This piece is more proof that Rob's analysis is worth paying for. He takes you way past the immediate social media post that triggered this discussion, out of the realm of simple judgement to a place where you are thinking more about your own thoughts and actions. And, in this case, you realize why you're are such a big hypocrite, and aren't even sure if that's a simple condemnation of you or proof that you are human.
But a woman who doesn’t intend to have sex on the first date does not put herself in the risky position of going to his apartment. Too easy to get raped.
I certainly agree that communication in dating is largely about implied and indirect messages and meaning. But I’d go a step further and say the “meaning” of what’s conveyed isn’t necessarily known even to the person doing the speaking (or nonverbal communicating). So much of what motivates speech and other behavior is opaque to us, probably especially in the context of dating and sex.
Quote Rob, "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." (In regard to dating.) ONLY FOR MEN. What women fear on going out on a date with a man they only briefly have known is getting assaulted and/or murdered. You read about it in the paper every day as well as personally knowing of such accounts. Women have much more to lose than men in such a situation. As far as what makes a man attractive to a woman - one of the top characteristics is a sense of humor and trustworthiness not, for most women, income.
In respect to sex, males are stupid. Well most of them are. They have hormonal floods that tell their brain they need to stick their penises in things... preferable other people.. and generally people of the opposite sex that are above their sexual attraction grade. It makes them make stupid relationship (life) choices.
In respect to sex, females are also stupid. Well some of them are. They have a biological tendency to leverage the stupidity of males wanting to stick their penises in them to gain a top-shelf mate. More often these days females also shop for males above their sexual attraction grade. This results in many females making stupid relationship (life) choices.
But if you think about all of this, it is the stupidity of males that sets the table for all of this. They are obsessed with sex (and this is biological I am sure, but one that should demand some discipline that seems to have evaporated with on-line porn) and that obsession has always been a female opportunity used to manage them... but today in this angry, hostile feminist-powered social upheaval, it has become a massively destructive weapon against them.
And the result of all of this is the biggest gender divide humanity has ever experienced... marriage and birthrates crashing. Generally opinions about the opposite sex growing unfavorable.
I find it very interesting that fiction novels, especially in the fantasy genre, written by female authors tend to depict the attractive males as very overt masculine warriors and the females are generally weirdly very feminine "closet" warriors.... and but also generally with accepted highly vulnerable and volatile emotions. Sex scenes can be nearly violent and the delineation between masculine males and feminine females is profound... as if the author could never write a convincing chapter without accepting what is clearly our basic sexual biology with some minor exception in the cohort of humanity.
But Hollywood is different. Most modern screen entertainment has adopted a weird woke narrative about gender and sex that is off. The leading male hero is often effeminate or otherwise gay or not included in any sex scenes... while the masculine warrior type is generally depicted as the bad guy, or an isolated jerk trying to find his way to some sensitive girly-man existence. Then these shows and movies attempt to make a female character the new "masculine" warrior lead... generally lesbian... and also with accepted high emotional turmoil that justifies shifts between being vulnerable and aggressive.
It is like the stories on the screen are written with a woke feminist agenda... and corrupt the actual story of real life sexual attraction that still seems to happen in novels.
I find the screen entertainment more irritating and unbelievable. I think many feel the same way.
I agree with the first part; men's sex drive leads them down some very unsavory byways. The second part is more complicated and feminists can't be blamed for trying to protect women’s interests.
As someone whose field of work for the past half century plus has been monitoring violence against women and helping the survivor's put their lives back together I see how hesitant many women are about precipitously trusting the future. A couple of the reasons cited to me by a lot of women is the coarsening of relationships by the wholesale consumption of porn as well as the looming threat of climate change.
So online porn and climate change are responsible for the decline in marriage, birthrates and gender relations and not post-moderist 3rd wave feminism. Got it.
Nope, widespread porn has actually seen sexual violence against women go down - way down. In fact, the areas in the world where sexual violence against women is highest, are also areas in the world where porn is illegal or otherwise very hard to get a hold of, like many locales in Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and so on. Clearly, wide(er) spread availability of both porn and legalization/decriminalization of prostitution will very likely further drive down sexual violence against women rates - a commonsense solution whose time is long overdue...
I would like to read this again after some editing and rewriting to strengthen the linking of the topics areas. I feel like there are important points to be considered here. Maybe the topic is better suited to conversation or Socratic dialogue.
Mostly, as an older reader, I am just so glad that for most of the younger folks, a woman going to a man’s room but refusing sex is no longer an accepted even approved explanation for why he raped her. You know, Cause what did she expect would
happen, going there? It is my understanding that victim blaming is why only a tiny sliver of the tiny sliver of rape victims who report to the authorities want to press charge and go to court. Because any occurrence or behavior by the female can be twisted into an accepted explanation for why it is the female’s fault that a man/men sexually assaulted her.
Hmmmm...not sure I buy the premise being made here. In that it is based off Richard Hanania's work, I'm going to give Rob here the benefit of the doubt. Let's rock and roll.
First off, to suggest that a person, and by that we really mean a man (as Rich pointed out and as Rob quoted), is somehow "on the spectrum" if he is very blunt, direct and straightforward in his communications with women, is patently absurd. Is it possible? Yes - but it is also possible that he simply values efficiency and economy over the often long, arduous and drawn out courting process - a process that has proven to be a method by which dishonest women can and will use to extract short term resources from men they have absolutely no interest in. "Foodie calls" have been well documented and researched, with roughly a full third of American women having openly admitted to engaging in such a practice. Getting right to the point obviates the need for the dog and pony show - and I think in today's age, rightly so.
Second, all of us guys know about what some have called the "Brad Pitt Test" (or, if you're Black like me, the "Idris Elba Test") - the idea that, if Pitt (or Elba, as it were) stepped to that same lady you were trying to holla at, would she give them the same reaction that she would to you? That famed Saturday Night Live skit featuring NFL legendary quarterback Tom Brady makes precisely this point. She's goin' with Pitt, Elba or Brady, to be down for whatever with them, and yet will require you to dance like the proverbial monkey first. Addressing the guys in the room, we've all seen such a thing happen - and I for one find it utterly demeaning to my very soul to have to put up with such contrivances. I would much rather get an "up or down vote" right off the rip rather than to have to go through all the stuff my dad and grand dad had to endure. It's the 21st century, after all, and I have no problem with a "Swipe right/swipe left" world. Let the chips fall where they may, is what I say.
As for Col. Jessup's famed line: Rob certainly doesn't need me to tell him or any other veteran that such things happen all the time in war. The Martin Scorsese classic "The Irishman" makes this point crystal clear: Frank Sheeran, who served in Patton's notorious 45th Infantry Division, is in Italy for a staggering 411 days (the average combat vet during WW2 saw about 100 days in an active warzone), and talks candidly about the numerous war crimes he committed. Sure, no one in polite society might not like to hear about that, but I thought The Irishman's accounting about this aspect of Sheeran's life was a sobering reminder about what war is like, for real. Jessup was 100% right in "A Few Good Men" - we need men like him up on that wall, able and willing to do the dirty work we don't want to do.
In my line of work and in my corner of the universe, I see Black women all the time go for guys (and recently in one case, a woman) who tells them what they want to hear, when it is bleedingly obvious that these people were lying through their teeth and being stompdown hypocrites. Guys like me are often reviled for our bluntforce honesty, but we often get to have the last laugh (and in my case, make a nice bit of coin from it all), because so many Black women simply cannot make peace with their base desires - which makes them ripe targets for f*ckboys and the like in the first place.
At any rate, if a lady tells me right off the bat that she's not going to sleep with me, I simply hang up; there's absolutely no point whatsoever in my engaging with someone who has already made it plain they have no interest in me like that; that's time I could be spending finding a lady who, on first sight, wants to jump my bones.
There's no comparison between the stakes in the game for men and women: caution or death; or in another scenario she winds up holding the baby and going forward and forever her life is circumscribed. It's pretty incredible the blindness men display in recognizing the huge disparity between the irrevocable risks posed for women vs men.
I should also like to remind the lady, that in today's 21st century world - one where birth control and indeed abortion are widely available(!) - the idea that a woman would be left high and dry is laughable. This is especially true in Black America, where it is a well documented fact that Black women, while making up eight percent of the nation's women, get FOUR TIMES as many abortions(!). Put another way: Black women, as a group, get the most abortions of all, proportionately speaking, that is. Yes, Roe's been overturned at the federal level, but that doesn't stop the states from putting it in place; I believe AZ just recently did? So, yea, can't use that excuse either; that's so 1950s. That dog just won't hunt in the 21st century, I'm afraid...
All abortions are tragedies,, even if the woman having one doesn't believe it is (the fetus is unavailable for comment). Thus, the fact that black women have four times as many abortions as non-black women is four times the tragedy.
And every abortion constitutes three tragedies; one for the woman who feels the need to destroy the life within her, one for the life that will never be lived and, finally, though he may feel he dodged a bullet, one for the man whose child will never be born.
Hrrmph, that's easy for you (and so many other women) to say - let's see if you're singing the same tune when you're bilked out of a few C-notes? Risk is risk is risk, and men have every right to hedge against it. Women tend to be very careless with money, time and resources that aren't theirs.
I would not like to be propositioned by any man, no matter how good looking. Yes I like men with decent looks, but that is not the be all and end all. Personality is my number one criterion. Being catcalled in the street is very intimidating and an immediate turn off.
I have heard of the kind of women who used men for money and other favors and of course I condemn this, but this is hardly the majority. Most women still want things between her and a man she likes to unfold gradually and not with a lot of explicit talk. I don't want a man to spend a lot on me either because it feels like it comes with obligation and expectation. I vastly prefer to meet men in a low stakes situation, like a club or shared interest where I can get to feel safe around him before I take any chances on intimacy.
Maybe it's just me, but I think hypocrisy, especially naked and nonchalant hypocrisy, is far worse than lip service to nearly any virtue. The lip service doesn't "make it better" by making me think the hypocrite "at least believes in the virtue", because frankly, at that point I don't -- and can't -- know *what* the hypocrite believes, including any respect for his/her audience. The hypocrite burned his/her bridge. "From a logical contradiction, anything follows."
I take the main point to be that we view moral failings in action less harshly if one has openly advocated acting morally. This seems quite true.
I recently argued in an exchange with Robin Hanson that this is because open advocacy if acting morally is signal if your morality because you risk being branded a hypocrite if you act immorally. Robin argued that given the effect described above this robs the attempt to signal of any power.
Today I'm not sure which is right, but your piece is an interesting alternative explanation.
Never considered the many reasons for “I’m not going to sleep with you”. Very interesting and dangerous at the same time. In this litigious society if I was single I would definitely not so soon in a relationship. Or maybe?😂
I think in their head the hypothetical woman has a “mom module” that she feels surveyed and evaluated by. Men have the analogous thing, which is not their dad, it’s “the boys”. There’s also this vestigial “god / St Peter” module that pervades the culture.
"The only effective way to eliminate hypocrisy entirely from human affairs is to have no moral standards.”, not quite. What is required for human relationships is not morals, but ethics. It may be immoral to sleep with someone's wife, but if the man considers her position, and keeps it quiet, as if nothing is happening, appearances are kept, no one is made aware, and life goes on.
If hypocrisy is rampant, then let it be and just be ethical with those you are dealing with.
It is how we treat each other that matters, isn't it?
This essay by Rob Henderson is somewhat confusing. On the one hand, it says that we act as if we are being watched. On the other hand, it says that we act as if we can get away with lying. Finally, it says that the audience watching us would rather see us misbehave after lying than after honestly saying that we will misbehave. So it seems that even when you are going to get caught in a lie, you still have the incentive to lie.
Or ambiguous? Some decisions should be hard (like sex or violence). But they still have to happen for the species to survive. And ambiguity is the tension that is core to novels, movies, etc.
This piece is more proof that Rob's analysis is worth paying for. He takes you way past the immediate social media post that triggered this discussion, out of the realm of simple judgement to a place where you are thinking more about your own thoughts and actions. And, in this case, you realize why you're are such a big hypocrite, and aren't even sure if that's a simple condemnation of you or proof that you are human.
But a woman who doesn’t intend to have sex on the first date does not put herself in the risky position of going to his apartment. Too easy to get raped.
I certainly agree that communication in dating is largely about implied and indirect messages and meaning. But I’d go a step further and say the “meaning” of what’s conveyed isn’t necessarily known even to the person doing the speaking (or nonverbal communicating). So much of what motivates speech and other behavior is opaque to us, probably especially in the context of dating and sex.
Quote Rob, "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." (In regard to dating.) ONLY FOR MEN. What women fear on going out on a date with a man they only briefly have known is getting assaulted and/or murdered. You read about it in the paper every day as well as personally knowing of such accounts. Women have much more to lose than men in such a situation. As far as what makes a man attractive to a woman - one of the top characteristics is a sense of humor and trustworthiness not, for most women, income.
In respect to sex, males are stupid. Well most of them are. They have hormonal floods that tell their brain they need to stick their penises in things... preferable other people.. and generally people of the opposite sex that are above their sexual attraction grade. It makes them make stupid relationship (life) choices.
In respect to sex, females are also stupid. Well some of them are. They have a biological tendency to leverage the stupidity of males wanting to stick their penises in them to gain a top-shelf mate. More often these days females also shop for males above their sexual attraction grade. This results in many females making stupid relationship (life) choices.
But if you think about all of this, it is the stupidity of males that sets the table for all of this. They are obsessed with sex (and this is biological I am sure, but one that should demand some discipline that seems to have evaporated with on-line porn) and that obsession has always been a female opportunity used to manage them... but today in this angry, hostile feminist-powered social upheaval, it has become a massively destructive weapon against them.
And the result of all of this is the biggest gender divide humanity has ever experienced... marriage and birthrates crashing. Generally opinions about the opposite sex growing unfavorable.
I find it very interesting that fiction novels, especially in the fantasy genre, written by female authors tend to depict the attractive males as very overt masculine warriors and the females are generally weirdly very feminine "closet" warriors.... and but also generally with accepted highly vulnerable and volatile emotions. Sex scenes can be nearly violent and the delineation between masculine males and feminine females is profound... as if the author could never write a convincing chapter without accepting what is clearly our basic sexual biology with some minor exception in the cohort of humanity.
But Hollywood is different. Most modern screen entertainment has adopted a weird woke narrative about gender and sex that is off. The leading male hero is often effeminate or otherwise gay or not included in any sex scenes... while the masculine warrior type is generally depicted as the bad guy, or an isolated jerk trying to find his way to some sensitive girly-man existence. Then these shows and movies attempt to make a female character the new "masculine" warrior lead... generally lesbian... and also with accepted high emotional turmoil that justifies shifts between being vulnerable and aggressive.
It is like the stories on the screen are written with a woke feminist agenda... and corrupt the actual story of real life sexual attraction that still seems to happen in novels.
I find the screen entertainment more irritating and unbelievable. I think many feel the same way.
I agree with the first part; men's sex drive leads them down some very unsavory byways. The second part is more complicated and feminists can't be blamed for trying to protect women’s interests.
I think that modern feminism does not do much to protect nor advance women's interests. I think that modern feminismin fact, does the opposite.
To what do you attribute the decline in marriage, children and overall gender relations?
As someone whose field of work for the past half century plus has been monitoring violence against women and helping the survivor's put their lives back together I see how hesitant many women are about precipitously trusting the future. A couple of the reasons cited to me by a lot of women is the coarsening of relationships by the wholesale consumption of porn as well as the looming threat of climate change.
So online porn and climate change are responsible for the decline in marriage, birthrates and gender relations and not post-moderist 3rd wave feminism. Got it.
Nope, widespread porn has actually seen sexual violence against women go down - way down. In fact, the areas in the world where sexual violence against women is highest, are also areas in the world where porn is illegal or otherwise very hard to get a hold of, like many locales in Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and so on. Clearly, wide(er) spread availability of both porn and legalization/decriminalization of prostitution will very likely further drive down sexual violence against women rates - a commonsense solution whose time is long overdue...
I would like to read this again after some editing and rewriting to strengthen the linking of the topics areas. I feel like there are important points to be considered here. Maybe the topic is better suited to conversation or Socratic dialogue.
Mostly, as an older reader, I am just so glad that for most of the younger folks, a woman going to a man’s room but refusing sex is no longer an accepted even approved explanation for why he raped her. You know, Cause what did she expect would
happen, going there? It is my understanding that victim blaming is why only a tiny sliver of the tiny sliver of rape victims who report to the authorities want to press charge and go to court. Because any occurrence or behavior by the female can be twisted into an accepted explanation for why it is the female’s fault that a man/men sexually assaulted her.
Interesting, but you sort of got lost in the weeds around the middle of the essay.
Editing is a good thing. Write long, then cut, cut and cut.
Hmmmm...not sure I buy the premise being made here. In that it is based off Richard Hanania's work, I'm going to give Rob here the benefit of the doubt. Let's rock and roll.
First off, to suggest that a person, and by that we really mean a man (as Rich pointed out and as Rob quoted), is somehow "on the spectrum" if he is very blunt, direct and straightforward in his communications with women, is patently absurd. Is it possible? Yes - but it is also possible that he simply values efficiency and economy over the often long, arduous and drawn out courting process - a process that has proven to be a method by which dishonest women can and will use to extract short term resources from men they have absolutely no interest in. "Foodie calls" have been well documented and researched, with roughly a full third of American women having openly admitted to engaging in such a practice. Getting right to the point obviates the need for the dog and pony show - and I think in today's age, rightly so.
Second, all of us guys know about what some have called the "Brad Pitt Test" (or, if you're Black like me, the "Idris Elba Test") - the idea that, if Pitt (or Elba, as it were) stepped to that same lady you were trying to holla at, would she give them the same reaction that she would to you? That famed Saturday Night Live skit featuring NFL legendary quarterback Tom Brady makes precisely this point. She's goin' with Pitt, Elba or Brady, to be down for whatever with them, and yet will require you to dance like the proverbial monkey first. Addressing the guys in the room, we've all seen such a thing happen - and I for one find it utterly demeaning to my very soul to have to put up with such contrivances. I would much rather get an "up or down vote" right off the rip rather than to have to go through all the stuff my dad and grand dad had to endure. It's the 21st century, after all, and I have no problem with a "Swipe right/swipe left" world. Let the chips fall where they may, is what I say.
As for Col. Jessup's famed line: Rob certainly doesn't need me to tell him or any other veteran that such things happen all the time in war. The Martin Scorsese classic "The Irishman" makes this point crystal clear: Frank Sheeran, who served in Patton's notorious 45th Infantry Division, is in Italy for a staggering 411 days (the average combat vet during WW2 saw about 100 days in an active warzone), and talks candidly about the numerous war crimes he committed. Sure, no one in polite society might not like to hear about that, but I thought The Irishman's accounting about this aspect of Sheeran's life was a sobering reminder about what war is like, for real. Jessup was 100% right in "A Few Good Men" - we need men like him up on that wall, able and willing to do the dirty work we don't want to do.
In my line of work and in my corner of the universe, I see Black women all the time go for guys (and recently in one case, a woman) who tells them what they want to hear, when it is bleedingly obvious that these people were lying through their teeth and being stompdown hypocrites. Guys like me are often reviled for our bluntforce honesty, but we often get to have the last laugh (and in my case, make a nice bit of coin from it all), because so many Black women simply cannot make peace with their base desires - which makes them ripe targets for f*ckboys and the like in the first place.
At any rate, if a lady tells me right off the bat that she's not going to sleep with me, I simply hang up; there's absolutely no point whatsoever in my engaging with someone who has already made it plain they have no interest in me like that; that's time I could be spending finding a lady who, on first sight, wants to jump my bones.
MOA
There's no comparison between the stakes in the game for men and women: caution or death; or in another scenario she winds up holding the baby and going forward and forever her life is circumscribed. It's pretty incredible the blindness men display in recognizing the huge disparity between the irrevocable risks posed for women vs men.
I should also like to remind the lady, that in today's 21st century world - one where birth control and indeed abortion are widely available(!) - the idea that a woman would be left high and dry is laughable. This is especially true in Black America, where it is a well documented fact that Black women, while making up eight percent of the nation's women, get FOUR TIMES as many abortions(!). Put another way: Black women, as a group, get the most abortions of all, proportionately speaking, that is. Yes, Roe's been overturned at the federal level, but that doesn't stop the states from putting it in place; I believe AZ just recently did? So, yea, can't use that excuse either; that's so 1950s. That dog just won't hunt in the 21st century, I'm afraid...
All abortions are tragedies,, even if the woman having one doesn't believe it is (the fetus is unavailable for comment). Thus, the fact that black women have four times as many abortions as non-black women is four times the tragedy.
And every abortion constitutes three tragedies; one for the woman who feels the need to destroy the life within her, one for the life that will never be lived and, finally, though he may feel he dodged a bullet, one for the man whose child will never be born.
Hrrmph, that's easy for you (and so many other women) to say - let's see if you're singing the same tune when you're bilked out of a few C-notes? Risk is risk is risk, and men have every right to hedge against it. Women tend to be very careless with money, time and resources that aren't theirs.
I would not like to be propositioned by any man, no matter how good looking. Yes I like men with decent looks, but that is not the be all and end all. Personality is my number one criterion. Being catcalled in the street is very intimidating and an immediate turn off.
I have heard of the kind of women who used men for money and other favors and of course I condemn this, but this is hardly the majority. Most women still want things between her and a man she likes to unfold gradually and not with a lot of explicit talk. I don't want a man to spend a lot on me either because it feels like it comes with obligation and expectation. I vastly prefer to meet men in a low stakes situation, like a club or shared interest where I can get to feel safe around him before I take any chances on intimacy.
This is way too complicated. Too many words. I'm going out for ice cream and taking my dog with me.
Maybe it's just me, but I think hypocrisy, especially naked and nonchalant hypocrisy, is far worse than lip service to nearly any virtue. The lip service doesn't "make it better" by making me think the hypocrite "at least believes in the virtue", because frankly, at that point I don't -- and can't -- know *what* the hypocrite believes, including any respect for his/her audience. The hypocrite burned his/her bridge. "From a logical contradiction, anything follows."
I take the main point to be that we view moral failings in action less harshly if one has openly advocated acting morally. This seems quite true.
I recently argued in an exchange with Robin Hanson that this is because open advocacy if acting morally is signal if your morality because you risk being branded a hypocrite if you act immorally. Robin argued that given the effect described above this robs the attempt to signal of any power.
Today I'm not sure which is right, but your piece is an interesting alternative explanation.
I really liked the article shared by Theodore Dalrymple. His description of the word cant made so much sense.
Never considered the many reasons for “I’m not going to sleep with you”. Very interesting and dangerous at the same time. In this litigious society if I was single I would definitely not so soon in a relationship. Or maybe?😂
I think in their head the hypothetical woman has a “mom module” that she feels surveyed and evaluated by. Men have the analogous thing, which is not their dad, it’s “the boys”. There’s also this vestigial “god / St Peter” module that pervades the culture.
"The only effective way to eliminate hypocrisy entirely from human affairs is to have no moral standards.”, not quite. What is required for human relationships is not morals, but ethics. It may be immoral to sleep with someone's wife, but if the man considers her position, and keeps it quiet, as if nothing is happening, appearances are kept, no one is made aware, and life goes on.
If hypocrisy is rampant, then let it be and just be ethical with those you are dealing with.
It is how we treat each other that matters, isn't it?
This essay by Rob Henderson is somewhat confusing. On the one hand, it says that we act as if we are being watched. On the other hand, it says that we act as if we can get away with lying. Finally, it says that the audience watching us would rather see us misbehave after lying than after honestly saying that we will misbehave. So it seems that even when you are going to get caught in a lie, you still have the incentive to lie.
Sometimes it's this way. Sometimes it's that way.
Or ambiguous? Some decisions should be hard (like sex or violence). But they still have to happen for the species to survive. And ambiguity is the tension that is core to novels, movies, etc.