On Nerd Entitlement. Do young male nerds lack privilege?

Seth wrote:

This may have already been said, but a tiny slice of this issue is that it looks like women are rejecting the one thing white male nerds want.

When you've never had anyone show you any sexual attention, the idea that sexual attention could be unwanted can be hard to grasp. Combine women being discouraged from overt displays of sexual attention or making the first move with someone who is insecure about their masculinity and you get this. You need empathy to understand something outside of your personal experience, but the way the dating system is set up minimizes empathy with the other sex. Which is really messed up.

That's my read on that Alexander piece, by the way. As far as I'm aware he's not purposely trying to recruit for the MRAs (though I've only read bits of his blog in the past) but he's only got his perspective to build on and that limits it. The people in immediate pain who read it see their experiences reflected and agree with it; the people who are outside of that read his actual arguments and see the flaws. Hence the two different responses.

Demosthenes wrote:

Dating is REALLY complex because our society has turned it into a very ugly thing in a lot of ways.

Also, this. And what clover said.

Demosthenes wrote:
I don't really know anything about him, so can't say anything with any degree of confidence, but from my lecture a few days ago I don't remember seeing the attitudes you ascribe to him in the latter part of your post. So I'd say you might be right, but my money would be on your self-admitted anger leading you to stereotypise.

Ummmm... wait, where did I stereotype?

I've meant this:

author of that piece, like so many MRAs, continues to view success as how often they get laid and how hot is the girl they get laid with. They continue to act like they deserve everything they want from hot women because they are smart or "nice". And now, with authors like that, they're trying to stir up men who are not getting laid and are angry about it to make them more angry for their cause.
Gremlin wrote:

That's my read on that Alexander piece, by the way. As far as I'm aware he's not purposely trying to recruit for the MRAs (though I've only read bits of his blog in the past) but he's only got his perspective to build on and that limits it.

That was my takeaway: he's trying to understand, but ends up way way off the mark. Like I said, he missed the point. (A larger point he missed is: stop talking and start listening.)

His post on social justice words, which I don't actually recommend, also illustrates how he's really outside of his comfort zone.

This bleeds right into the Nice Guy issue we've discussed before as well. The people saying these things are not bad people, they're just privileged. Assuming everyone's desires are the same is an assumption of privilege.

It's a paradox for me because you can't change their minds by being hostile, yet generally these guys take every minor disagreement as hostility. I look at the writings of the last three or four articles that were posted and the writers go out of their way to clarify they're not attacking, and yet these things are being read as attacks. I don't know how to change it.

I very clearly remember being one of these people. I was a Nice Guy from age 16 till 22. I didn't understand why being a Good Listener wasn't enough to get sex from every woman I knew, and that lack of understanding grew into resentment. The problem is that I don't remember any single specific thing that changed me -- and even if I did, I doubt the events that shifted my perception of the world would apply to anyone else.

Via Tumblr:

you know what, f*ck it, I’m going to reblog this twice because I have a story to tell.

Almost two years ago I was approached by a man at a bar. He was very handsome— tall, with great cheek bones and the kind of eyes that crinkle at the corners with every smile. That man asked to buy me and my friends a drink.

Not wanting to give him the wrong idea, we turned him down. None of us were single, and we’d all had experiences where men have expected things from us after providing seemingly generous acts of charity.

That man spent the rest of the night harassing us. He followed us around the bar, dumped a beer over my friend’s head when she confronted him, made lewd comments about my ass when I walked passed to go to the bathroom. We tried to tell the bar staff what was happening, but with the room being so crowded, by the time we managed to locate the bouncer, he’d disappeared into a throng of people.

That man approached us when we were on our way to our car. He was verbally aggressive, throwing slurs at us and stepping into our personal space. When I pushed him away, he punched me in the face hard enough to knock me down. When my friend tried to call the police, he slammed her head into a wall.

We were lucky that after that, he panicked an ran away. It could have been much, much worse.

Bottom line? f*ck you if you think all women want is attention from attractive men. f*ck you for eternity.

Attention from an attractive man didn’t give me an ego boost. It gave me a f*cking black eye.

UCRC wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
I don't really know anything about him, so can't say anything with any degree of confidence, but from my lecture a few days ago I don't remember seeing the attitudes you ascribe to him in the latter part of your post. So I'd say you might be right, but my money would be on your self-admitted anger leading you to stereotypise.

Ummmm... wait, where did I stereotype?

I've meant this:

author of that piece, like so many MRAs, continues to view success as how often they get laid and how hot is the girl they get laid with. They continue to act like they deserve everything they want from hot women because they are smart or "nice". And now, with authors like that, they're trying to stir up men who are not getting laid and are angry about it to make them more angry for their cause.

Did your lecture involve Aaronson, or Alexander? The quote from Demo is about Alexander, the author of the article you posted, not Aaronson.

IMAGE(http://images.techtimes.com/data/images/full/33896/agent-carter-alphabet3-gif.gif?w=600)

Stengah wrote:
UCRC wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
I don't really know anything about him, so can't say anything with any degree of confidence, but from my lecture a few days ago I don't remember seeing the attitudes you ascribe to him in the latter part of your post. So I'd say you might be right, but my money would be on your self-admitted anger leading you to stereotypise.

Ummmm... wait, where did I stereotype?

I've meant this:

author of that piece, like so many MRAs, continues to view success as how often they get laid and how hot is the girl they get laid with. They continue to act like they deserve everything they want from hot women because they are smart or "nice". And now, with authors like that, they're trying to stir up men who are not getting laid and are angry about it to make them more angry for their cause.

Did your lecture involve Aaronson, or Alexander? The quote from Demo is about Alexander, the author of the article you posted, not Aaronson.

Yup, and Alexander dips so far into MRA dogwhistle words that classifying him as an MRA is really more a calculation based upon his viewpoints. As to the MRA stereotypes I then use in talking about Alexander... well... they're all in response to things he said in that article... so if I'm stereotyping him as an MRA, it's because he seems to be pretty well-fitted within those stereotypes that are well established by groups like A Voice for Men.

Spoiler:

And frankly, calling them stereotypes rather than established positions of the movement that Alexander seems to fully agree with and espouse himself kind of diminishes the damage of stereotypes, to my mind.

It seems to me that a significant part of the dating problems being discussed has to do with boys and girls being segregated at school and at play, and then having that be a normal state of affairs into adulthood. I've had classmates from "Boys Only" segregated Catholic schools, and they did exhibit these sorts of behavioral and social oddities, at least when they were fresh out from the segregated parts. Women from "Girls Only" schools also exhibited their own set of oddities. Conversely, it seemed very strange to them that I could just walk up to a woman, say, "Hi!" and NOT intend to date them nor have sex with them.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

Man, Arthur Chu just knocks it out of the f*cking park.

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/10/the_...

The thing that bothers me about the whole Aaronson thing is that it's pretty clear he was dealing with depression to the level where I would say it was a mental illness. So the dress downs he's receiving draw parallels in my viewpoint to the things that other groups suffer through.

I've seen for a long time in the feminist movement that women's feelings of oppression are completely justified and that if a woman feels uncomfortable, regardless of the motivations of any men around them, it is in the man's fault. Then on the flip side, here is a man who feels awkward, shy, and ashamed of his gender because of how he is treated by women and people, including the feminists, decide to ridicule him for those feelings.

Increasingly, in modern thinking, women's feelings are CAUSED by the people around them, and men's feelings are something men ALLOW to happen to themselves. In addition, in modern thinking, a woman is owed good feelings by society, and society has failed her if she has bad feelings. Whereas, a man is required to give himself good feelings, and HE is a failure if he has bad feelings.

Now, all that being said, for me this leads to a good discussion about how the wrong types of masculinity negatively impacts people of both genders. The frustration I have with modern feminism is that it is only concerned with the woman's feelings and weaker males that are traumatized by the same negative masculinity are not only dismissed, but in many cases actively shunned and ridiculed by the feminists. It's one thing to just say, yeah, we only deal with women's issues and be done with it, but it seems to me that people like Aaronson who have legitimate male problems are attacked as if there's only so much "turf" available for gender rights and the feminist groups want to keep the discussion wholly focused on them instead of the gender equality that they claim to support.

Our culture increases the worth of men based on how often they have sex and who they are having sex with. At the same time, in America the rather prudish culture we have also shames people for having sexual desires. In the case of the nerd, popular culture and the media places a higher value on physically fit and attractive men over less fit and attractive, but arguably more economically useful intellectuals like them. So the nerd lives in a world where no matter how valuable their contributions are economically, etc they will always feel like second class to someone else just based on physique. Lastly, the culture also tends to condemn mental illness, which prevents people like Aaronson from seeking and receiving treatment.

So do nerds have privilege? In employment sure. In social life, definitely not.

burglebup wrote:

The frustration I have with modern feminism is that it is only concerned with the woman's feelings and weaker males that are traumatized by the same negative masculinity are not only dismissed, but in many cases actively shunned and ridiculed by the feminists.

I think the rest of what you say has merit, but on this point I'd disagree. To be honest, the only place I see men's feelings taken seriously is in feminism. My only reservation is that I'm old, so my idea of "modern" feminism may be past its sell-by date at this point.

As far as that Aaronson guy, there's a whole mess of stuff going on with that, but this part stood out to me and I think is relevant here:

Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.

Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any.

Is he even a real nerd? Nerds are supposed to be good at research. If he says he didn't find any, then he's either a liar or sh*tty nerd. Or I guess a STEM nerd. Maybe they don't get the class bonus to non-science research. I don't understand how anyone that would use the word 'scour' to describe their research could fail to find any.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

Is he even a real nerd? Nerds are supposed to be good at research. If he says he didn't find any, then he's either a liar or sh*tty nerd. Or I guess a STEM nerd. Maybe they don't get the class bonus to non-science research. I don't understand how anyone that would use the word 'scour' to describe their research could fail to find any.

Well, two things come to mind for me.

1. If he's seriously suffering from depression... clinical depression often has disillusionment, so he may have found things but discounted them through the haze of his depression.

2. I'm sure you don't mean anything malicious in your heart, so take this as gentle ribbing, but do note that you stereotyped nerds and discounted his observations in a single blow.

burglebup wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

Is he even a real nerd? Nerds are supposed to be good at research. If he says he didn't find any, then he's either a liar or sh*tty nerd. Or I guess a STEM nerd. Maybe they don't get the class bonus to non-science research. I don't understand how anyone that would use the word 'scour' to describe their research could fail to find any.

Well, two things come to mind for me.

1. If he's seriously suffering from depression... clinical depression often has disillusionment, so he may have found things but discounted them through the haze of his depression.

Except he doesn't say he found them and discounted them. He says he didn't find them. That makes it even more remote that the explanation here is some kind of side effect of depression.

2. I'm sure you don't mean anything malicious in your heart, so take this as gentle ribbing, but do note that you stereotyped nerds and discounted his observations in a single blow.

No, I'm a humanities nerd who is sh*t talking the STEM nerds. ; D

Seriously, before even getting into issues of feminism, this guy is an embarrasment to nerds if his research skills are that poor.

Well, first off, Aaronson's problems are, by and large, in his past. Whatever depression he deals with today doesn't have much to do with the subject at hand. Not to dismiss his suffering, which I think is a present problem for many young, isolated people who have trouble navigating today's dating market and sexual expectations. But he's not presently dealing with it.

Second, his diagnosis of the root of his problem is incorrect: his core issue was that he felt his sexuality was illegitimate and unwanted because of the cognitive dissonance between the feminist dictum not to harass women and the patriarchal view that male sexual advances are inherently unwanted. Yes, you wouldn't have this dissonance if feminism didn't exist. But the real problem is trying to hold on to both views and not realizing the assumptions behind them. If you instead take the view that women like sex and that men don't have to be masculine overachievers (either intellectually or through strength) before women want to have a relationship with them, it becomes easier to resolve the seeming paradox.

The dejected nerd's problem isn't that he's outside the masculine role. The nerd's problem is that he bought into the role in the first place; he's letting someone else define who he is.

Not that it's easy: there's a lot of our culture that is set up to tell young men that they're worthless if they don't have sexual partners or fails to live up to the provider or protector image. And, at the same time, that their sexual desire is an imposition. And some of that is reinforced by the women who bought into the message and think they're worthless if they respond to male sexual desire, or one of the other conflicting ideas.

It's mostly, I think, because our gender roles, sexual mores, and cultural rituals are schizophrenic; different ideas from different parts of the culture have collided and dating has become an armed dance of sorting out your personal baggage and how to conflicts with your potential partner's baggage in ways that more homogenous cultures don't have to deal with.

Third, as cheeze_pavillion has been saying, Aaronson comes off as an engineer talking about a humanities subject. From reading what he's written, his attempted research was a decade or two ago, so I'll cut his past-self a little bit of slack. But this hardly the first or most embarrassing thing that a STEM nerd has gotten wrong about a humanities subject.

Gremlin wrote:

If you instead take the view that women like sex and that men don't have to be masculine overachievers (either intellectually or through strength) before women want to have a relationship with them, it becomes easier to resolve the seeming paradox.

The problem is that the data overwhelmingly suggests that most women respond in a positive sexual way to masculine traits. Especially the masculine side of confidence and assertiveness. Regardless of being a nerd or not, men that lack self confidence have a hell of a time getting dates.

This is one of those things I think is hard wired into our biology.

Define "masculine traits" and the population which you define as "women."

Huh, guess all those confident, assertive nerds I know aren't really nerds.

Tanglebones wrote:

Huh, guess all those confident, assertive nerds I know aren't really nerds.

My wife says no, those are geeks. *shrug*

@Larry

One of many cited:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/head-games/201305/the-allure-aggressive-men

What did the researchers find? Women preferred aggressive men as short-term mates, and particularly during ovulation. This finding builds on previous work demonstrating that women find male characteristics such as dominance and masculine facial features especially attractive when they are fertile. What's more, this study shows that the male signals of genetic fitness are not just physical, but behavioral as well. At the same time, it is important to underscore that these men were preferred as short-term mates. Dominant men who derive pleasure from being aggressive deliver scant relationship benefits because they pose a threat to the family, show decreased parental investment, and have affairs. Consequently, and as expected, the women in this study preferred less aggressive men for long-term relationships.

The research also uncovers that the attraction to socially dominant men isn't just psychological — it's undergirded by biology. So while the appeal of an aggressive man may be confusing on an emotional level, an evolutionary lens can bring these tangled motivations into clearer focus.

So putting this in the context of the young male nerd. The time at which young females are generally not thinking about families and offspring and instead are exploring sexual activity as a pleasure and thrill is going to be the time when she is least likely to be receptive to their advances. So basically throughout puberty they are seeing the dominant alpha male getting all the sex while they are shunned.

You bet your ass that can lead to resentment.

burglebup:

So, your study showed "aggression" and defined "women" as "women socialized in a Western culture." Both of these are people who are likewise socialized in a Western context, acting in Western ways. In addition, both you and the study define "aggression" as "masculine." In all likelihood, the women in the study also define "aggression" as "masculine," to which extent socialization and cultural mores is uncertain. The study simply assumes that it's all biology, among all the other assumptions it's making.

Out of your article:

Research has established that, generally speaking, women must choose between between two types of men: dads and cads. On the one hand, dads are typically more commitment-oriented, warm, faithful, and reliable. Yet they are usually less handsome, charismatic, and dominant than his caddish counterparts. On the other hand, cads are sexier, with their narrow eyes and strong jaws — but they also tend to be flashy and exploitatative of others. Even worse, these masculine men often embody the Dark Triad, a personality constellation that encompasses Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism. So, what in the world is appealing about these objectionable individuals? Quite simply, they possess high-quality genes that they will pass down to their future children. In turn, the thinking goes, women will maximize their reproductive success by choosing a macho man as a short-term mate for his genes, and a less masculine man with a warmer personality for a long-term, invested partner.

Why would a guy who's warm, faithful, and reliable necessarily be less handsome (say what?!?), less charismatic, and less dominant? It's nonsense.

@LarryC

*shrug* not my study. I am just pointing out that there are tons of studies out there about women and attraction to the types of masculinity that these "nerds" lack. You're more than welcome to point to research that suggests otherwise.

I've only ever seen Psych "studies." I say "studies" because nearly all of them possess the weaknesses I point out here, if not worse. A weak study isn't better than no study, especially when it serves to emphasize things you already suspected were true. It's confirmation bias in a pseudoscientific format. There are many very excellent reasons why psychology is a "soft science," which to "hard scientists" means not science at all.

I will grant you that "nerds" like Aaronson lacked something. Confidence is one of them. I do not view confidence as a particularly masculine trait. I like confident women. I prefer confident women. It's sexy to me. I'm looking for a partner, not a real life escort quest. If I were gay or if I were a woman, that wouldn't change.

I like women who are dominant, charismatic, and handsome. Who doesn't?

Just because your personal preference differ from others doesn't mean the others aren't statistically in the norm.

Let's go back to my question.

"Define masculinity."

I did not say that my preferences were normal. I was asking you to define masculinity. You've suggested that looking good, being influential, and having charisma were all masculine traits. I contested that. Are you saying that it is normal for men to see ugly, witless, uncharismatic women as more feminine? Are you implying that masculinity is simply attractiveness as a general trait when men have it?

Is aggressive exploitation masculine and attractive to women? I find that extremely hard to believe. I have never seen it work.

Burglebup, there's a well-known problem in psychology in that most studies are done at Western universities and involve college age participants. The biases should be obvious (and I'm surprised the field got this far without really looking at itself very carefully.)

What Larry is getting at (imo) is that "masculinity" is defined differently in different societies and social contexts. Latin concepts of macho differ from New England Protestant rectitude, and the crunchy granola types at a working agricultural coop in Vermont would have a different definition of masculinity from that found at, say, Liberty University. Pretty much for any social setting, you can find differences; but if your studies focus on college-age students, or other uniform groups, you could end up with an unintentional bias.

Masculinity where Larry lives is most likely different from the common American stereotype of masculinity. Heck, when I was in college, I knew I could not compete with people with more self-confidence, so I went for the geeky/nerdy girls who were okay with that, and we did just fine. But then, that was 30 years ago... Another difference? Probably.

burglebup wrote:

@Larry

One of many cited:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/head-games/201305/the-allure-aggressive-men

What did the researchers find? Women preferred aggressive men as short-term mates, and particularly during ovulation. This finding builds on previous work demonstrating that women find male characteristics such as dominance and masculine facial features especially attractive when they are fertile. What's more, this study shows that the male signals of genetic fitness are not just physical, but behavioral as well. At the same time, it is important to underscore that these men were preferred as short-term mates. Dominant men who derive pleasure from being aggressive deliver scant relationship benefits because they pose a threat to the family, show decreased parental investment, and have affairs. Consequently, and as expected, the women in this study preferred less aggressive men for long-term relationships.

The research also uncovers that the attraction to socially dominant men isn't just psychological — it's undergirded by biology. So while the appeal of an aggressive man may be confusing on an emotional level, an evolutionary lens can bring these tangled motivations into clearer focus.

So putting this in the context of the young male nerd. The time at which young females are generally not thinking about families and offspring and instead are exploring sexual activity as a pleasure and thrill is going to be the time when she is least likely to be receptive to their advances. So basically throughout puberty they are seeing the dominant alpha male getting all the sex while they are shunned.

You bet your ass that can lead to resentment. :)

As LarryC points out, these are always interesting because of how the reseachers stuff the conclusion they want in the premise, and it's usually one that treats the female with less agency than the male. There's a much simpler, female-centric explanation: women don't want to put all their eggs in one evolutionary nutsack, so to speak. Why assume women are attracted to dominant alpha males or "an advertisement of good genes"? These guys just have *different* genes from the kind of guy who will stick around. That's sufficient to explain the data. Occam's Razor and all that. As usual though, the kind of researchers that go looking for these kind of so-so biology explanations start out with a misogynistic view of the world, and it biases their ability to come to logical conclusions.

I mean, maybe there is some intersection of biology and psychology when it comes to all this. But maybe it's just that the human female is the world's apex predator of persistence hunting and it has nothing to do with "good genes."

Maybe what leads to resentment is that these so-called 'nerds' aren't as smart as they think they are.

Actually I think if you look at marketing it tells you everything you need to know about the taste preferences of most men and women. Marketing only cares about money and you can see the type of sex stereotypes they peddle.

Man, there is nothing more empty and nihilistic than the "Appeal to Marketing."

Don't be mad because it's a mirror to your desires.

I really don't think you know me well enough to make that claim, son. Empty nihilism's funny like that.