Comments on The Boyfriend's Introduction to Feminism

Elliot Temple
,
125

Yes and yes, good point.

Preferably, I think it’s better to avoid a pejorative aspect if possible.
However, I think sometimes a statement of fact can be seen as pejorative even if there is no better way to put it. This might be one of those cases, since, if “artificial hole” is how it is, what is the alternate phrasing that isn’t “artificial vagina” and also isn’t pejorative? (Putting aside that I agreed to use “artificial vagina” earlier for other reasons.)

IDK, maybe I’m wrong about the second part and there’s always a way without compromise, but it seems like some of the time it’s not really practical except maybe via tone management.

126

My experience has not been nearly as conclusive. Over a variety of age brackets, I’ve seen women generally handle situations worse than me (men too). Of my long term relationships, I’d say 60-80% of the women have been more emotionally volatile than me, and the rest about the same.

Here’s a feminist writer who argues something maybe contradictory to what you said:

From abstract:

Specifically, I argue that the social norms around stoicism and restricted emotional expression are masculine-coded forms of emotional labor, and that they are potentially prosocial.

From III.A.:

If the previous section is successful, then I’ve established that stoicism as construed here is a form of emotional labor. What’s left is to argue that it could serve as the prosocial kind, the sort that could rightfully feature in a progressive response to the emotional labor asymmetry that is characteristic of patriarchy. I argue that emotional compression is a positive, prosocial way to deal with one’s emotions because it mitigates the dangers of emotional contagion and crossover.

[…] it’s plausible that the gender status quo achieves (though problematically) this kind of social compression effect by means of the stereotypical relationship between genders. Men experience lower “affect intensity” (range of emotional response) and also lower emotional contagion than do women, suggesting that there may be some compression effect achieved in interactions between men and women given the current gender norms (Fujita, Diener, and Sandvik 1991; Doherty et al. 1995).

Some subtext here is that in society the primary moderators of emotional contagion are men, and thus, while men can be part of the problematic side of contagion, the majority of the reason for contagion would be women. Why? Because they are less emotionally stable. (Or at least something like emotional instability would be feminine-coded, to use the authors language.)

Sure, I was kind of being a bit sarcastic here (sorry, not great for discussion), mostly because your answers seemed heavily biased to pointing out what is bad about men while making no admissions that women are contributing to any of the problems.
I don’t think that’s a good way for us to actually make ground because your biases are getting in the way – or at least that’s how it seems to me.

You can pick any one, or the one just above (which is a combination of biases but you could address why you’re so one-sided in what you say if you think plenty of women are problematic too).

I don’t think this is necessarily true at all. It could be true for some, but also there are political reasons to lie about the quality of their relationships, lie to themselves about the quality of the relationships, suppress issues for the sake of appearances, etc.

One thing I do think queer people have an advantage with is that the queer community is much more tight-knit and thus have a much easier time meeting partners. Since children aren’t so much of an issue there’s fewer restrictions on who suitable mates are, too. Proportionally, more of the trans people I know are in relationships than cis-het people, but I definitely do not think that’s because they’re more emotionally stable or have a better understanding of themselves.

Non-decisive factors become decisive when they are applied before decisive factors. Like if women say that a decisive factor is that a man wants to share 50% of housework, but they first select based on the top 5% from a dating app, there is no way to statistically tell that distribution apart from the distribution where both those factors are decisive. So the top 5% criterion may as well be decisive.
The top 5% criterion doesn’t have to literally be “top 5%”, it’s just something like highly attractive or whatever that gets applied first but women won’t admit is a decisive factor.

I think this is a nonobvious application of CF btw.

Yes I can see how they’re different but I think you’re being a bit pedantic. It doesn’t really matter where the line is drawn, just that it’s significant by some normal standard. Perhaps for income it might be $300K+, or for wealth it’s like $1m+ in your 20s, or for power it’s being the CEO of a company with 50+ employees.

Sure

I wouldn’t mind it so much if you were more open to, or put forward, criticisms of women’s behavior in dating markets and the like. That would go a long way to help alleviate my concerns of bias.

127

I’m not sure why you think you know this about anon105.

I assume you mean top 5% in looks, based on other things you have said in this thread. But from my perspective as a woman, I would consider anon105 potentially in the top 5% of men as I would rate them.

There are women who read the profiles on dating apps, and try to match with people who seem smart, interesting, have common interests, etc. My own standards go towards things like smart, reasonable, able to discuss things, and also not a misogynist and able to have an equal partnership. From what anon105 has said here so far, he seems like he could be in the top 5% for those things.

I’m not sure if your claim would be that I am wrong about my own preferences and standards, or that you are only talking about most women not all women, or that if I am correct about my own preferences that would make me a rare exception, or something else.

128

I know this was already covered in another post, but anon105. But I just want to point out that what I said there was that you aren’t just making a clear, factual statement. As in, making a clear factual statement is not the only thing you were doing. You were also using insulting terminology.

So what I said was consistent with what you were saying. I was not trying to say that you can only do one thing (either use pejorative or make factual statements). I was trying to say that you were doing more than just making a factual statement – you were also using a pejorative. So my point was that I thought it was inaccurate to claim that you were just calling it how it is, not attacking trans people, since using a pejorative could be seen as a (verbal) “attack” on trans people. Your language went further than just calling it how it is.

129

He’d know if he was. You can search YT for videos from these kind of guys and get a sense for their experience. Then compare that to what anon105 has said.

Sure, do you think that comes through on a dating app?
(And by top 5%, I just mean the group of men that get the vast majority of attention on dating apps; it might not actually be 5%.)

I’m sure both anon105 and I are in some top 5% of desirable traits. But that’s besides the point if those only come out via more in-depth, long form interactions.

I think you could be wrong about your own expression of preferences on dating apps. Part of the problem is bad filtering combined with overwhelming response rate. I don’t doubt you have a reasonable idea of what you’d want if there weren’t bottlenecks in the way of those preferences.

Most men end up liking a lot of profiles because dates are so rare, which only exacerbates the problem. It also creates more work for women, which means initial filtering needs to be somewhat extensive and done based on the available info only. Do you think the qualities of anon105’s that are desirable (for you, potentially) would come through in 5 photos and a bio of 100 words? How long would it take to actually ascertain these things? Would you be willing to go on 10 low-stakes coffee dates to get a vibe check on 10 different guys? What proportion of women do you think do this? etc

I think some women have a good idea of what they want, and most have some idea but also do a lot subconsciously and don’t really pay attention to what they actually do. Partly I believe this because, if they did, there would be more women concerned with actually finding better patterns and solutions. Can you point to any women that are trying to take initiative in this regard? What are they doing?

With regards to you being a rare exception, I think the fact you’re discussing here (and discussing at all) probably already makes you a rare exception.

If you don’t use dating apps (or not much), have you talked with many other women about how they use it and what choices they make?

There are some women who describe doing what you’re describing. Lynn Everly on YT describes in one of her videos her process for meeting her BF via app, which was being more careful, going through bio, considering like ‘if I like him could I see this working out’, etc. This is not the typical approach, AFAICT, but it is somewhat practical for women. (I have no idea if that would work well for men given the vastly different dynamics.)
I can’t find the show transcript button so it’s a bit hard for me to find the video again, but it might be one of these:
How Online Dating Is Changing Women [7:48]
The Real Reasons Modern Dating Is Broken (and how we fix it) [11:10]

She has more videos that it could be too, and is a bit redpilly (or honest, depending on how you see it; e.g., 5 Brutal Truths Women Will Never Admit).

130

They aren’t all that time sensitive. Some are, but many (I think most) aren’t. I used it as an example because it is a small mistake that can actually lead to pregnancy in some cases.

By running them together, do you mean taking them continuously with no break? There are pills that are specifically meant to take that way. I don’t think there’s a medical consensus about it being better or worse, but I’m not sure. There are some women it doesn’t work well for – they will get irregular spotting during their cycle if they don’t take a break, so it is easier and more convenient to just take the break and get their “period” at a predictable time.

Regarding taking them 27 days apart instead of 28 – one of the benefits of taking the pill on a 28 day cycle (or 21 days if you are taking them continuously) is that your cycle lines up with the week. So you always start a new pack on the same day of the week, which is generally easier to remember, and easier to keep track of your pills. And for some women shortening the cycle can also cause similar problems as continuously taking them (irregular spotting/bleeding).

1 Like
131

Oh thank you for pointing that out. I misread you originally.

132

You’re both overcomplicating things (bringing up statistical distributions) and wrong. Factors aren’t decisive because they’re applied first. Order doesn’t matter. They’re decisive because they’re applied decisively.

If you swipe left (reject) on a dating app, that’s decisive because you’ll never see them again on that app. You’ve inputted your final decision. Whatever reason(s) you did it for were decisive factor(s) for you because they led to a conclusion. Decisive factors are factors that are capable of deciding the issue, leading to a conclusion, etc. A dictionary definition of decisive is “settling an issue; producing a definite result”.

If you write “this person doesn’t seem very cool” as a private note on someone’s profile, but don’t swipe, that’s indecisive whether you do it first or second. They’re still in your potential dating pool. They aren’t accepted or rejected. Whatever seemed uncool about them did not lead to you rejecting them. It was indecisive and other factors were required to reach a conclusion.

1 Like
133

Okay, I think I understand.

Instead of my first sentence (“Non-decisive factors become decisive when they are applied before decisive factors”), something like this seems correct instead:

Factors become decisive when they are applied decisively.
In the dating app case, it doesn’t matter what she says is decisive, rather, decisive factors are any factor that cause her to take a decisive action (swipe left).

So, if someone is being picky on a dating app, it’s likely that they’re making a lot more factors decisive than they might say are decisive. They say they want X,Y,Z, (and will swipe left on those without X,Y, or Z if they can). But, if they’re also swiping left based on A,B,C, too, then all A,B,C,X,Y,Z that, if absent, cause a left swipe are decisive factors. There is no prioritization.

If they make an exception for someone not meeting condition Y, then Y is not a decisive factor. One reason for this might be that there is an extra factor behind Y (like Y') where the real condition is Y or Y' or some other combination.

I note this is a bit awkward to phrase because the action is rejection, so the rule is like:
left swipe if !X or !Y or !Z or !A or !B or !C (which is the same as saying
right swipe if X and Y and Z and A and B and C).

134

Do you know how to post mortem your error and its cause(s)?

135

I don’t remember exactly, so I’m going to read Postmortems Help Address Causes of Errors and Errors Merit Post-Mortems first, then try.

relevant quotes from PMHACoE:

If you just make a straightforward correction – correct the error you made in this one case, but not in any broader category or pattern of cases – then you’re missing out on a potential opportunity for significant improvement.

Some people are too eager to update and move on without substantial investigation or discussion of their error. They just “fix” it in one minute and then are done. These fixes are usually errors too.

and EMPMs:

How did that error happen? What caused it? What thinking processes were used and how did they fail? Try to ask “Why?” several times to get to deeper issues than your initial answers.

In this case, I think there were a few errors.

  1. thinking probabilistically and in terms of systems not agents/units. (e.g., what probability does this guy have of a left or right swipe) – this is a pattern of mine.
  2. not recognizing decisiveness correctly. (treating something called non-decisive as non-decisive, instead of judging how it is applied)
  3. thinking there was prioritization (this seems like a ‘fix’ for the above point)

I also think I got one thing right:

  • I realized that factors which were not called decisive were in some way decisive because they were applied (though I was wrong about the nature of the application)

E1:

I think this is two errors.

The first is that I often default to thinking about how I’d simulate a system as a method of understanding it. Analyzing or running such a system often involves probabilities (e.g., choosing what proportion of people apply a factor X). However, we’re not talking about a big simulation, we are talking about a single person. There is no probability distribution of outcomes, there are just two answers: 0 or 1; swipe left or not swipe left. In some sense I confused the simulation for the test that the simulation would run each trial.

The second is resorting to probabilities and distributions as a shortcut instead of thinking through the whole process. This (I think) often yields approximately correct conclusions, at least for some range. The problem is that I’m using tools built around probability to think about boolean intersections.

Another error (that I thought of now) around this kind of thing is that I’m trying to go from probability stuff → boolean stuff in a way that doesn’t work. Partly I think this is due to the other way kind of working. That is, if you have a lot of boolean processes in parallel that are a bit random in some way, you can get some kind of distribution or cumulative distribution graph out. Then, I’m taking the idea of a CDF and working backwards to apply it to the original thing, instead of going back to first principles and applying the original boolean logic directly. (I’m not sure this played a role in my error, but it seems related to the other two)

E2:

I think this one is a bit simpler, I recognized that some kind of decisive factor was being applied, but didn’t properly identify that it was a decisive factor. This is related to E3.

E3:

Because I didn’t label the first factor as decisive, I needed a way for it to become decisive, hence introducing prioritization.
While, often, when physically evaluating something for meeting goals we will evaluate them in an order, the order itself doesn’t matter for passing all the goals (this is just basic boolean logic; commutativity).
This error is two fold: first, it results from E2 as a necessity for the construction, and second, it was allowed to occur because I did not detecting and address E2 (and thus made something up instead).

Okay, so maybe E2 isn’t as simple as I thought.
Why didn’t I recognize it as decisive? In part because it was called not decisive. I did recognize something about it though, because earlier I was talking about looking at what people do not what they say. I knew it mattered for the outcome.
I’m not sure if this is just simple or I’m stuck.

Hmm, I’m not sure, but I would now change how I’d respond to anon105’s quote:

Instead, I might now say: whether they are decisive factors or not depends on whether the woman in question would reject someone (swipe left) based on them. Even if she is doing this for load management (too many possible matches), they become decisive because she is applying them decisively (swiping left).

Though this is kinda how I corrected it before.

Why talk about probabilities and order at all?

One thing I was thinking about is strategies to apply at various levels of filtering. So say you start with 1000 candidates and have some filter X, after which there are 200 candidates left. Since 200 is too many, and if X is expensive or slow, then you might introduce a second filter Y that is faster. I was thinking there was a difference between applying Y before or after X. (There might be an overall time difference, but the set of resulting candidates will be the same.)
The reason I thought there was a difference was because I actually had a different Y' that I was using in one of the situations. Like if Y is facial attractiveness, one might set a high bar Y when it is applied first (to thin out candidates quickly), and use a lower bar Y' when it is applied afterwards (most of the hard work is done, so you can use a more generous filter to end up with more potential matches). So it looks like order matters if I confuse Y and Y', but actually there were just 2 different conditions.

So in summary:

  • I incorrectly generalized the situation and prematurely optimized (confusing Y and Y' in the process)
  • I incorrectly reduced the generalization back down to (what should have been) a boolean case, failing to recognize Y and Y' were different, and that the ‘non-decisive’ factor was applied decisively (since it resulted in rejection).
  • I incorrectly kept some ideas around probabilities / statistical distributions from the generalization, which made them a ‘natural’ example, and overcomplicated things. Instead I should have recognized that it’s simpler to talk about boolean intersections in terms of boolean operators, not via a complex chain of functions on probability distributions.

It’s a bit taxing to think about so I’ll leave it there for now. I think I made some progress understanding how I went wrong.

136

Was this ad hoc?

A next step is to take proposed underlying causes/errors and consider what other things/errors they would cause, and then check if those are present in your thinking too.

137

What? I can’t imagine a woman marrying a guy she doesn’t like with one of the main reasons being his ability to vote. Even if he would just vote for whatever she wanted (which sounds unrealistic), one vote isn’t very important. Money and credit cards provide far more utility than one vote per election.

138

Sometimes men start acting badly on purpose to make her break up with them. And sometimes they do something similar without conscious clarity. I’ve seen men admit to doing this on purpose. I think it might be somewhat common but I don’t really know. One reason is the men are scared of conflict or confrontation and they don’t want to initiate a hard conversation. Another reason is they prefer to be the victim who got dumped so they can (inaccurately) blame their problems on her and try to get sympathy for their victimhood instead of having the more aggressive, responsible role that makes a decision. I think there may be other reasons that I don’t know. I’ve seen this sort of behavior on reality TV shows (without an admission of conscious intent) and, based on Reddit comments, it seems to manipulate a significant portion of the audience. (Also btw/fyi the online comments about dating reality TV shows are full of misogyny in general.)

139

Those listed traits could be positive or negative. They’re pretty ambiguous without elaboration. The only one I take as clearly bad is “angry”, but most people actually think anger is good and appropriate sometimes, so that one merits elaboration too.

140

This seems like a very bold assertion without much explanation.

You’re defining top 5% as it pertains to dating app matches, not any other criteria, right?

How would people in that category just know that they’re in the top 5% of people getting lots of matches? Wouldn’t they need access to data typically kept more opaque, like rates of dating app responses or something?

Also, I am skeptical of taking the self reported experience of redpill influencers on YouTube. I think they have incentive not to be honest about this sort of thing.

(side note: I want to use an intensifier above in front of skeptical but I’m considering Elliot’s opinion that they aren’t good and you should use a stronger base word instead. I don’t know of any good words that feel strong enough alone. Dubious, doubtful, skeptical… these are all fine words but not quite strong enough. I basically don’t believe redpill YouTubers to accurately self report at all, but I reserve a small possibility that they could be honest sometimes. What’s a good word for that as an alternative to “really really fucking skeptical”?)

Regarding my own position, I would assume I am not in the top 5% of men in terms of volume of matches. I am selective on dating apps. The main app I use shows me who has liked me, so that I can like them back if I want to, and at a rough estimate I like back less than 2% of the people who like me. Even then, I often choose to pace liking people back to make sure connections are spaced out so that I have plenty of time and energy to talk to a new person and don’t get overwhelmed.

I don’t think it takes that many matches for me to get overwhelmed though. I am pretty busy and only have limited social energy to meet new people, try to get to know them and figure out if they are fun to talk to or not. If my primary goal was a quick agreement on whether or not to have sex, it could go faster of course, so I might burn through all of the people I liked more quickly. At that point it might be more useful for me to be less selective about who I liked back. I don’t organize any of my dating app strategies around maximizing sexual partners, though.

At a guess, my behavior as described above maps more reliably onto women than it does to men.

I think a lot of people are sufficiently bad at relationships that you can get decently informative vibes just from a few pictures and some text they chose to write. What types of pictures they chose to prioritize, what sorts of words they chose to write about, how they wrote, etc.

It’s not ideal; I don’t think dating apps in general are ideal, I think they are pretty bad and create some bad incentives. But I do think plenty of red flags can come through a dating app profile.

141

Yeah it was kind of a silly example. I intended it as a sloppy proxy for exerting social/political influence or navigating social pressure, but I don’t think that is a good proxy. I agree financial security was vastly more important.

Maybe a better second item for a list could be summarized as “social standing” — getting married to avoid lots of negative social pressure from a community.

142

I think most of them can be positive or negative when viewed as general traits for life. But I think they are all largely negative in the specific context of being applied towards one’s partner in a relationship.

Before I elaborate, does that make more sense or do you still think they mostly seem ambiguous?

143

I’m skeptical of your self assessments. A couple of quotes:

I think it is conspicuous that your assessment is that women are mostly more volatile than you, and that the correct number of sexual partners is equal to or less than your number of sexual partners.

I think these kinds of judgements are suspicious.

Re: number of sexual partners, if your metric is reasonable, then surely reasonable women would reject you for the same reasons, right? Which means any woman with a lower partner number than yours ought to reject you for having a higher count. If they didn’t, that would make them unreasonable, and you shouldn’t want to date them then. So the correct number of sexual partners for a woman to have isn’t less than or equal to yours, it should just be equal to yours. Any more or less would be unreasonable. Right?

It seems like you (and this author? I did not read the full paper) are defining emotional stability as synonymous with stoicism. Stoicism is a trait heavily associated with men. Ergo, men are more emotionally stable because they’re more emotionally stable?

I am focusing on men because that seemed relevant to the topic. Why would you assume that means I think women are perfect? I don’t think that logically follows.

Put bluntly, I don’t think you need to hear more criticism of women right now. That doesn’t seem like it would be good for you, and so far it hasn’t seemed relevant to the points I was making.

Why does this betray a bias?

Queer people are much more likely to seek mental health services than cis/hetero people. (Example source: Sexual minorities more likely to seek mental health services, study finds | UCLA Health ) Do you think that’s because the majority of non-queer people are extremely stable and mentally sound and don’t have any big emotional problems?

If not, wouldn’t it suggest more queer people are self aware of their need for mental health support? And even if mental health support is imperfect, as long as it helps at least more often than it hurts, wouldn’t that mean queer people are successfully receiving some mental health support?

I disagree that it is pedantic.

I think you were conflating two different ideas. One had to do with getting access to super wealthy men, the other had to do with getting access to men that make any significant amount more money than alternative men. These are different situations. Maybe not worth rehashing right now though. We can let this one go for now.

Like I said above, I am not sure this is a good idea. From my perspective this is kind of like me arguing with someone that I find their views racist, and then they ask me to offer up some criticism of black people just to alleviate their concern that I am biased in favor of black people.

I don’t see the point, other than to assuage an emotional discomfort you are experiencing. And I’m not convinced I should do that. Sorry.

1 Like
144

Yeah. It doesn’t need to exactly by 5%. It could be 10%. It could change per app. Doesn’t really matter.
The important part is that there is a breakpoint that separates guys that get a lot of likes from the rest of us.

No, you’d just be like ‘what do you mean dating apps don’t work? they work great!’

Then watch videos from non-redpill channels. There are plenty more people talking about this than redpill influencers. Here’s some youtuber with a more-indepth-than-usual video:
Are Dating Apps Pay-to-Win? [29:54]

If you want some by redpill influencers, look for one of the videos where they set a profile and mention in the bio just getting out of prison for a violent crime.

Without specifics, this sounds like the most middle-ground experience I’ve heard about. Maybe that’s because you use it more consciously and presumably pay for it (seeing who’s liked you is typically a paid feature I think). Good for you, but it doesn’t sound representative (of either the average experience or the top 5%). The other factor that sounds relevant is longevity of account. And low volume maybe.

Some factors that might be relevant that you haven’t touched on is actual number of matches and age brackets. (I don’t think women use these apps the same over all age brackets, but mostly that’s because I think they have different attitudes to dating at 23 vs 33.)