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Elevatorgate: Effective Altruism version?Effective Altruism Promises to Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse
Does anyone remember Elevatorgate? Long story short: the atheist "movement" had gotten going, many books were published and cons were attended. At one a figure in the community "Skepchick"- Rebecca Watson- was propositioned by a man who'd attended her talk in an elevator and made a video stating - in understated tones given the conflagration it started tbh - that she didn't like it and it made her feel unsafe.
Because this was pre-#MeToo and the Great Awokening and atheists at the time kind of prided themselves on being
assholestruth-tellers , figures like Dawkins jumped in, criticizing or mocking her for complaining about such an anodyne event. Dawkins wrote a notorious letter titled "Dear Muslima", mockingly comparing the suffering of a hypothetical circumcised Muslim woman with Watson in the sort of move that wouldn't even begin to fly today.Well...that led to an absolute shitstorm that split the atheist community with some using it to create "Atheism+": basically atheism that was sufficiently woke, after insisting atheism had a racism/sexism/whatever problem. As foreshadowing for a now pervasive social tendency, it then ate itself with circular firing squads and purity spirals.
At the time, there was enough pushback that Watson and her defenders didn't outright win but she probably won the moral victory. Years down the line most of the leftover "100% atheist" communities were pretty woke, see the banning of RationalityRules for arguing against trans-identified males in women's sports.
Now...
...
...
I'm torn.
On the one hand, I recognize the same tactics (and, tbh, it doesn't escape my notice that the first victim seems to have social competition with males for funding on her mind) that ripped the Atheist community apart. I also find most of the examples of harassment to be of the all-too-common nebulous and vague variety that allow people to claim victimhood. I honestly don't know if people are this fragile nowadays, or are exaggerating their fragility for points, but it is a bit absurd. If you're an adult, I don't want to hear about you being groomed. A "22f-44m" relationship is one where one party is twice as old but it'd be absurd to act like one party didn't have agency.
A lot of the complaints also seem to be that alleged rationalists and effective altruists - for some reason - don't just take people at their word.
On the other hand: some of these (e.g. the final one I quoted, the one about a male jumping into a woman's bed at night) are more egregious and the quokka point is well-applied here for those "good" EAs who still encouraged people not to go to the cops. It's exactly the sort of problematic math I can see some people doing. Hell, people did it all the time in churches, schools and so on. It's not a particular foible of EAs.
Also:
I have to say I find this funny. People discovering that looser social and sexual norms allow bad actors - or merely "people with more status than me who don't want to treat me as I think I deserve" - to accrue sexual and social benefits and blur the lines. Quelle surprise.
This feels less like breaking social and sexual norms and more like the same old problem with mixed gender workplaces under a different name.
I don't think I have ever been in an adult work environment where there wasn't at least one couple. I met my wife at work, I had two other work romances before I met my wife.
If you put people together a bunch, and give them a common interest then they will at a minimum develop some friendships and social ties. It shouldn't be a surprise that some of the friends start taking it further if they share a sexual interest in each other.
I think people should be responsible and be adults. Which is a whole package of norms and expectations. And I'm guessing the EA crowd broke some of those rules.
However I sometimes feel like the metoo movement and some parts of feminist groups want a completely asexual workplace. I feel that such a thing is largely impossible, but would also be a travesty. Once an adult leaves college the workplace can become one of their best places for finding a compatible life partner. Apps and bars are a shitty replacement.
That's where it's inexorably trending, not because most people explicitly want that, but because nobody wants to get sued for unwanted sexual attention but nobody has any principled way to handle the situation because, the minute romance is involved, it'll get messy and complicated and people will be hurt (especially since there seem to be gendered cognitive biases here like men having an optimism bias or some men & women being bad at cross-sex mind-reading). To say nothing of the fact that modern norms are in flux and messy.
And, as we've seen, faced with being hurt, some women* lack any moral vocabulary (or tools for revenge, frankly) for describing it beyond sexual harassment/sexual assault. Which companies must take seriously. But, of course, the "validity" of the case varies but must go through litigation first.
The uncertainty here gives corporations an incentive to be proactive (and thus more restrictive).
So it's simpler to just try to cut it out, even though I doubt that's optimal for even most feminists actually (obviously, people of all stripes want the right kind of attention).
* It's mostly women reporting abuse lbh
To be honest, I think you’re spot on the nose with women(or at least a subset thereof) not having any way to describe unwanted attention beyond sexual harassment. Feminism has reduced thinking about the ethics of sexual relationships to a consent binary which leads to redefining lots of things as consent issues, so women who want to complain about more typical bad behavior have to frame it as somehow leading up to rape. Which is ridiculous, obviously, for a lot of these cases.
Good point, except it's probably not feminism but a natural effect of male status differentiation in the presence of women and their observable reactions (yes, "hello, human resources?!" meme), recreating low-class school social dynamics.
I think this is a major source of differences in attitude – in this thread and elsewhere – toward mixed workspaces and generally the idea of adding women to environments where they were historically absent. People who believe that it's an unalloyed good since you can meet your soulmate or something are, probably, just not ugly; for less lucky ones (and who are also not exceptional in some way), flirting in the workspace is a non-starter, so they just lose the possibility to make a living without humiliation. When one looks up blackpill content on the distribution of attractiveness and growing proportion of sexless men, and non-infrequent incel-type assessments like this one on Quora –
– it's hard not to come away with the feeling «holy shit, tens of millions of guys are forced into a lifetime of being severely bullied». It's the kind of thing non-targets aren't prone to notice or connect to external factors (did you care that they were suicidal losers in your school?) so it may be arbitrarily intense. Even if it's an exaggeration based on insecurity and not an accurate stereotype, the very fact that there exists strong social pressure to dismiss it as a delusion is telling. There's no «lived experience» clause for ugly men.
And contrariwise, it may be the case that the incessant wringing of hands about sexism and harassment, and demand for National Incel Strategy, generalized tyranny, censorship, surveillance etc are products of many women being unable to remove uggos from their life, developing chronic stress and fear, and growing desperately violent as a result (in their own passive-aggressive socially manipulative manner).
We may underestimate how much gendered animosity the society contains at the margins; and the consensus about its direction is very likely wrong.
I've argued before that the cross-gender animosity is not only at the margins but is borderline mainstream (Most young guys I know follow and like Andrew Tate, social media comment sections are much more adversarial than they used to be, from both sides ). Which to me seems like a rather recent development.
Of course there's no way to quantify this, but you can tell which way the cultural/psychological wind is blowing if your eyes and ears are open enough.
Unfortunately, significant amounts of ink were spilled on the post defending myself of accusations of being an incel or whatever against discussing the central thrust of the post which I meant to be the worsening relations gaining enough mass to be noticeable in mainstream forums.
I'd love to hear what you have to say about this topic. Maybe consider an effort post?
I think the thing about Tate and co, is that they represent what essentially is an aspirational culture these days. Represent isn't exactly the correct word, but I'm not sure how else to put it. But I think they're reflecting a view based on a certain "Social Media Yuppie" perspective that's coming out of a few large cities, frankly, London is the biggest example here I think. Where they're wrong of course, is that the SM Yuppie mentality, isn't as common outside of these places as these people think. But that doesn't mean that it's not influential either. I do think there's reasons why people see this as pretty much the peak of attainable status right now.
And I think people do see traits of SM Yuppie culture "bleed out", and I think there's a reaction to it.
I've always argued that the manosphere as a whole (and it's a bunch of different parts and I acknowledge that) should be more focused on teaching people to avoid red flags. And I understand avoiding these red flags are tough, because again, these are relatively high-status baddies we're talking about here. But still...you don't want to deal with the narcissistic traits here. Just say no. It's not worth the headache. But educating men about potential red flags has always been seen as misogynistic by people who well...promote and sell those flags, giving them out to women to be honest.
And then there's the concern that this SM Yuppie culture will be picked up on by your partner in an existing relationship. What do you do then?
Anyway, I think largely that's what this is all about. I think you can avoid it if you want to, especially if you recognize status pressures and try your best to avoid them. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy or without cost.
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