It’s certainly true that “Failed attempts at sleeping with someone can often lead to awkwardness or uncomfortability.” However, this is also true of successful attempts. “No attempts” isn’t a reasonable solution.
If there is a taboo the EA community would benefit from breaking it’s the notion that something being awkward/uncomfortable is evidence, in and of itself, that something that has transpired is bad, or someone did something wrong. Well intentioned people acting in good faith can often lead to awkward situations even when nobody did anything explicitly wrong.
There’s obviously a continuum of behaviors from very benign to potentially very serious, it’s very difficult to escape nuance in these cases. Life isn’t always so simple.
For clarity’s sake, my point isn’t that people are “bad” if they try to sleep around, but that there can be subtle harms if people do it within a tight-knit community, and that we’d be better if people did it less within EA.
“Subtle harms” sounds like an escalation from “awkwardness or uncomfortability” but if we’re talking about consensual adults acting in good faith I’d say these “subtle harms” are an inescapable consequence of normal social interaction.
I feel like there’s a problem here of like people are going to have crushes, yknow and this is going to affect their judgement and behaviour and sometimes people notice other people have crushes
I feel like the difference between “hey i think you’re cute but no worries if you’re not interested” and not saying anything is almost the difference between a disclosed conflict of interest and an undisclosed conflict of interest
It’s certainly true that “Failed attempts at sleeping with someone can often lead to awkwardness or uncomfortability.” However, this is also true of successful attempts. “No attempts” isn’t a reasonable solution.
If there is a taboo the EA community would benefit from breaking it’s the notion that something being awkward/uncomfortable is evidence, in and of itself, that something that has transpired is bad, or someone did something wrong. Well intentioned people acting in good faith can often lead to awkward situations even when nobody did anything explicitly wrong.
There’s obviously a continuum of behaviors from very benign to potentially very serious, it’s very difficult to escape nuance in these cases. Life isn’t always so simple.
For clarity’s sake, my point isn’t that people are “bad” if they try to sleep around, but that there can be subtle harms if people do it within a tight-knit community, and that we’d be better if people did it less within EA.
“Taboo” is also stronger than what I’d want here.
“Subtle harms” sounds like an escalation from “awkwardness or uncomfortability” but if we’re talking about consensual adults acting in good faith I’d say these “subtle harms” are an inescapable consequence of normal social interaction.
I feel like there’s a problem here of like
people are going to have crushes, yknow
and this is going to affect their judgement and behaviour
and sometimes people notice other people have crushes
I feel like the difference between “hey i think you’re cute but no worries if you’re not interested” and not saying anything is almost the difference between a disclosed conflict of interest and an undisclosed conflict of interest