Sex and Violence Reveal Their Opposites

What does it mean when a woman says “I’m not going to sleep with you!"?

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1941 novel The Last Tycoon, a film producer character named Monroe Stahr instructs his scriptwriters on how the audience is to understand the heroine’s motivation:

“At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken Willard…Whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her enough strength to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would even consider sleeping with Ken Willard…”

This was written during the era of the Hays Code, a set of guidelines that prohibited Hollywood from depicting various acts to promote a narrow set of traditional values.

In Fitzgerald’s story, the film producer stresses that the heroine cannot show any sign that she wants to have sex with her love interest, even though everything she does, from the way she walks to the way she eats, is meant to show that she very much wants to.

That story came to mind when I read Richard Hanania’s recent post, summarized in the headline “I'm Not Going to Sleep with You!” Means She Probably Will. The idea is that during romantic dates, people implicitly send subtle signals, and there are consequences for being too direct.

If, after a date, a woman accepts a man’s invitation to visit his home, and first says, “I’m not going to sleep with you,” this could, of course, mean that she has no desire to sleep with him. But it could also mean something like “I’m going to share this information with you in order to gauge your response and if you behave weirdly, then I’m not going to sleep with you.” It could also mean “I’m attracted to you and would like to sleep with you but I’m not feeling at my best so I’m not going to sleep with you tonight but want you to know I like you and trust you enough to be alone with you” It could mean “At this very moment I’m not entirely certain I want to sleep with you but let’s see how the rest of the evening unfolds.” It could mean “I really like you and I’m absolutely not going to sleep with you but I have no way of forecasting how I’ll feel as we spend more time together.” In the same way as you could imagine someone watching their figure entering a patisserie and thinking “I will absolutely not order a slice of their famous strawberry cake” and 20 minutes later find themselves savoring the last bite.

Many years ago I met a girl at Starbucks and got her phone number. Later I called her and asked her out. She said “Yeah, but just as friends right?” I said okay sounds good. This conversation took place over the phone, to give you an idea of how long ago this was (2010 I think). We had lunch, then went to a nearby shopping mall where she helped me pick out a new jacket (I was stationed in Washington state at the time, at a base not far from Seattle; lots of rainfall). We had a good time but I don’t even think we hugged goodbye. Next time we hung out we got dinner and she came over afterwards. We dated for a few months. In hindsight, her motives (probably largely unconscious) for that first date, and her comment about just hanging as friends, were screening mechanisms to make sure she was attracted to me and that I was not a lunatic. Let’s see if this guy can get through lunch and shopping as a normal human being first before we see where else it might go. Perfectly reasonable for a young woman who is unsure how much she likes a guy she barely knows.

All of this is to say that a person’s words often have a direct correspondence to feelings that endure beyond the moment of utterance. And sometimes not.

Richard notes:

“Of course, if you’re an autist or a very confused young person, you may ask why we can’t send out the necessary signals explicitly. Men can provide IQ scores and their bank statements on first dates, while each woman presents a document that lists her previous sexual experiences along with an essay explaining how in each case she slept with a man it was in the context of a committed relationship she had good reason to think would last a long period of time.

One reason signals can’t be too direct is that an important thing individuals look for in partners is social skills. Can you subtly send out signals indicating your own worth and fitness, and pick up on those sent by others? Unlike things like IQ scores and wealth, there’s no way to show that you have social skills other than by actually socializing with other people. And the best test of such skills is in courtship, where the stakes are highest. Your genetic future depends on winning over the right partner, yet there are minefields you have to clear. Today, this includes everything from the embarrassment of getting rejected in front of other people to being charged with rape. Earlier in our history, going after the wrong woman or mistreating her could make you subject to violence at the hands of males in her life, and that risk still exists in certain communities.”

These are all good points. I’d also like to suggest the possibility that humans evolved more to respond to signals of underlying traits rather than the traits themselves.

Imagine you had to choose between 2 people to have sex with:

1. An extremely attractive person who shows you verified medical documents indicating that the person is riddled with contagious illnesses

2. A strange-looking person with misshapen facial features and limbs of asymmetrical length who shows you verified medical documents indicating that the person has a clean bill of health

A lot of people would find this difficult to answer. This suggests we often rely on signals (appearance) more so than the underlying attribute the signal is meant to convey (health).

This is also why people are often intrigued to hear the opinions of celebrities and movie stars. We are well aware that the intelligence, wit, and personality of the characters they portray were drawn up and perfected by a room full of creative writers. And yet, when people see the celebrity in an interview, some part of them can’t help but remember the signals of intelligence and wit they picked up on when seeing the actor portray a brilliant character in a movie or TV show. And thus people become interested in hearing their views.

Richard’s post draws on evolutionary psychology, a field which has done more than any other to uncover hidden motivations and inexplicable behaviors in the realm of sex and courtship. A fascinating finding from evolutionary psychology is that humans are inclined to err on the side of mistakenly detecting the presence of others.

We possess what has been termed a Hyperactive Agent Detection Device. We have a powerful drive to think of events and situations in terms of goals, desires, and intentions. This cognitive module is useful when thinking about the actions of other people, who actually do reason in terms of goals, desires, and intentions. This mental device helps us figure out why other people behave as they do. But we have a tendency to overextend it. We are socio-cognitive creatures who evolved in small hunter-gatherer bands in which privacy was essentially nonexistent. So we tend to behave as if we are being watched by an audience at all times. Our Hyperactive Agent Detection Device often causes us to infer the presence of others even when no one is present.

This is consistent with another idea from evolutionary psychology—error management theory, which contends that whenever the costs of making an error are asymmetrical, it’s better to lean toward making the less costly error. This bias sometimes increases overall error rates. But because it minimizes occurrences of the more expensive error, it reduces overall costs.

The Hyperactive Agent Detection module evolved because the more costly error is to overlook the presence of others who are observing you than to misperceive the presence of others when in fact you are actually alone. Put simply, we tend to behave as if we are being watched because it’s more adaptive to do so.

Some people are more prone than others to mistakenly believe they are being observed. People who are highly paranoid (tend to obsess over other people’s hidden motives and intentions) and people who are highly empathic (dwelling on other’s emotions and goals) have particularly sensitive Hyperactive Agent Detectors.

From Christopher Lasch’s opus, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations:

“Modern life is so mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions- and our own- were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored for close scrutiny at some later time.”

This was written in the 1970s, before the age of social media.

Lasch attributes our tendency to register the presence of an audience to our media-saturated environment. What’s more likely is that we are evolutionarily prepared to never feel truly alone. To feel as if we are being observed. But our environment can exacerbate this inclination. The same person’s Hyperactive Agent Detection Device would probably show different levels of sensitivity if they lived in a rural village versus Manhattan. When every surface around you depicts images of people on camera, whether on a TV show or livestreaming from their phone, you are reminded of the possibility that you are being scrutinized.

If you’re reading this, then you probably live in a place that more closely resembles a major city than a provincial settlement. By some combination of evolutionary psychology and mass and social media, we are all, to some extent, performing for an audience.  

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Here we can risk the hypothesis that when it comes to self-image, expressing a particular opinion is often a necessity before acting out its opposite.

Like when a woman tells her date she’s not going to sleep him as she enters his apartment. (By the way, the male equivalent is when a man tells his partner “I’m not going to cheat on you!” before doing just that).

Seduction and sex run on implicit rather than explicit communication. The same is true of violence and war.

The very same logic seems to hold when a president announces that his country does not engage in torture, even as he later vetoes a bill that formalizes this commitment into law.

Dick Cheney in an interview from 2004:

“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”

A wink and a nod.

For a fictional example involving violence, let’s recall the movie A Few Good Men (1992). Two U.S. Marines are accused of murdering a fellow service member. Their defense attorneys (played by Tom Cruise and Demi Moore) succeed in proving that the defendants followed a “Code Red,” an unwritten rule that permits Marines to secretly beat another service member who threatens group cohesion. This unofficial rule condones violent hazing but the film implies that it is necessary for social bonding. It has to be performed at night. Unacknowledged. Disavowed. In public, the Marines pretend not to know of its existence. The climax is so famous that even people who haven’t seen the full movie know about it. The outburst of rage from Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (Jack Nicoholson): “You can’t handle the truth!” He then goes on to reveal that he indeed ordered the Code Red.

This outburst—the precise moment when he makes the implicit explicit—marks his downfall.

This is the logic of sex, and of organized violence (I’m not speaking about street gangs or two dudes throwing down on the street; I’m talking about liberal democracies that project an image of having evolved beyond tawdry methods to enforce peace or group cohesion). And other transgressive or quasi-transgressive behaviors. If it must be discussed openly, it has to be articulated in coded language.  

This strategy is more complex than it may appear. On some level, we may know that people respond to signals (e.g., language) as well as the underlying attribute of interest (behavior).   

Because you know that you are “covered” or “absolved from guilt” by the official verbalized storyline you narrate, you are subsequently allowed to indulge in the disavowed behavior.

In the mental ledger of your mind, the language you express offers a counterweight to the actions you engage in. If you say nothing at all and only indulge in the (mis)behavior, then the bottom line sums to a moral debt. But if you say X and do Y, then the ledger is balanced out and you’re back to zero, or close to it.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. People observe both what you say and what you do and make some implicit calculations about you character. Last year, a team of psychologists found that people evaluate individuals who support absolute honesty and then lie more positively than individuals who openly espouse a flexible moral stance on honesty and then lie. In other words, people prefer individuals who endorse honesty and then lie over people who take flexible stances on honesty and tell the same lie.

Plainly, we seem to like people who espouse good conduct and behave in the opposite way more than people who openly express and live by unsavory principles.   

People prefer the woman who says I’m not going to sleep with you and then sleeps with you over the woman who says I’m going to sleep with you and then sleeps with you.

People prefer the president who says we don’t torture and then orders torture more than the president who says we’re going to use torture and then orders torture.

Who is more serious about keeping a healthy weight? The person who says “I’m definitely not going to eat that strawberry cake” and then eats the strawberry cake, or the person who announces “I’m definitely going to eat that strawberry cake” and then eats it? The first person, at least, pays lip service to the ideal of fitness and health.

People prefer the person who understands the rule/custom/courtesy/law they are about to violate more than the person who doesn’t care about rules/customs/courtesies/laws.

Most of us, I think, need some amount of this duplicity to function. By communicating aloud that you will not do something, you permit yourself free rein to do so. You can indulge in it, because you are exonerated by the fact that, for your self-image, and for the invisible audience, you did not plan to do so. Appearances matter (whether to yourself or to the imagined audience). You can subtract what you did from what you said, which means some less incriminating version of your action will be recorded in the official ledger.

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Is it hypocritical to say one thing and do another? Of course. But as the seventeenth-century French essayist François de La Rochefoucauld wrote, “Hypocrisy is a form of homage that vice pays to virtue.”

In the act of being hypocritical, we indirectly acknowledge the importance and value of virtuous behavior. Hypocrisy entails espousing certain principles while acting in a manner contrary to those principles. Usually we view this as a moral failing. But when you engage in hypocrisy, you typically present a façade of virtue. The choice to exhibit this façade, rather than openly embrace vice, signals an acknowledgement that virtue is the more praiseworthy and commendable path. Hypocrisy (as opposed to open and unapologetic misconduct) inadvertently affirms the value system it seeks to sidestep.

Or as Theodore Dalrymple puts it, “Most of us are hypocrites, and thank goodness for it. A society in which everyone lived up to his moral principles unswervingly would be intolerable...The only effective way to eliminate hypocrisy entirely from human affairs is to have no moral standards.”