Problems with Cross-Gender Eavesdropping

Not a flawless cheat code.

I know I’ve told this story before. I was a teenager/young adult a little before the crest of the most current wave of feminism, I was isolated & weird enough that I was reading weird blogs, & when I read feminists urging men to seek out female perspectives & also saying that feminism was for both genders, I think I took it more literally/logically/symmetrically than I was intended to & started seeking out male perspectives, usually also online. One thing I found out online is that men don’t get compliments as often as I do. I newly cared a lot (& again, more literally/logically/symmetrically than I think anyone intended me to) about gendered fairness, & I wanted to act in good faith from my side of the aisle, so I started complimenting men more.

Things did not go as I predicted. To my total surprise, basically every time I did this, the dude took it as a signal to start trying to hit on me¹. Then I had to reject him, leaving both of us feeling worse than if I hadn’t complimented him at all. It took more iterations of this than it should have for my actual life experience to override this random scruple about men & compliments that I had picked up from the internet.

Some large number of you are here reading this because last winter I wrote a post for autistic women about how to be ladylike. I do think a higher-than-chance fraction of y’all are on the spectrum, but I also think a much higher-than-chance fraction of you are men.

Scott Alexander told a lot of you to come here, so maybe he can explain what you’re doing here:

I know ACX readership is 85-90% male, but I recommend this article to people of any gender. Partly because it doubles as a good explanation of why “ladylikeness” should exist as a concept. But also because I think straight people benefit from reading dating advice aimed at the opposite sex - not just so you can catch their adversarial strategies, but also so you know what constraints they’re working under, why they’re hard, and what they’re after.²

So, he’s not wrong. There’s a lot of alpha in this kind of eavesdropping. And that alpha is even more tempting to the kind of person who, say, feels that they are at a disadvantage when trying to understand the other gender. Someone with slightly weird theory of mind. Someone with clunky intuition. Someone for whom social status games are a bit confusing, & who doesn’t notice status moves as fast as they happen. Someone who might feel their competitive advantage is at consuming information & building models from that info, and wants to apply that competitive advantage to people. And also, of course, someone who spends a lot of time online (although it’s getting less & less weird to spend a lot of time online), where it’s easy to feel like you’re eavesdropping, like you’re getting information that wasn’t meant for you, wasn’t tailored to preserving a social relationship with you, & therefore feels more real.

But there are also a lot of like unavoidable structural dangers to this kind of eavesdropping, & they are dangers that are going to be even more obscure to the kind of person painted in the above paragraph.

Here are a couple of those dangers. (I don’t think I’m the first person to say any of this.)

• People discuss members of the other gender who are particularly salient to them—for instance, very attractive people, or the kind of person who is most likely to approach you. Then cross-gender eavesdroppers read these discussions as if the women are discussing men in general (or as if the men are discussing women in general, mutatis mutandis, god this is gonna be confusing to write). This is pretty understandable because the discussion is usually phrased as “men do x” or “women do y” but it doesn’t work. The biggest failure mode is that cross-gender eavesdroppers lean hard into not doing the things that salient people do, when those cross-gender eavesdroppers might be better served by thinking, “Huh, these are the kind of men/women that women/men think about & talk about. Are there ways it would be helpful for me to be more like them?”

• People you can eavesdrop on are weird. Normal people are not talking that much about the other gender at all, & when they are they’re probably doing it with their friends privately, not online where you can see it. And of the people talking about gender stuff online, the most extreme & weird ones are gonna get the most attention!

  • A kind of sub-aspect of this. If you see some piece of genderposting that got a lot of attention, you might think, “Wow, I remember what sympopp just said about how weird things get attention, but this genderpost resonated with a lot of people, there must be something to it!” But: you don’t know which gender it resonated with! It could be an artful expression of an experience that the other gender has long had & which you would never have found out about if they weren’t collectively celebrating it. Or it could be that all the attention it’s getting is from cross-gender eavesdroppers. As happened to my essay.

I think that people are going to read this essay as if it’s mostly about men eavesdropping on women. But I increasingly see things happening the other way around: women taking redpill stuff very straightforwardly & dooming hard about it. H. Pearl Davis types. Ladies, don’t do that either!

1. And I was giving the same kind of to-my-mind neutral compliments I would give women. “Nice coat.” But I do think this is somewhat of a skill issue, I know women who are good at doing this kind of thing. Probably a big part of the problem is that I was specifically trying to give compliments the same way I would for women, & not thinking about stuff like eg trying to drop the compliment right before I left. Also I think that men who are posting online about not getting compliments are not necessarily representative of men.

2. One thing I think is very funny about this quote, & an example of the type of thing I’m talking about, is that the ladylike post contains literally no dating advice. It’s specifically only about leveraging your attractiveness outside of dating circumstances, a social problem compared to which dating is extremely easy or at least symmetrical and relatively self balancing. But it’s much more interesting or salient-feeling or obvious or interesting or something for men to think about women’s dating techniques.