Navigating Male Binary Thinking

The problem of messaging intended for a particular population

Cartoons Hate Her

has written another great post, one that I started writing a note restack for that got much too long, so I’m writing an extra, unplanned post this week! In it, she claims that women get approached much less often than they’d like, and that the shift against men approaching women in public was largely downstream of the preferences of very introverted, anxious women who don’t like being spoken to by men at all. Read the whole thing here:

Oops, We Forgot Some Women Like Flirting

I loved this article, and I’m fascinated by how strongly “don’t hit on women in public” got conflated with “don’t say hi to women in public”. I am tempted to blame - in part - the fact that men don’t like to and probably are just kind of bad at making social distinctions. In my observations, men, way more than I would predict, score in the mid to poor range at knowing the difference between “flirt with this woman” and “say something repulsively sexual to this female stranger”, or in knowing the difference between “this woman is animated” and “this woman is furious” (either direction).

I’m not the only one to have noticed this! I think it played a role in the messaging above and complicates some of the reasoning that inspired it, as well as how it was received. This trait caused a) a lot of men on the receiving end to assume “don’t hit on women in weird creepy ways” meant “don’t talk to them”, and b) a lot of women on the giving end of this advice to say “don’t talk to women you don’t know” to catch the men who hear “don’t hit on women in creepy ways” and think “oh but I’m being non-horrible” right before they tell a woman they’d love to [drawn out censor beep] her on a city bus.

In the first case, you have men rounding off all engagement with women to creepy despite receiving a narrower message. In the second, you have women rounding off the narrow message to “all talking to women is banned” to deal with the fact that some men tend to round off all engagement with women to totally normal.

Which is to say, maybe some women sincerely didn’t want any men talking to them ever for any reason. I think those were an even smaller number than they seemed. Many women were just trying to account for the fact that men who don’t know the difference between normal and creepy should assume normal is creepy and not try. A debatable strategy, but one with different implications for female motivation.

Sometimes, the reason what women say to men seems confusing is due to feminine preference for hyperbole. Sometimes, it’s bad advice because it forgets to account for poor calibration. I think both of those failure modes played a role in this story, by the way. Sometimes, though, it’s odd because it’s rooted in an effort to manage male black-and-white thinking. The would-be-advisor starts by assuming said advice will be extended to the most extreme possible version of what it could be interpreted to mean. From there, the advisor chooses their preferred failure mode: when the dumbest and least-skilled person you can imagine encounters this advice, what mistake would you prefer that they make?

Women are risk averse on average, but even the more reckless among women will tend to think that if they have to have low-skill men follow any advice, that advice would be: leave me alone, it’s more polite. Unfortunately, this is very understandable logic, despite the fact that if followed it may result in many men never *gaining* valuable skills. While you want to benefit from skill, you’d prefer not to be a man’s practice for almost anything, outside of a few narrow circumstances. Viewed through this lens, the women yelling at women who said it went too far may still have been dumb, rude, and unnecessary, but it served a purpose: “shhzt, you’re diluting the message, and someone stupid might hear you. We need a unified front or the boys will take any opening they can get.”

As I said many moons ago, this isn’t even a wholly insane way of managing male behavior; it’s kind of how most states and communities do it:

This tends to add up to a world full of 8-foot-thick walls built to withstand the small percentage of (overwhelmingly male) people who will hack 5 ft into anything whether they’re allowed to or not, and the rest of us must simply adapt.

This clearly had many downsides! Personally, I think COVID did much more work in breaking down everyone’s extraversion muscles than MeToo did, but I’m happy to accept that they both played a role in our currently rather stand-offish, anti-social public culture. The fact that men have reduced their cold approaches so much, though, suggests to me that something often claimed in this discussion isn’t true. Many say that it’s only the shy, polite men who take this advice, while the crappy ones ignore it. I would say that objectively all forms of flirting and chitchat have died down significantly. Feminism has more power over the crappy guys than anyone wants to admit. Here’s where you can start telling me that my COVID theory is sounding really plausible.

Whether or not the strategy was effective as intended, I don’t think the Jezebel feminism thing was solely or perhaps even largely driven by women who never wanted men to say hi to them at a coffee shop.