I had an implicit ‘psychological’ in my head when i said ‘sex differences’, thanks for pointing that out :)
agunning
Karma: 440
hrmm
I think the awkward thing here is ‘socially awkwards around romance and inclined to listen to you’ is going to correlate pretty well to ‘single , insecure +not terribly sexually experienced’ which is going to correlate with ‘will and maybe should be seeking out a serious relationship anyway’
so I think Owen here is kind of the unusual case as someone in this demographic ’sleeping around’
or something
and I can see lots of ways increasing the ambient level of sex-negativity is going to make these people worse/more socially awkward about approaching people
also for poly guys starting out being a secondary partner seems like a good way to get some experience without being too subject to the gender ratio problem
I think the issue with “consider” is that like, I suspect most of the people who should be considering this will not
and I’d rather give more actionable/precise advice than this for people who are like, struggling with scrupulosity or whatever.also the issue that people saying “hey that sexually nonnormative thing you’re doing consider not doing that” a lot does create a hostile environment
tbh I always feel slightly like I want to push back when people say “polyamory is this thing that’s new and untested and that our culture does not have well established guidelines for”
like, poly feels pretty intuitive to me from being somewhat immersed in poly culture, it’s just that I don’t think the norms have seeped out into the mainstream yet? Sure, the way people do poly is pretty heterogeneous but the same is true of monogamy?
I think I do want to urge people to be cautious if they don’t feel entirely comfortable with it/ don’t feel like they get the norms, or it feels like they’re trying to work it out from first principles. But ‘this seems as simple as any other relationship structure’ is a state that it’s possible to get to
idk man I feel like I’m pushing back on this from something close to a mainstream sex-positive feminist viewpoint? the left is not homogeneous?
differences in sex drive are about as large as gendered differences get, I think.
i suspect that the difference in comfort is less that women have better social skills[1] than that they have the moral luck that the median man is happy to sleep with the median woman and that they are ~less physically threatening or something.
(add ’on average” to all of the above)
i suspect differences in ~romantic attraction are much smaller, it’s just that secondary relationships … are romantic relationships? idk about all the stuff monogamous people do.- ^
I think the human social skill default is we assume other people are like ourselves
- ^
I mean this proposal is a conjuction of a lot of recommendations some of which seem reasonable some of which seem unreasonable to me, so I abstained ?(despite being against discouraging casual relationships more broadly)
i mean i don’t really understand baseline male sexuality but like, you should be genuinely curious as to what’s in someone’s head to do this?
idk?
I mean I think if you’re attracted to like 90% of women you shouldn’t be DMing 90% of women “you up?”
but like a friend or someone you have a crush on? my view is they’re an adult and can handle hearing this and there are an astonishing number of ways people can screw up which are prevented by doing this ASAPlike if you look through the comments women are more saying “guys do X to try to sleep with me but retain plausible deniability for doing so when I would really just like to do X for its own sake” and less “hearing that guys are interested in me is an infohazard”
i think a lot of guys are rationalising about this out of a fear of getting rejected when the point is they should be making it easy to reject them.
I guess my objections to this are
-I think the median person’s view of poly is like “seems like a bad way to do relationships but also none of my business” which is distinct from being weirded out by poly people-I’m not trying to be a poly advocate, I’m trying to live a lifestyle which is poly? I object to you trying to discourage this on the grounds that discrimination is bad? Like i feel like you are saying “it would be better for poly acceptance if
EA were less friendly to poly relationships” which no?
-A movement focused on ‘doing the most good’ is going to attract people with moral views pretty different to the median. We’re not a political party, we are a social movement which naturally has people doing weird things in pursuit of its goals so I think it’s good that we advertise ourselves as being tolerant of weird people?
tbh I’m not exactly sure you … understand poly culture here?
like it feels like you have primary relationships filed under “serious” relationships and secondary relationships filed under “unserious” which like … doesn’t really get it imo
for me “good friends and people who i’d like to be friends with” is pretty closely correlated with “people i’d go out of my way to hook up with” and it feels like you have decided that a for me is an normal human way to show affection is off limits or inadvisable?
i think there’s a third thing that’s kind of reasonable to object to which is guys in EA hitting on women in EA for no more reason than that they are women in EA, which is fair enough.
as a poly person this correlates very strongly with “I would like to be friends with this person”
like, I feel like if you were in this movement 50 years ago you would be saying “we shouldn’t be encouraging gay relationships within this movement because it’d make the place feel uninviting for people who don’t want to be hit on by people of hte same sex”?
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
i feel like the “what if you replace poly with gay” thing is saying, like
empirically something (some kind of instinctual conservatism towards sexual norms) caused people to say the same things about gay people.so something like instinctual-conservatism-towards-sexual-norms when it’s ~adults doing consensual things is a heuristic that failed in the past and is probably not reliable
if you want to interfere with my private life to that extent there’s a very strong burden of proof upon you
also happier EAs are EAs that are better at doing EA work, generally speaking
i mean
this is the point of flirting? it is plausibly deniable?i think a lot of the time flirting means, say “i’m not sure if i’m ~attracted to you and testing the waters would help me get data on this”
(i think poor social skills often cashes out as “not having things like this as hypotheses” rather than “being unable to read people”)
im honestly not sure if there’s a clear line between flirting and non-flirting.
if i knew i wanted to hook up with someone i would simply tell them
i meant mostly about how you can get a larger sample size of what possible relationships can look like before (say) committing to monogamy. (I suspect polyamory is even better in this respect).
and especially when you’re young you might not have a good sense of how to select people in the first place and love can be pretty dumb about these things.although more relaxed social norms about talking about such things also helps and has positive externalities for the people more inclined to be ~prudish
but anecdotally given there’s a tail of people who keep getting into these relationships again and again, i think the relationship-expectation thing is really important
i mean i guess there’s a whole spectrum from sexual assault to harrassment to plain old social awkwardness
but “how safe i would feel” is a pretty good proxy both for how common I believe these things are and how likely I am to feel creeped out/feel uncomfortablelike “being creeped out/uncomfortable” is for most people at least something of a truth-tracking thing and we should optimise for the thing it’s trying to track
[quite importantly “be legibly safe to my system 1″ is a very different thing to “try to Goodhart on my system 1′s sense of safety”!]
tbh I suspect that “stuck in a long term abusive relationship” is a more important tail risk than sexual assault and “sleeping around” helps people defend against it (by developing reasonable expectations of what relationships should be like)
i think “please do not intefere with people’s dating decisions unless there is a very very good reason” is the hard-won-of-experience cultural practice here