thread: 2006-04-08 : That certain zing
On 2006-04-08, Brand Robins wrote:
Okay, avoiding the rape word...
Charles, you say many true things in your post but there is one problem that comes quickly to mind from the gender studies work I've done: you assume that in the male aggressor model the male is always the initiator de facto and a priori.
That is to say, that women sit there passively without doing -anything- in order to swing the way that men will approach them, or which men will approach them. Alice, in the above situation, may just sit and wait for one of the boys—but there are many situations in the world in which she is doing much, much more than that and has started prompting one of the boys far ahead of time.
Now, it's also true that the tools girls are given may not be fair nor adequate for the job in all situations; but that is a different argument than assuming the passive prey is simply sitting and waiting like a deer in a sniper scope.
The real problem then comes when boys are stupid about girls, and don't know when they're being prompted. Or when girls are stupid about boys and don't send the right prompts. Or, most common of all, when both sexes ignore the signals and charge right ahead with their social-awkwardness and emotional blackmail blinders on.
This makes BR go "This, btw, is why I used to pick up so much better than my friends."
In highschool my friends always laughed and gave me respect because they'd never seen me fail to pick up a girl I went after -- despite that fact that I'm neither handsome, smooth, nor cool. They had seen me go whole nights and parties without trying at all, but they knew that when I did try I'd always get somewhere. They never realized, even when I explained it to them, that it was because I waited until I got a signal from a girl that she wanted to be picked up. I was very marginally less stupid about girls than they were, and the results were they sat on the wall at dances and I'd be on the floor with someone kickass.
This makes MB go "See? Yes."
I'm tellin' ya, best thing you can do for the social well-being of your self/kids/species is to learn/teach them to watch body language and read it well.
This makes CS go "signalling"
I did talk about signalling, although when I simpolified it to ABCD, I didn't emphasize the signaling.
However, in a thread that starts off by emphasizing the supposed blindness of most men to signaling, its pretty obvious why it is a less effective tool.
Anyway, in passably sane egalitarian model, both parties use signaling until either party is confident enough to approach, and it is pretty obvious that everyone wins more often that way.
And total agreement on the need to learn body language skills. I think the biggest marker of geeks is the poor skills at reading (and speaking) body language.
