It’s interesting though unsurprising that the vast majority of people taking the maximalist position on female mating behavior (freest behavior, fewest consequences) are themselves female the changes they prefer would be to their own benefit.
I’m so ashamed that I want what’s best for me. I can hardly live with myself.
Can’t tell if you intend that last sentence ironically, but in fact, there isn’t anything dishonest or shady in that interaction. It’s not particularly charming or tactful, to put it mildly, but it involves no dishonesty or deception.
If a guy tells you that he might get together with you on Friday but doesn’t commit to it, then you should be fully prepared to find that he might not go through with it. He’s not doing anything wrong by backing out of that non-committed expression of interest because he found something better to do that night.
Yes, it would be much better manners for him to phrase his refusal more vaguely, along the lines of “Yeah, I know I said we might get together and see a movie on Friday, but I won’t be able to make it, something came up”. Without adding “and it was my cock, when I saw this other chick who’s way thinner and hotter than you are and with whom I’m hoping like hell to score on Friday instead of spending a tedious evening at the movies with you, potato face.”
But there is absolutely nothing rude, dishonest, jerkish, manipulative or “shady” about the simple fact that the guy expressed some tentative interest and then backed off from it. The possibility of backing off is what “tentative” implies in the first place.
I know! It makes no sense that people don’t praise my enlightened self-interest when I mention that I advance in supermarket lines by beating up the people ahead of me.
What I think is interesting is the reversal of the gender roles from a more traditional situation. It used to be, as Shodan noted, that “if a woman stood downwind from you, you were engaged”, more or less. That is, men were very strongly chastised for attempting to get women interested in them unless they had serious “intentions”.
Well, men (and women too) kind of got tired of those rigid expectations and wanted to be able to be a little more experimental in their interactions, without the other party necessarily assuming that they were going to follow through on every expression of interest. So we had the Sexual Revolution and the open relationships and a variety of cultural patterns of sexual permissiveness, currently manifesting itself as the “hookup culture”, and now (in most of the US at least) pursuit of a sexual encounter is not automatically presumed to imply pursuit of a marital relationship.
But now guys are applying to women something of the same expectations that women used to apply to them, in a different context. That is, women are now being strongly chastised for attempting to get men interested in them unless they have serious “intentions”—except that now, the expected “intentions” are supposed to involve romantic or sexual involvement in general rather than marriage in particular.
Yesterday’s male “gay deceiver”, who was vilified as unethical and manipulative if he kissed a girl without intending to marry her, is today’s female “cock tease”, who is vilified as unethical and manipulative if she kisses a guy without intending to sleep with him.
It was an unfair and coercive expectation back then, and it’s an unfair and coercive expectation now. Let’s all stop sulking so much about inconsistent or unreliable “signals”, and just recognize that feelings of attraction are often temporary or conditional, and nobody is entitled to more sexual or romantic attention from an uncommitted potential partner than that person actually wants to give them.
If somebody really does have feelings of attraction to you that are more than temporary or conditional, they won’t leave you guessing. In the meantime, guessing (and sometimes guessing wrong) is part of the game. If you don’t want to play that game, you certainly don’t have to, but that doesn’t mean that that game itself is intrinsically wrong.
So true.
What’s also interesting is the way the whole “speaking in signs” thing is being portrayed as a woman thing. And yet, it’s generally understood by just about everyone here that when a guy asks a woman out, to say, dinner and a movie, what’s actually usually being communicated is that the guy has romantic designs on her. Straight out the gate, the guy is “speaking in signs” when he asks her out. So why is it puzzling when a woman uses the same method of communication? He started it!
Now let’s say a woman responds to a dinner request as if she thinks he just wants some platonic company while he eats his steak. She says yes, without assuming more than that. He keeps asking her out; she keeps saying yes, again with no assumptions. Unless he makes intentions explicitly known to her, she has no reason to change her behavior. So is it fair to accuse her of leading him on when it finally comes out that she doesn’t like him beyond just friends? I get the feeling that a lot of people would say yes. Because she should have known what he really wanted, even though he never voiced that to her.
It’s the crime of wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too. People want to speak in signs and be understood, but they can’t handle it when the object of their desire does it and confuses them.
Yes, yes. Men are my victims. Every last one of you. Rarr.
This thread really isn’t doing wonders for the board’s rep. And I say that as a surly, socially awkward female.
We have a rep?
I thought we were basically summed up in the unofficial slogan (can’t remember right now who was responsible for it):
“The Straight Dope Message Board. Overthinking things: it’s what we do.”
To the people who are casting stones at even sven (I’m too tired to hunt you all down and quote everyone): she’s explaining a perfectly (internally) consistent set of signals, which translate as:
“I’m somewhat interested in you, and might want to do something about it at some time in the future (depending on circumstances), but I don’t want to get more serious right now.”
In other words, this is a relationship on the “keep warm” setting. The proper response to this is to flirt back and maybe make a gentle pass every now and then to see if the circumstances have changed in your favor (if you are also interested in keeping your options open), or ignore her / tell her to get lost (if you aren’t), but otherwise not to loose too much sleep over it.
Being interested in someone isn’t a state that instantly resolves into “I want to date/screw/marry you” vs. “you’re chopped liver, get away from me”; pushing for a solid yes/no right now just gets you more no’s. Unless you’ve fallen utterly in love with even sven and no-one else will do, relax and find some more people to flirt with in the meantime.
Would it have been better for me not to express any interest, thus cutting of the possibility of further encounters? At least this way he had some possibility of sex, and I wasn’t doing anything to stop him from seeking better offers elsewhere.
Is there some percentage on this? I mean, if there is a 90% chance I will want to sleep with you, is flirting okay? What about a 30% chance?
A cock tease would be someone who has NO intention of sleeping with you, but gives that impression because she likes the power of it- not really relevant to the situation above.
The Straight Dope: Fighting rug burn since 1972
Which would bring us full circle back to the OP, which posits that since men are still primarily the “guessers,” and that men so very often guess wrong, does all that incorrect guessing contribute to this “rape culture?” And if there’s any validity to that premise, wouldn’t that make the game itself intrinsically wrong?
Sorry, just feel like we got off topic for a couple pages.
I don’t think men primarily are the guessers. Women have to interpret signs from men, too, and they’re hardly infallible. That’s why books called He’s Just Not That Into You make the bestsellers list.
And I don’t think “guessing wrong” leads to rape. If “guessing wrong” does in some cases lead to rape, I think it’s involves such a minuscule fraction that it doesn’t make sense to pin the blame on the environment rather than the individuals who rape.
“Guessing wrong” presumes guys who rape are victims of innocent misunderstandings who then get helplessly carried away with themselves when they are finally rejected. From where does this theory come from?
Your intended largess comes off looking like the very model of a cocktease. I’ll fully admit that I tend toward what a female friend of mine disparagingly calls “radical honesty”, i.e. I just don’t treat people in a way that I would not want to be treated or otherwise mislead someone to my own ends, and thus, I would find this kind of behavior to be objectionable and worthy only of avoidance were it directed at me. But setting aside the issue of whether it is or should be acceptable, the fact remains that while you’re cited this example of how the alleged inscrutable machinations of the female mind is in fact readily accessible to anyone who makes the effort to think through the process, but in the anecdote you clearly indicate that you have no interest but are displaying behavior that simulates interest anyway just in case he’s the only available warm fuck-toy at the end of the night if you do happen to be drunk enough to overlook his myriad of flaws. By your own statement, you are being intentionally deceptive with no other purpose than to string him along and keep him available. Right, wrong, or otherwise, this is a blatantly a case of (deliberate) mixed signals. That may just be part of the process as you see it, but if you can’t acknowledge that you’re either being intentionally obtuse or are not nearly as intelligent as in all other ways appear to be.
Whether it is appropriate or not, it is confusing as hell to be on the receiving side of such behavior, and the only practical way to cope with it is to be confrontational about such motivations–which in my experience most women will shy away from, even if there interest is there, just because that is what the social conditioning as directed them to do–or ignore it completely. That doesn’t mean that a single act of flirting–or even a lusty spontaneous weekend spent with the shades drawn–commits the woman to anything deeper or more extensive, or that there is anything at all wrong with having a casual relationship based strictly on sex or a quick zipless thing, but when the signals are on-off-on-off-off-on-ad nauseum without any other indication of what the trigger or motivation is, that is the definition of inscrutability.
Indeed. My personal issue–and again, I recognize it as being completely my own problem bourne out of an innate difficulty to read what are apparently clear signals, is that while men are (quite reasonably) expected to advance the first overture and accept the sting of overt rejection, I also find myself castigated and outcast when I interpret a signal incorrectly or make a misstep, often without any clue as to how I screwed up or what I should do differently in the future; in essence, I find myself in the same situation over and over again, and also apparently giving the impression that I’m going to be some kind of vindictive asshat who can’t accept a simple “No thank you,” when the the opposite is the case to the point that I’ll make the effort to absent myself from a situation in an effort to palliate the problem, and yet that is often not enough to passivate the situation. “Rape Culture”, as described in the o.p., may be very real, but it also seems to be, as with many scholastic aspects of feminist theory, widely exaggerated in the minds of many women who apparently believe that all men are opportunistic rapists given a favorable circumstance with no consequences.
I don’t think, however, that the proposed solution by the o.p. has any merit in this regard, and indeed, a more formalized system of dating (or arranged marriages, or whatever) tends to be predicated on the submission of women to whatever external factors dictate the components of a suitable arrangement. This is clearly not favorable to women, and I’m not clear that it is even good for most men except insofar is it make skew the advantage to whatever subset happen to have the requisite assets (fiscal worth, social standing, et cetera) are favored by said system. The proof of this, as such can exist, is that the freer and more progressive societies have universally migrated away from any type of rigorous arrangements and rituals.
Stranger
I tend to agree with this. Men and women just aren’t all that different, with a couple of exceptions. Both flirt. Both are sometimes really hot for someone, and sometimes kind of meh. It sucks if you are the person on the receiving end of the ‘meh’, and don’t know how to flirt effectively - but that isn’t the fault of the “game”, it just is what it is.
There are really two significant differences: in our culture at least, men are supposed to be more forward in expressing interest than women; and men tend, on average, to be bigger and thus more dangerous physically (and women know this). Thus, men face the task of simultaneously conveying interest without conveying threat.
The notion that rapes are more likely because of a mix-up in communications is wrong way to put it, to my mind. A mix-up in communications creates awkwardness when the truth is (inevitably) revealed. Whether that awkwardness leads to rape or not depends on the guy’s nature. It would take someone who combined an epic sense of entitlement with a lack of empathy for others to react in that way. Sadly, such people are not as rare as they should be.
Have you actually read the book? Because the essential premise isn’t that women don’t comprehend or correctly interpret signs of disinterest, but rather that they understand them clearly but then excuse the resulting behavior for a myriad of reasons (mostly because they don’t think they can do better than what is in hand). The entire book can be summarized in one line; “Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. You know why he’s doing that, and you shouldn’t put up with it.”
Let me state it another way; many women (and I know this because I’ve had the sometimes dubious pleasure of being Designated Male Point of View for many such sessions) will meet or go on a date or whatever with some guy, and then call up or have lunch with her friends who will spend hours collectively deconstructing every story, word, look, tactile interaction, and tic exhibited by the guy in order to suss out his True Intentions, even when his actual intention very clearly to meet, laugh, and make out. The guy in such situations rarely has any clue that he’s going to be subjected to a post-date analysis that makes the Challenger Accident Investigation Board look like Sunday tea, and his preparations for the date extend only so far as selecting a shirt with no obvious stains or smells and pocketing a fresh Trojan “just in case” what he’d like to happen ever actually were to occur.
On the other hand, a guy goes on a date, and goes to his buddy’s apartment next day to play some Madden 2010.:
Buddy: “So how was she?”
Guy: “Not bad. A little chunky, but in a curvy way.”
Buddy: [Rapidly fingering the controller buttons] “Gonna see her again?”
Guy: “Sure, I’ll give her a call in a couple of days and…oh, you dick! How the hell did you do that?”
Buddy: “Heh! Found this awesome cheat on BadMadden.com, and…”
Yes, ladies, we really are that much of a cliche, and almost completely uninterested in trying to discern the nuances of your words and find meaning in the particular arrangement of accessories that you spent hours meticulously selecting.
Stranger
I contend that it’s not really the awkwardness that comes when the truth is revealed that is the source of frustration, but rather the truth itself. Rejection is not going hurt less if it’s unambiguous, and I find it really hard to believe that a would-be rapist would gamely accept a blunt rejection but turn into an unstoppable maniac if a women is more coy with her rebuff. Never been raped myself, so maybe I’m completely wrong here, but past experiences with jerks and creeps tells me that the OP’s theory is wrong.
I’m not sure I buy the whole “rape culture” philosophy, but one thing I have noticed is that holding men accountable for their own behavior when it comes to boundary-stepping seems to be the last thing people think of as a solution. Instead of telling men to think before they act, to treat women like people and not walking genitalia, and so and so forth, there’s a tendency to try to control women’s behavior. In some cultures, that means telling women to cover themselves up. In American culture, that means women are told they are leading on unwanted pursuers by being polite and less-than-blunt with them.
Saying “No, I can’t make it, but thanks for asking” is too vague, ladies. You have to say “No, I’m not interested in you romantically and I don’t want to go with you Friday night, so do not ask me out ever again. And get your hands out of my pants”.
If guys could just understand that’s it’s perfectfully fine for a woman to obliquely express distinterest in response to an equally oblique expression of interest, the world would be a lot better place for everyone.
If you don’t think this same pattern of delusion applies to men, I have a pipeline in the Gulf to sell you.
And in this very thread, we have guys who say they can’t understand if a woman who rejects them is just playing hard to get or really doesn’t like them. This is no different than a woman who tells herself that when a man who fails to return her phone call, it could because his cellphone has bad coverage, “so let me call him ten more times!”. She dismisses the most likely explanation in favor of the least likely one, so she has an excuse to chase after him.
Most men who claim not to be able interpret signs and signals are falling prey to the same thought process, but some of them, instead of attributing this to their own hopeless optimism or desperation, blame their failure to take a hint on flaky, wishy-washy women.
Well, if you don’t care enough to at least try to figure these things out, then you lose the right to complain when things later don’t go your way. If you shy away from straight and to-the-point language because you’re afraid of the consequences, then you can’t fault her for doing the same thing.
You’re trying to eat your cake and eat it too, Stranger. Own it.
Emphasis added. Stranger, would you mind sharing with us the algorithm you’re using for interest level calibration? Because frankly, it’s a mystery to me how you’re arriving at your assessment of “no interest”.
If a woman is considering a man at a party as even a possible “fuck-toy” for the end of the night, then yes, evidently she does have SOME interest in him.
As you’ve been asked a few times before in this thread: exactly how much sexual or romantic interest do you feel is required in order to justify a woman in expressing any sexual or romantic interest?
Sounds like you’re operating with kind of a double standard here. When you can’t figure out what a woman’s intentions are regarding you, you assume that it’s because she’s deliberately sending you “mixed signals”. When a woman can’t figure out what a man’s intentions are regarding her, you assume that his “signals” are unambiguous and she’s just trying to twist them into a favorable interpretation.
Dude, you’ve just spent most of this thread lamenting about how hard you try to “discern the nuances” of women’s words to figure out whether they’re interested in you, and how frustrating you find it when you don’t succeed at that, and how you resent the situation.
And now all of a sudden you’re putting on the “We men are just simple, straightforward honest souls who don’t really pay much attention to chicks’ silly games” butch act? Yeah, sure.