Fake Charity Nerd Girl

There’s this idea I have, I’m not sure where exactly it comes from, about the way relationships work. It says that everyone has different needs and preferences, and so to be in a relationship you have to figure out what your needs are, and express them to your partner; they do the same, and if you’re both willing to accommodate each other’s needs then congratulations.

I try to live by this, mostly. There have been many times when a boyfriend said or did something that upset me, I responded with the classic “when you do x I feel y,” and he responded with “oh okay, I won’t do x.” But somehow that exchange always left me feeling a bit unsatisfied.

You know what feels great? Telling one of my friends that ugh, my boyfriend did x, and hearing her respond with “seriously? that’s so fucked up!”

I think there are a couple things going on here.

One is that no matter how relationship anarchist you want to be about things, there will always be some things that fall outside the realm of needs and boundaries and preferences and end up in the category of “normal things people are or aren’t supposed to do.” You’re not supposed to nonconsensually beat up your partner, or express discomfort at them having friends outside the relationship, or tell your partner’s mother to go fuck herself upon first meeting her. (I think “don’t sleep with other people” used to be on this list, but no longer is.) No one thinks these are boundaries that need to be expressed. And if you can get your preferences into this list, that’s a huge win. So it makes sense that, even if in my small ineffectual way, I push for my preferences to be codified into local social norms.

Another thing is–negotiating an entire relationship from first principles is exhausting. If you are a naturally mono-inclined person trying to date someone who’s never heard of the concept of monogamy, you will spend half your time trying to legislate edge cases. It makes sense to look for someone who shares your basic intuitions about interpersonal relationships.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say here–certainly not that modifying traditional relationship structures is impossible or even undesirable. Maybe that I think it’s too easy to see the modifications and miss the social technology underpinning them.

People’s worries about demographic decline among the educated are really hard to square with my personal experience of everyone I know having three or more kids.

To be fair, the people I know are either academic economists or Finance Professionals and I realize this is not a representative sample of the intellectual elite, and in particular both groups are known for being kind of conservative/reactionary, at least compared to the rest of said elite.

(And for the record this totally doesn’t hold among the people I know who are not members of one of those groups.)

(Not sure how much this is economists vs. all academics–a French person once mentioned to me that “it’s the trend for all French intellectuals to have three children nowadays.”)

But it still makes me wonder if there’s some sort of countersignaling backlash to the demographic transition coming?

Like, there’s a level of education/achievement where the wife is working and wants to succeed in her career and thus doesn’t have time to have lots of kids. And then there’s a level where the wife works in a sufficiently creative/self-directed profession that she has plenty of job flexibility, plus they have enough money for the best full-time nannies and private schools anyway.

I don’t know what kind of rp stuff you people are reading. Even the most reasonable stuff of theirs I’ve seen takes a sharp dive into dehumanising women before long. I genuinely find it difficult to understand how people in my tumblrsphere who do not seem to be terrible manage to not see this in everything they put out.

I guess I’m not sure what your disagreement with me is? To be clear, I absolutely think RP stuff tends to dehumanize women. I think women are people with feelings and desires and preferences that matter just as much as men’s and a lot of RP writings encourage men to ignore this, resulting in both harm to women and probably ultimately harm to those men as well (because that attitude seems like it would make it hard to form close and rewarding relationships with women). I guess I assume most of my followers already agree with this so tend not to post about it and instead post about other aspects I find interesting.

FWIW, I started replying to your reblog of my previous post to mostly agree with it but the post somehow veered into me being mad about PUA rape apologism, so I deleted it because I figured that was an invitation to discourse I didn’t need in my life.

But for the record: a lot of RP writings promote treating women badly/thoughtlessly/selfishly and I categorically disavow this. Some of them literally promote/encourage rape and even present as “success stories” detailed descriptions of times they have committed rape and that is fucking evil and those people should be condemned in the strongest possible terms (and like, arrested if it’s legally feasible though I’m sure it isn’t).

(I don’t think I’m come across anything on RPW that I would characterize as dehumanizing women, but I also haven’t read that much of it.)

I think the idea that people self-select into rpw or feminism based on what best fulfills their needs is… very optimistic.

Oh yeah I definitely agree. But maybe it’s true of some people, me being sort of an example (not that I’m “in” RPW but that I’m more sympathetic toward their general mindset than feminism). And if not, it’s a cute idea, right?

An interesting thing about redpill thought–and something its adherents would probably tell you distinguishes it from bluepill thought–is its focus on personal responsibility. Complaining about your husband on RPW is forbidden; your posts have to be about ways that you can improve as a partner. And I think if you commented on a PUA blog that the reason you can’t get laid is because women are bitches you’d get laughed at: regardless of whether women are bitches, the reason you can’t get laid is because you aren’t trying hard enough.

I think that mindset is part of what I find appealing about these communities. I’ve had several frustrating conversations with social justice-minded friends/acquaintances that go something like this:

me: *shares a problem I’ve been experiencing at school or work*

them: oh wow. clearly your classmates/boss/colleagues/industry is/are incredibly sexist. I’m so sorry you have to deal with that!

me: uh actually, I don’t really think that’s the issue here? I think that there are some ways I can grow as a person and I’m trying to figure out how to do that–

them: don’t blame yourself honey! this is structural oppression!!

And obviously, the “you are responsible for your own life” and “your problems are other people’s fault” narratives are both right sometimes. I think the response above would be correct if, say, I were experiencing workplace sexual harassment. Sometimes keeping a positive attitude toward your husband and becoming less demanding and more pleasant to be around is exactly what you need to make your marriage work, and sometimes he’s just an asshole and you need to dump him.

So what divides those attracted to the narrative of personal responsibility from those attracted to the blame-others narrative? Well uh, just speaking for myself, I’m an extremely privileged person. If it’s true of anyone, it’s probably true of me that most of my problems are kind of “my fault,” rather than the result of unavoidable external circumstances. And I’d guess based on any SJ-approved metric of privilege, the people in redpill communities are more privileged than those in SJ communities–in other words, the people for whom the personal responsibility narrative is most accurate/helpful.

(Of course, I’m sure both sides would object strongly to being characterized as coexisting communities for competing access needs. Either sexism isn’t real and those who claim to be held back by it are brainwashed, or all women are oppressed by sexism and those who claim otherwise are brainwashed.)

There are certainly a lot of criticisms I could make about this article. 

But the one that stands out is that after reading it I went and read through a bunch of RPW threads and wow that subreddit is really … normal? The article characterizes it as

• “Reddit’s most infamous MRA community” (… wait what about … r/MensRights?)
  
• “chamber of bigoted secrets”
• “violently misogynistic”
• “hateful discussion”

but the stuff I read really just reminded me of, like, a million conversations I’ve had with other girls. “I just started a new job and guys keep hitting on me, how do I react?” “He says his best friend is a girl … is that weird?” “I got rejected by my crush and now no man will ever love me again!” It’s … well, not exactly Sex and the City, but Sex and the City if all the characters were Charlotte. Yet somehow, this is a subversive and reactionary fringe political group.

tfw the only political position you’ve expressed to someone is that you think women should be relegated to the domestic sphere and they tell you “you seem pretty liberal”

(redpilly thoughts on dating)

I was reading Ozy’s latest post and they mention that a great way for women to improve their dating prospects is to ask guys out. My first reaction to this was “nonono” because there’s this failure mode I see in a lot of my non-rationalist (i.e. “cool”) acquaintances that goes something like this.

• girl asks guy out/pursues him because Hey It’s the Current Year
  
• guy seems (to me, an outside observer) to not show any strong signals of interest
• they hook up
• after a few times guy loses interest and stops returning texts
• girl is sad

And this can all be avoided by waiting for guys to ask you out, making them take you out to dinner and pay, basically just insisting on some credible signals of interest in a relationship with you.

Then I realized everyone who reads Ozy’s blog is a nerd, and the women who read it are probably disproportionately poly or high-sociosexuality, so it is actually good advice for people who read it. (When you’re dealing with nerdy guys, “too scared to ask you out” is way more likely than “player who considers you below his league but would sleep with you if the opportunity arose.”)

I still kinda object to the advice when given to a wider audience though.

I had a dream last night in which @sinesalvatorem was telling me about a sex club she was starting, and I was trying to convince her to make it a Christian chastity club instead.

about me: I am the worst at watching period TV shows because I always identify with the sensible adults rather than the young lovers defying society and end up yelling at the screen in frustration

“No you can’t marry the girl you love! Marrying an heiress is the only way to rescue your family from debt! Have you no sense of filial duty?”

“I don’t care how much you like this guy, you can’t cuckold the king of France! Think about the chaos your country will be thrown into if you get pregnant and there is any reason to doubt the child’s paternity!” 

I wish I could say “I watch SU but identify with the diamonds,” but truth is the character I most identify with is Peridot

(also on the subject of LARPing it occurs to me that my favorite character I’ve ever LARPed was a hyper-reactionary woman who thought that society was going downhill because no one respected the gods anymore but was pretty hypocritical about it–she thought that women should be submissive to their husbands but was scheming and ambitious in her own right, and believed in the virtue of chastity but was kind of a slut. so uh)

re: neoreactionaries and political LARPing

(if this comes across as mean to neoreactionaries that was not my intention, it’s meant as more self-critical than anything else)

I don’t have like, a coherent thesis to share but I was thinking a lot about this when I read Submission. Submission is this beautifully embarrassing Mary Sue wish-fulfillment fantasy that clearly lampshades that it is such. (Quote from the main character Francois: “Story of O contained everything I didn’t like in a novel: other people’s fantasies disgusted me.”) Francois is … well I really sympathized with him but also he’s an upper-middle-class white man whose response to his pathetic life is “hey man … what if we like … brought back the patriarchy?” He’s a beta who buys into redpill/evo-psych and thinks he’s an alpha. 

(I’m not saying neoreactionaries are weird beta losers who spend too much time on the internet but uh)

(<3)

It reminded me of this old post about confusing a kink for a political philosophy because there’s something similar about BDSM and neoreaction–maybe that they’re both about being transgressive by playacting an oppressive past. Ross Douthat’s commentary on Fifty Shades of Grey is relevant I think; “The hope … is that we can eventually have all the fun of Rome without the nasty bits,” he writes. Because like, I hate my left-liberal bubble but would never live anywhere but SF or NYC. Sometimes my friend from Texas shows me her Facebook newsfeed and it’s sort of horrifying. And Francois doesn’t really want to return to the past. What he wants is this absurd pseudo-Islamist fantasy where his life is kinda like it is now but also he gets three virginal teenage brides to serve his every whim.

Internal monologue I had the other day:

mmm my wedding is going to be so great. We’ll use traditional wedding vows of course … ooh, maybe we should leave the “obey” in the vows, that would be ~rly trad~

… wait, if I do that will people interpret it as like public BDSM or something? ew that is so not what I’m going for

… wait, is there really a difference?

after reading this I’m p ready for the glorious Houellebecqian future tbh

today in personal insights: I realized that part of the reason I got really excited about PUA stuff when I first discovered it is that the Dominant Narrative is that Men Like Smart Women and hearing that makes my brain go “oh no but I’m not smart, clearly no one will ever love me”

and PUA is like “actually men don’t care how smart you are or what you’ve accomplished, all they care about is physical appearance!” to which my brain’s response was “oh good then I’ll be fine, I’m pretty hot”

which uh makes a lot of sense given where I actually am in the distributions of those two traits? idk

(and can I find a good reason to be annoyed at the people who promote the Men Like Smart Women narrative for ideological reasons? I mean obviously the real answer is some combination of the two, and maybe it’s best just to get as close as possible to the real answer and promote that. or maybe people are different enough from each other that promoting a single narrative is sort of hopeless. but I do have to grudgingly admit it seems good on the margin to encourage women to spend more time trying to be successful and less time on makeup?)

send me an ask and I’ll tell you why you’re degenerate

So the other day I read Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle’s takes on the whole “conservatives should be pro-contraception if they really want to reduce abortion” thing, and I really liked them because the idea that providing better access to contraceptives reduces abortion rates was one of those little things I absorbed at some point during my socialization and have never since had occasion to question.

So, how do you prevent abortions?

There are pretty much two ways: lower the rate of unintended pregnancies and lower the probability of abortion conditional on unintended pregnancy.

I. Unintended Pregnancies

Here’s a map of unintended pregnancies by state. My first thought was “poverty rates?” 

Not the worst idea, correlation .37. My second thought was “wait no, percentage nonwhite”

Better idea, correlation .82. Neither of my thoughts was “oh, red states and blue states” 

Which is good because that is a bad idea, correlation .29 (in the direction of blue states having more). In other words, you’re not allowed to blame it all on abstinence-only sex ed.

I decided to search for some randomized controlled trials on interventions to prevent unintended pregnancy and found this cheerful meta-analysis which looks at 26 trials of interventions including abstinence-only, conventional, and other things based on stuff like “operant theory” and “empowerment theory” and concludes, “strategies evaluated to date do not delay the initiation of sexual intercourse, improve use of birth control among young men and women, or reduce the number of pregnancies in young women.” Apparently results were “remarkably consistent across studies” in showing that nothing made teenage boys more likely to use birth control. So that’s something.

Now that was in 2002. Since then we’ve had that Colorado study showing that if you give women IUDs, their rates of unintended pregnancy go down. Which seems obvious. Except as McArdle points out the study doesn’t actually show this, it just shows that they started a program in some counties of Colorado to give free IUDs to low-income women, and then the abortion rate fell in those counties. As it did in the rest of the US. And they didn’t really have a control group so yeah.

I’m actually all for aggressively promoting IUDs and implants. Even if this study didn’t really show anything it seems … physically impossible for it not to help … I mean I guess the main issue is “can you convince people to get them and how much does it cost.” But I don’t think the reason most people get pregnant without meaning to is that they don’t know birth control exists or can’t afford it/don’t have access to it, and while I’m still somewhat confused as to why unintended pregnancies happen it seems like a complicated social technology issue that is not amenable to government intervention.

II. Abortions

Gotta say, probably the best thing to do here is to outlaw abortions.

McArdle gives this really pretty picture. Who is really great at preventing abortions? Ireland. How do they do it? Make it illegal. (Also Austria, but I honestly don’t know what’s up with Austria. According to Wikipedia there are very few abortion clinics in rural areas of Austria? Idk man.)

In terms of state-level data, I looked at abortions/unintended pregnancies in the US. The correlations with poverty and percent nonwhite were both lower (-.26 and .36 respectively) while correlation with percent voting for Obama was .77. The “make abortion socially stigmatized and really hard to get” plan is looking good.

Also, I liked McArdle calling this idea the “torture doesn’t work” of the feminist movement. I remember, when I was 15 or so, thinking that abortion and torture both seemed like hard moral problems. Then at some point someone told me that torture didn’t work, and someone else told me that actually making abortion illegal just drove it underground and really the best way to prevent abortion was to make contraception more widely available, and I didn’t really think about either one again for years.

untiltheseashallfreethem replied to your link:UV :…

Datapoint: I like when people hold doors for me, but I’m super territorial about my possessions, so I feel like my space has been very invaded when people try to carry bags for me. I also have a sort of self-reliance thing about carrying my bags.

But in general, I think I enjoy chivalrous behaviors? I like it when guys open the car door for me, but it seems like no one does that, other than old professors and neoreactionaries.

I like the rule where the guy walks on the outside of the sidewalk. Ostensibly it’s to protect the girl from being splashed with mud, which is not really a danger in this modern-paving age, and yet it still makes me feel protected for some reason. 

Interesting! I also approve of the “guy walks on the outside of the sidewalk” rule, and think guys should perpetually strive to be more like old professors and neoreactionaries ^_^

And I think your first point is interesting, in that feminism is definitely #the aesthetic for me, but self-reliance and strength are also #the aesthetic and sometimes they seem sort of opposed.

skwrk:

sex positive paradigm: “everyone wants to have sex, but society tells us it’s bad. uh, does it hurt anyone? no! so where’s the logic in that? if everyone just had more sex, everyone would be happier. there’s nothing wrong with casual sex, it’s fun! it’s not any different from any other activity.” 

ozymandias271:

I also have… major issues with the description of the sex-positive paradigm, the point is NOT that everyone wants sex or that everyone should have lots of sex, it is that your sex life is none of anybody else’s business whether you are celibate or having orgies swinging from the chandelier

So sex-positive people tend to be adamant that the movement is not about “casual sex is great,” and other people seem to interpret it that way nonetheless. Because the thing is that these spokespeople for sex positivity (who are the central examples of sex-positive people? Ozy? Cliff Pervocracy? Dan Savage?) are always on the “orgies swinging from the chandelier” side of the spectrum. 

This isn’t surprising given

• people who have more sex and more interesting kinds of sex with more different people have a lot more interesting things to write about
  
• they’re more qualified to give opinions and advice
• they’re probably less likely to care about privacy/decorum

And I don’t know how other people’s brains process social norms, but mine very much focuses on what people do rather than what they say. If I’m surrounded by feminists who work outside the home saying “being a stay at home mom is a great personal choice!” I will interpret that as “being a stay at home mom is shameful and low-status.” If I’m surrounded by poly people saying “monogamy is a totally valid alternate lifestyle!” I will interpret that as “monogamy is weird and selfish and evil.” And I suspect the same sort of thing goes on with the sex-positive movement.

And having a norm of “sex is shameful and we don’t talk about it” has … problems but at least it avoids having the social defaults be too skewed solely by selection effects of who talks about things.

It seems like there are two purposes to marriage, and they are fundamentally opposed.

One is to accomplish things together: to make an income, to run a household, to rear children. For this purpose it’s best if the two people have complementary skill sets.

The other is the whole love thing, and on just about every dimension people seem more attracted to people who are more similar to them.

In the past the former purpose was considered the more important one, and you didn’t even have to worry about who would provide an income (or freshly killed animals or whatever) and who would vacuum the carpets, because gender roles took care of that for you.

But now that the second purpose is considered paramount, mating is becoming more and more assortative to the point where every smart, ambitious person I know is married to a more or less equally smart and ambitious person, probably in the same field. And then they both have demanding jobs and compared to 99% of the population their comparative advantage would not be housework and childrearing, but someone has to do it and so it defaults to the woman who now has to work a second shift after she comes home from running her hedge fund.

(Or they don’t have children, or they delegate childrearing to hired help. Anecdotal evidence suggests the latter leads to dissatisfied children.)

Like, optimizing for comparative advantage is great in theory! I’d like to advise smart and ambitious women to go forth and find housespouses! But my confidence in the efficacy of this is very low as a result of actually knowing many smart and ambitious women, who seem to agree that they would like to date and marry guys who at minimum are as smart as them and have pretty good career prospects, and ideally the higher-status the better.

And you’d expect optimizing for comparative advantage would work better in the other direction, but actually two professors of my acquaintance immediately come to mind who married attractive, unintelligent women, had unhappy marriages and divorced soon after, and are now happily married to women of similar intelligence and career status and have multiple kids together.

Clearly the solution to all of this is that women aren’t allowed to have jobs anymore. But this seems sort of economically inefficient as well as politically untenable.

I’m not a Catholic conservative I swear … *latest issue of First Things falls out of backpack* I-I’m an atheist materialist individualist secular liberal, I- *struggles to gather up old Ross Douthat columns* no I don’t commiserate with my Catholic friends over the possibility of allowing remarried Catholics to receive communion, I’m an apostate, I’m a utilitarian, I read Dan Savage, I … no I’ve never told someone to stop separating the procreative and unitive purposes of the conjugal act, what do you mean that’s my favorite phrase

theunitofcaring said: down this path lies neoreaction. :)

I will undoubtedly get there at some point.

I don’t know when religion got so consumerist, or if it always has been and I just wasn’t paying attention.

I have a friend who goes to church whenever she feels like it, usually twice a year, and prays when she wants something. Another friend who says she wants her kids to believe in God, not so they can act on their religion but just so they think there’s someone looking out for them, to make things easier. And I think that’s normal. Most people I know ask what God can do for them, not what they can do for God.

(Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace)

People tell me that the Catholic Church is okay but they really need to liberalize on same-sex marriage and contraception if they want to appeal to the younger generation, like they’re the Republican party or something, like divinely inspired truth obeys the median voter theorem.

(Grant that I may not so much seek to be understood as to understand)

I don’t believe that there is a god but I alieve that He is a demanding god. Jesus didn’t tell us to try to be pretty okay people: that’s what we try to do anyway. That’s the baseline. He told us go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and follow me. 

(Where there is despair, let me sow hope)

That’s why I think effective altruism is a more real religion then most religions. We give you the sacred texts to read and tell you to come to services every week. We ask everything of you and in return we give your life a joyful purpose. We tell you to lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven and that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God and we mean it.

(For it is in giving that we receive)