out the same thing about women's beauty, and came to roughly similar conclusions: https://putanumonit.com/2022/12/13/why-are-women-hot/

We already established that men will happily have sex with women who aren’t optimizing for sexiness, and date women who aren’t the most sexually desirable, and persist in long-term relationships independent of the woman’s looks, and will care about their woman’s beauty in large part to the extent that they care about its effects their status in the hierarchy of men. And so my answer to the origi

... (read more)

[-]GayHackRat2y176

Hmm, while it's true that many women can still attract a mate/have plenty of sex if they don't put effort into their looks, it definitely seems to me (anecdotally, through both my own lived experience and what others talk about) that women get more male attention when they do put in effort

[-]Valentine2y1711

I think the point is that women are clearly optimizing way harder for female approval of their looks than they are male approval.

This article is pretty wild to read in this context. I think it has some Hell Realm memetic code embedded in it, & LW is kind of awful at navigating Hell Realm memetics, so I kinda hesitate to point at it here… but with that caveat: it's just fascinating that here's an article spelling out how to maximally appeal to the male gaze, focused on some sincere attempts at data, and the apparent female reaction is disgust and eyerolling and attempts to censor?

(It's possible that the female reaction is actually to Hell Realm code, not so much to the optimize-for-male-gaze thing. I bet that's at least a factor. But it's still interesting that the rejection shows up this way!)

[-]Said Achmiz2y105

Seconding recommendation of the linked article both for its own sake and due to its relevance to this discussion.

4Valentine2y

Oh yeah, I read this article some time ago! It probably affected my thinking here. I also heard Louise Perry make comments pointing out something similar recently. I don't really get to claim a lot of originality here. Maybe my Great Insight™ is how there's maybe an analogy between the way women focus on beauty and men focusing on getting big.

[-]CasioTheSane8mo30

As someone that has been a strength athlete, and part of fitness communities for many years, I have never seen a real world instance of someone becoming generally less attractive to the opposite sex, or having trouble finding partners due to lifting weights.

Building noticeable amounts of muscle is much harder than most people who haven't tried to do so assume. The "grotesquely muscular" men on, e.g. bodybuilding magazines are essentially fake, and not something that really happens to people that lift weights, except for a few minutes in a staged photo that... (read more)

[-]meedstrom10mo3-2

Nitpick: "...is extremely bizarre" can sound prescriptive. If you only meant it descriptively, maybe "extremely unusual".

[-]O O2y*21

Personally I just simply like the idea of being an attractive person more so than the societal implications of it. It’s just an axis that I want to do well in (in addition to money, sociability, etc). A lot of that’s reinforced by what other men think, but I also (maybe even primarily) take into account what women think.

[-]jessicata2y2-3

Male K pop stars are an example of men typically considered "unmasculine" by other men but who tend to be attractive to women. I think the women are just right here, and K pop stars are more ideally hetero-masculine than the muscly guys who are actually less attractive to women. It's more conceptually appropriate to define ideal hetero-masculinity in terms of appeal to women and vice versa. (The men could in theory be correct if they admitted to latent homosexuality, but they won't!)

It's natural and basically eugenic (in the literal sense, not the politica... (read more)

2interstice2y

If within-sex coalitions are common and adaptive, isn't being good at the politics of those coalitions "eugenic" also?

3jessicata2y

Often yes. But within-sex coalitions can be "cartel-like" in a way that is dysgenic, analogous to how economic cartels reduce economic competition. Within-sex coalitions are often more about military than evolutionary fitness. For instance, consider this quote from the Futurist Manifesto: The pattern of enforced monogamy is also a product of within-sex coalitions; it reduces the level of competition among males compared to the evolutionary average.

2Algon2y

Not sure what you mean by this, as the link goes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestor. Do you mean in the long run, all males in a monogamous society will have the same expected number of children?

6jessicata2y

"Some research suggests that the average person has twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors"

2[comment deleted]2y

[-]Review Bot2y*10

The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

[+]Marthinwurer2y-8-12

[+]the gears to ascension2y*-10-11

[+][comment deleted]2y20

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Is being sexy for your homies?

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