In my oppinion—a very attractive compromise which many other cultures adopt is to keep everythign you love about the deep relationships except for the sex. People having sex with each other is uniquely prone to causing harm+drama+conflict.
I don’t think we’ll ever see a TIME article exposing the problem that someone in EA had too many people offer to help them move house, or that community events were filled with too much warmth and laughter, or that people offered too much emotional support to someone when they lost a parent.
More friendship and loyalty and support and love and fun and shared moments of vulnerability is fine! Just leave out the sex part!
I don’t think this fixes all of it. For example, imagine someone describing being expected to load their boss’ personal belongings into a moving truck, on a weekend, with pizza and beer for compensation.
Also, many people will want to participate in EA professionally but not socially, and the stronger the community is socially the harder that will be.
Which isn’t to say that we should avoid doing nice things for each other and having fun together, but it doesn’t free us from thinking about how people might feel pressured.
Agreed, but there is something—if not uniquely, then at least particularly—problematic with respect to people feeling pressured with respect to sexuality. Both that sexuality is pretty central to personal self-determination and that the harms from sexuality pressure are more concentrated on a minority-within-EA population.
We should be careful to avoid dismissing a simple easy solution to a real problem because it might fail to solve an imaginary one. Do you really think the community currently has a problem with bosses pressuring their direct reports to help them move house?
How do you know we don’t live in a world where >90% of the problem is specifically due to people having sex / trying to have sex with each other? What would convince you that sex is the culprit, rather than interpersonal relationships in general?
In my oppinion—a very attractive compromise which many other cultures adopt is to keep everythign you love about the deep relationships except for the sex. People having sex with each other is uniquely prone to causing harm+drama+conflict.
I don’t think we’ll ever see a TIME article exposing the problem that someone in EA had too many people offer to help them move house, or that community events were filled with too much warmth and laughter, or that people offered too much emotional support to someone when they lost a parent.
More friendship and loyalty and support and love and fun and shared moments of vulnerability is fine! Just leave out the sex part!
I don’t think this fixes all of it. For example, imagine someone describing being expected to load their boss’ personal belongings into a moving truck, on a weekend, with pizza and beer for compensation.
Also, many people will want to participate in EA professionally but not socially, and the stronger the community is socially the harder that will be.
Which isn’t to say that we should avoid doing nice things for each other and having fun together, but it doesn’t free us from thinking about how people might feel pressured.
Agreed, but there is something—if not uniquely, then at least particularly—problematic with respect to people feeling pressured with respect to sexuality. Both that sexuality is pretty central to personal self-determination and that the harms from sexuality pressure are more concentrated on a minority-within-EA population.
We should be careful to avoid dismissing a simple easy solution to a real problem because it might fail to solve an imaginary one. Do you really think the community currently has a problem with bosses pressuring their direct reports to help them move house?
How do you know we don’t live in a world where >90% of the problem is specifically due to people having sex / trying to have sex with each other? What would convince you that sex is the culprit, rather than interpersonal relationships in general?