I agree, 100%, and that’s exactly what one of the roles of the chaperone was supposed to be. A neutral third-party, who can educate, who can be asked questions and give answers that come from science, not dogma. Someone bound to confidentiality, who can be approached without fear of shame. Someone who can help people identify and safely extricate themselves from abusive relationships. Almost a parental surrogate, for those who don’t feel comfortable discussing these issues with their parents, or don’t like the answers they’re getting, or who have parents who won’t discuss it at all.
[quote=“jsroberts, post:76, topic:85306”]
My main problem with your system (and it is a big one) is that it’s a top down, controlling approach that will be resisted.[/quote]
I think the best standards are ones that are codified from the bottom up, and then enforced from the top-down. Standards should be enforcing the rules that people want to have in place, not trying to outlaw normal behaviour. And I would envision it as an opt-out process, though, once established, it might be a big red flag to request to opt-out.
How does it not respect agency? All of the control is still in the hands of the people doing the actual dating. The chaperone should merely be there to make sure that things don’t go beyond the boundaries that the daters themselves decide and agree to.
As for gender relations, I’m not sure what you’re referring to. The idea, in my head, was designed to be gender neutral: that it would work for any two (or more) people who would choose to be in a relationship with each other. The design was just to prevent the worst of the negative outcomes from relationships, and to help steer people towards the right ones.
I’m well aware of this, but the problem with a strictly bottom-up approach is that it relies on there being no horrible people out there. Coming from a background in computer science, with a little bit of education in computer security, I see interpersonal relationships as a network with a few (shoddy and poorly-enforced) protections against bad actors. And sure, the security vulnerabilities that exist are only a problem if bad actors figure out how to exploit them, and end-users don’t take the proper steps to guarantee their own security, but you always have to assume that the end-user will choose convenience over security, and you always have to assume that there will be bad actors seeking to exploit the vulnerabilities in your network. So, I see dating, and I feel an urge (doomed to failure, per the xkcd comic) to fix it.
I acknowledge that that’s the best fix, but as I said, with an (admittedly small) background in computer security, I can’t trust “educate the end-user” as a workable solution; I have to build something that will work without having the user as a single point of failure.
And, for the nth time, I know this system is not workable. I’m not suggesting that we adopt it. Please don’t argue against this system being adopted, because I’m not arguing for it to be adopted. I pointed out one major roadblock in my original post, but I also acknowledged that there were others that I had found.
@popobawa4u asked why we stick to the current “mating routines” instead of coming up with a new system: I said, “I like the idea of a new, more formalized system, and here’s what I came up with when thinking about that… And I’m well aware that the system I described won’t work, but it’s nice to dream.” It’s a demonstration of the urge, for a person to whom computers make infinitely more sense than people do, to impose order on the chaos that is “dating.” I know, per the xkcd comic, that any such system to impose order will create vastly more drama than it solves, but it’s just so attractive a problem to fix that you can’t help proposing solutions for it.
