Thank you!
Above I also read some comments about offering the couchsurfing itself being bad. But I got some numbers meanwhile, and people say that offering the couchsurfing itself didn’t cross the line yet (outside some hypotheticals that may or may not have happened) but that the comment had a factor ~50x effect on the badness, which did cross the line.
I would like to ask for some of your perceptions of the relative importance of the different problems that coincided here. I see three problems with the situation (am I missing some?):
The masturbation comment
The couchsurfing
The power differential
No. 1 seems easy to avoid. I hardly ever talk about such private things. Generally the topic of “Things to do with sex” seems relatively sharply defined to me, so that I don’t find it challenging to avoid it categorically.
The other two seem like things I could more easily get wrong, so I find it disconcerting how easily this mistake could’ve happened to me.
Couchsurfing is something that I’ve offered before, regardless of the gender of the guest. It itself puts me, as the host, in a position of power because I know the place, have keys, etc., and the guest doesn’t have an easy fallback option. So I’m usually quite careful with it and use a phrasing like, “By the way, if you want to crash at my place just let me know. It’s quite small and messy though and there’s all the construction work. You can probably find something nicer.” (Typically with some links to the main EA couchsurfing sites.) That gives the guest a plausible reason so they can refuse without having to give a reason. (Or would people not do that because they’d feel it’s misleading/dishonest to refuse an offer for a reason other than the implied one? Or would they understand that I’m giving the pretend reasons on purpose so it’s okay?)
But apart from that my general feeling was that offering couchsurfing is good and nice and should be done? (I like to save costs for hotels if possible, so I want to pay it forward or give back to the community.) Or should there be guidelines for when offering couchsurfing is appropriate and when it is not? I mean, refusing when someone asks would be awkward, but just not offering it in the first place if the other person is newer to EA, more junior, or younger could work, apart from the fuzziness of those terms?
The third one is particularly tricky because I don’t usually perceive myself as being in a position of power (except in, to me, known cases like couchsurfing), but someone else might easily perceive me as more powerful, unbeknownst to me. E.g., I can’t tell people’s ages very well. And a lot of EAs usually seem really impressive to me, so if more people are like me and we meet, we’ll be intimidated by each other without realizing this about each other. At one point I had just given a talk, and suddenly there was someone talking to me all flustered-like. It took me a moment to realize that giving the talk must’ve increased my perceived power charisma, so that I tried to be extra silly to get it down again. But I could’ve easily missed or misattributed the flusteredness and probably have in many other cases.
Would it be acceptable to quite generally (when there is any doubt about the power dynamics, so like 80% of the time) to be like, “I’m generally concerned about power dynamics. I’m a bit intimidated by your accomplishments, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you also see yourself in an equal or higher position of social power. What is your impression? Do you think it might be more prudent to try to find another solution than the couchsurfing?” Something like that?
So in summary:
There are my questions above about guidelines for offering couchsurfing and about how to find out about the other person’s perception of power.
But I’d also be interested in the relative importance of the three (or more?) factors: Is it more additive, and if so, is like 10 bad + 10 bad + 10 bad = 30 bad or 27 bad + 1 bad + 2 bad = 30 bad? Or is it multiplicative: 10 bad x 10 bad x 10 bad = 1000 bbbaaaddd or 10 bad x 2 bad x 5 bad = 100 bbbaaaddd? I mean, the sum/product is not important. I just get the feeling that there’s an understanding that the masturbation comment was bad, but it’s less clear to me whether the other two factors were equally bad or half as bad or much less bad.