One thing Greta Christina did in criticizing DJ Grothe was refer back to a previous post she had written, Why “Yes, But” Is the Wrong Response to Misogyny. When I saw this post, I thought it was pretty obviously problematic, for reasons that don’t require any preamble to explain, so I want to talk about that now. Here’s the core of the post:

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it trivializes misogyny.

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it conveys the message that whatever men want to talk about is more important than misogyny.

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject to something that’s about them, it conveys the message that men are the ones who really matter, and that any harm done to men is always more important than misogyny.

And when the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it comes across as excusing misogyny. It doesn’t matter how many times you say, “Yes, of course, misogyny is terrible.” When you follow that with a “Yes, but…”, it comes across as an excuse. In many cases, it is an excuse. And it contributes to a culture that makes excuses for misogyny.

Whether this is right or not depends on what kinds of situations Greta is talking about. Situation 1 is where someone says, “this is an example of horrid misogyny” full stop, and someone else changes the subject. In that situation, the second person definitely seems like they’re trivializing misogyny. But then there’s situation 2, where someone says “this is an example of horrid misogyny, and also X” and someone takes exception to the “and also X.” It’s hard to see how a rule against taking exception to the “and also X”s in situation 2 could be justified.

For one thing, if such a rule ever truly came to be accepted in a particular community, it would invite abuse. People could cite instances of misogyny to push any crazy agenda and then invoke the rule to block criticism. But even without active abuse of the rule, there’s still the possibility of cases where the “and also X” is problematic in important ways, and it doesn’t necessarily trivialize misogyny to discuss that.

Now, Greta’s initial “yes, but” post was made in a context that made what she said sound pretty plausible. A 15 year old girl had made a short post on Reddit’s atheism community (known as r/atheism) with a picture of herself holding up a copy of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World with a message saying, basically, “look what my mom got me for Christmas!” The post got a lot of nice comments, but it also got quite a few nasty, sexual, harassing comments. Obviously that was horrible.

But even then, the “yes buts” weren’t directed only at people saying “that’s horrible.” Rebecca Waston’s post on the incident was titled, “Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists,” and ended with “Fuck you, r/atheism.” It’s not surprising to see pushback against this, especially from r/atheism users who didn’t contribute to the horribleness.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to say in Rebecca’s defense here (such as “it should be obvious from context that she didn’t mean all atheists,” “r/atheism really is especially bad,” that r/atheism’s moderators need to delete those kind of comments, etc.) The point is that it’s not reasonable to expect people to refrain from pushback as a matter of general principle, and the defensibility of Rebecca’s post doesn’t make “no yes buts” a good general principle.

The dustup with DJ is a pretty good example of why “no yes buts” is a problematic general principle. For starters, Greta doesn’t seem to be sticking to a strict “no yes buts” position. Instead, she says:

My problem is that — when weighing on the one hand, “Greta did something that in my opinion was unfair by quoting someone out of context,” and on the other hand, “Ryan publicly stated that he wanted to ‘slap the bitch’ and ‘kick her readers in the cunt’” — you seem to think that the former is of greater concern than the latter. You have certainly devoted significantly more space to discussing it. In the discussion on Stephanie’s blog, you devoted one sentence to saying that “there is never any defense for real or pretend threats of violence”… and 2,371 words discussing other matters, including 602 words (by a conservative count) justifying Ryan’s behavior, defending it, explaining the context for it, expressed a wish that people have sympathy for it, defending your own reaction to it, and blaming me for having instigated it.

Those priorities are, in my opinion, exactly backwards. If you’d spent one sentence saying, “Yes, I think Greta’s behavior was unfair,” and then spent the rest of your comments on the topic saying that obviously the important issue here was threats of violence, specifically gender-based, sexualized threats of violence against a female writer and her readers… we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Though it’s a little unclear, this makes it sound like her position is that it’s okay to say “yes but” as long as you don’t dedicate too many sentences to the “but.” The underlying idea is that how much attention you devote to different issues reflects how important you think those different issues are. However, while importance is one factor people use to decide how much attention to pay to different things, it’s only one of many. This makes the whole idea of criticizing someone based on how many sentences they devoted to different points a little strange.

For one thing: when you agree, all you have to say is “I agree.” You can elaborate, but it isn’t always necessary, and it would be a waste of time to rehash absolutely everything the person you’re agreeing with said. But when you say “I think you’re being unfair,” it’s natural for people to expect a somewhat detailed explanation of why you think they’re being unfair. In fact, I think if anything DJ could be faulted for not explaining himself enough.

Furthermore, part of DJ “defending his own reaction” here was DJ responding to some not very nice comments about himself, in particular “DJ Grothe has a problem, an ongoing problem with a pattern, and that problem is him” (from Stephanie Zvan). Had DJ followed Greta’s suggestion in the second paragraph quoted above, he wouldn’t have been able to respond, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people to not defend themselves against such remarks. (Maybe Greta didn’t mean to suggest that, and she was just giving one example of one thing DJ could have done instead, but if so, it’s not a very helpful example.)

But maybe Greta didn’t mean to say that “we wouldn’t be having this conversation” if only DJ had distributed his sentences differently. She certainly does make other criticisms of DJ, and I’ll talk about them in later posts.

The psychology today blogger describes this as a “silly reason,” and obviously he means to make it sound embarrassing. But it makes the most sense if you understand it in a less crude way. I grew up in a liberal Protestant family that took for granted that I would go into some career requiring specialized post-high school training, and get married no earlier than my mid-twenties (and even that would be young). Once I figured out that, contrary to what our sex-phobic “health” classes would have had us believe, there were lots and lots of people in the world having premarital sex without anything bad happening to them, the idea of delaying sex until marriage ended up seeming pretty silly to me. Nowadays, as a grad student, I’m used to hanging out with people who will agree with me when I say I have trouble relating to old friends who got married right out of high school.

But let me tell you about one of those friends. My friend was pretty smart, a couple teachers really liked him, but his parents didn’t encourage him to go on to college and eventually he told me that he just didn’t consider himself the college-attending type. Though I didn’t know her as well, my impression was that the situation with his older sister was the same: teachers liked her, but she didn’t have much motivation to go to college. My friend got married to his high school girlfriend a couple years after graduation. Though I never thought of it this way before reading the psychology today post, when you’re in that kind of sub-culture, the idea of delaying sex until marriage (or at least engagement) isn’t going to seem so obviously absurd.

What’s unclear here is why religion should be linked to sexual attitudes. The link does seem to be there, but why is it there? This issue becomes more puzzling when you notice that not all religions seem to endorse the same sexual ethic. The earliest books of the Bible seem to have been written for polygamous, slave-holding aristocrats, whole St. Paul’s letters seem to have been written for poor men who had no chance at a Solomon-like harem and who naturally resented men that had them.

I’m sure social scientists have interesting theories on the link between religion and sexual mores, but up til now I haven’t invested much effort in understanding them. So if you’ve read a good book (or even a good article) on the subject, do drop a comment with a mention of it.

So what would happen if we all became conscious of the above behaviors being strong clues that men are in fact actively trying for promiscuous short term sex? Would such behaviors reduce, would long term relations become less exclusive, or what?

Case in point #1: I was watching Dexter with my girlfriend last night, and in one episode Dexter goes to car dealership, primarily to investigate a salesman who he suspects of murdering two young women, but he ends up buying a car anyway. The salesman comments on the fact that while most single guys go straight for the sports cars, Dexter went straight for the minivans, from this the salesman infers Dexter must have a family (he has a girlfriend who has two kids; their father was killed in prison).

The salesman’s comment was only moderately insightful: we all know sportscars are popular among young, single men, and that minivans are what you buy if you have kids. But why do single men like sportscars? The obvious answer is to attract women.

Case in point #2: One of my girlfriend’s coworkers last summer was a young, single guy who was the proud owner of a bright yellow mustang. She called it his “penis car,” a sign he was “compensating for something.”

Robin’s question of “What if people knew that men buy status symbols to get sex? What if they were punished for doing so?” is misguided because people do know it, and men *are* punished for it, in the form of comments like “he’s compensating for something” and “I’m I supposed to be impressed just because you drive that car!?”, and, in extreme cases, being seen as all-around douchebags. And, in the fact that if a guy walks into a bar and starts throwing money around, few women will respond by thinking, “Ah! A nice guy I can settle down with…”

Like most animal behaviors, “men throwing money around” has an equlibrium point. If people were even more conscious than they in fact are of what’s going on with this behavior, the equilibrium point for it might be different, but it’s a mistake to think this could radically change society.

But it’s not really that hard. Here’s the secret to doing it: realizing that the U.S. isn’t that religious of a country anymore, and there are lots and lots of people out there who are atheists in practice even if they don’t call themselves atheists and would never join an atheist org. I’ve never cared much about the religious beliefs of my dates, and without making any effort to find an “atheist girlfriend,” I’d say about half the girls I’ve dated described themselves as in some way non-religious when I met them. My current girlfriend started out “agnostic,” and over the past year she’s come around to being comfortable with the word “atheist.”

If I were single and really, really cared about finding an atheist partner, I’d be trying to meet people all the normal ways and then just try to get the religion thing out there as quickly as possible. This might actually be a good idea anyway: OK Cupid analyzed data of people contacting eachother and seeing what made people more or less likely to write back, and one of the biggests boosts to yoru chances is saying you’re an atheist. It’s not hard to guess why: in superficially religion-dominated culture, being an atheist makes you unique, and some people will be thrilled to hear it, perhaps not because they’re atheists seeking atheists but just because they’re vaguely tired of religion.

I’d listen closely to the self-described agnostics and “I’m not really religious”es–some of them will turn out to be generic theists or dabbling in neopaganism, but a lot will be people who are basically atheists who need to be made more comfortable with the term. As I’ve said before outside the dating context, it’s unreasonable to expect every atheist to be an activist, but if you’re just looking for someone who’s sympathetic to your views on religion, it shouldn’t be that hard.

People have especially begun to talk about men having it pretty bad in the dating world. This is something that’s particularly come out in this Kay Hymowitz piece and various responses to it. And the consensus here seems to be some version of “changes in social conventions about dating have made things really hard for men.” At this point, I say the consensus is wrong, and I have the truth.

First, obvious question: why men? Why isn’t the confusion of cultural change just as hard on women? Cultural change, in and of itself, is indifferent to gender, and should affect all equally. Why is it hurting men more?

Second, I would especially question the American Scene writer linked above what a new, solve-all-our problems set of social norms is supposed to look like. The goal is a way for the nice guys of the world to have a way of approaching women they want to date without risking awkwardness, but there’s no thought about how such a set of social norms could possibly work in the real world. In the real world, as Dan Savage once said, “All unwelcome advances are made by assholes, while all welcome advances are made by non-assholes.” The cited xkcd strip subtly reinforces this point: guy doesn’t hit on girl because he thinks she’d think he’s creepy, actually she thinks he’s cute, but what would the middle ground be? In the real world, unfortunately, it tends to be one or the other. Any attempt to change this will run up against the fatal challenge that, if there ever were a guaranteed protocol for men to express interest in women without awkwardness, all men would start using it–including men many women would consider “creepy,” making advances made under that protocol awkward suddenly and then some.

Want to know what the truth is? First, understand that men are whores. I regard this as a scientific fact. There have been studies organized by scientists like David Buss where men and women are sent into bars to proposition people of the opposite sex for either a date or immediate sex, and the inevitable result is that it’s 50-50 on whether the date proposition is accepted, regardless of gender, but men accept 75% of the offers for sex, women 0%. And men are invariably politer about turning down sex: “Oh, I’m sorry, my fiancé is in town. Can I take a rain check?” Other great anecdotes in this area include the report of the famous anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who reported that the Trobriand islanders believed in virgin birth, reasoning that there were some women who were clearly too ugly to have sex with, but who kept getting pregnant anyway.

While results like these still have the power to surprise in the intellectual world, they are semi-commonplace in the entertainment world, where the goal is not “intellectual assent” but “oh yeah, I know what he’s talking about.” Consider this exchange from When Harry Met Sally:

Harry: No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry: No. You pretty much want to nail ‘em too.

or this Chris Rock bit:

See, it’s easy for women to turn down sex. lt ain’t shit for y’all to turn down sex. lt ain’t no thing for y’all to turn down sex. Y’all like, ”Why can’t you turn it down? l do it all the time. ”Why can’t you say no? l say no.” See, it’s easy for y’all. You know why? ‘Cause every woman in here, every guy you met has been trying to fuck you. That’s right. Women are offered dick every day. Every woman in here gets offered dick at least three times a week. Three times a day, shit! That’s right, every time a man’s being nice to you, all he’s doing is offering dick. That’s all it is. ”Can l get that for you? How about some dick?” ”Could l help you with that? Could l help you to some dick?” ”Do you need some dick?”

That’s the basic story of what men are. And women? The basic story is that they aren’t. No matter how many times misogynists call women sluts and whores, they will never be able to document female behavior like the male behavior described above, and smart misogynists know they will never be able to.

Now for the promised male angst theorem: as long as men are naturally indiscriminate, women are naturally discriminating, people’s mate preferences are somewhat (though not, of course, absolutely) consistent, and everyone is left to follow their natural inclinations, there will be lots of sexually and romantically frustrated men out there. And see how much light it sheds on some of the dating dilemmas discussed in the above links.

Consider the man who says: “The modern dating world is so unfair! There are no clear expectations as to who will pick up the check, but with some women still make the guy pick it up if he wants a second date!” The male angst theorem explains why men say things like this, and not “Some women don’t get that the world has changed. They still expect men to pay for everything. But if they want to date me, they’re going to have to realize it’s the 21st century.” As long as women are choosier, they will be doing the choosing. Sure, some women may have a sense of entitlement, a feeling that they should be calling the shots in the modern dating world, but they only get to act on it because of the failure of men to be picky. If men were choosier, women who insisted on having dates paid for would have nothing to do but complain in the alternate-universe version of the Kay Hymowitz piece.

The wonderful thing about this theorem is that it applies no matter how women go about making their discriminations. It works if women mindlessly chase the tallest men available, it works if they mindless chase the most pumped body builders, it works if they mindlessly chase the best-groomed metrosexuals. It works if all they cared about was IQ, salary, or capacity for stand-up comedy. It works if it’s true that women go after alpha males (whatever that means). And it would even work if women mainly picked their mates based on ability to navigate confusing social norms.

Admittedly, if the male angst theorem were the only cause of male dating angst, things might be a little better. One contributing factor to male angst is that women have been known to make decisions based on that intangible quality of “having a good personality,” which can look pretty mysterious to most guys. Another is that, because cognitive shortcuts are as much a part of dating as any other area of life, and because success can be read as a sign of underlying quality, men who are seen as having a successful dating life tend to spiral upward, while those who aren’t seen as having a successful dating life tend to spiral downward. Still, I think the most basic features of the modern dating world can be deduced simply from knowing that women are choosy, and men are not.