I’m no expert, but I’ve run across social structures for facilitating casual sex: sex clubs, certain message boards, etc. And they all still involve some mechanisms for screening people before they participate, and etiquette for negotiating for sex. It’s still about establishing mutual respect.
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This is far from my experience. I have only ever had sexual interactions with people I had not known at all. It still seems like guesswork.
This does not make any sense to me whatsoever. Sex is not a “thing” at all, it is an experience, and experiences are innately shared by all of the participants. Like any other activity, people either agree to participate, or they don’t - and establishing this would require communication. It is not transactional, like a commodity bought and sold, where the seller doesn’t have it anymore and needs compensation. When two (or more) equals experience something, they all benefit from it mutually. Like if we went jogging or made dinner, there is no reason to assume that there is acquisition or entitlement involved.
I never said anything about gender. I don’t presume what sex or gender people are unless they say. Either way, I don’t believe in “getting something” from people.
Rapport has always seemed like a vague notion to me, I’ve never understood it. I’ve usually just proposed a formal activity such as “Let’s be allies!” or “Maybe we should create a recording studio!” or “Maybe we should have sex!” I think of social activity as what people do with each other. It was awkward in the city, but it was more functional because my approach seems to only work in academic type environs. Being stranded in an awful suburb for now, I have not been able to create any social infrastructure to speak of.
This presents some difficulty for me. I don’t think of myself as being a person, and struggle to avoid having a personal life as most people seem to understand it.
This is the contradiction which puzzles me. Communicating sexual interest to people who I already know has only ever caused problems. Whereas with strangers it can be awkward, or sometimes reciprocated. So from my perspective, it seems that others generally desire anonymity, but then put forth the idea that this should not be the case. Sex seems to be part of how people meet - except for those who are hostile to the idea.
Did you approach them on the street, or they you? What was the protocol? Did you meet at a club or other “maybe I’m up for sex, maybe not” event/location as mentioned above?
(since intent is hard to measure in text, let me underscore that I’m asking honestly. Your experiences are foreign to me and I’m interested in finding out how you’ve navigated this complex social system.)
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Forgive me if I’m misinterpreting here but it kind of sounds like you’re saying that the more people get to know you, the less they are likely to be interested in having sex with you.
If this is the case then I think the issue you may want to examine is how you conduct interpersonal relationships with other human beings rather than figuring out what’s wrong with the rest of society for not appreciating things like Cat Calls.
Unless you’re one of those rugged individualists who just decides “I don’t care about the rest of society’s social norms.” In which case you should probably just accept that the rest of society is going to see you as antisocial and abnormal.
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It’s been long time (I am recently divorced), but thinking back it has seemed more or less random to me. Not at clubs (ick) but just part of our daily activities. Sometimes other people and I approach each other - sometimes we talk, sometimes we walk away, sometimes we pounce on each other.
I think text is the most pure form of communication! But I question this being a “complex social system”. Usually when people implement a system, they can tell you why they do it, and how it works.
You make it sound like a gradual loss of interest, but it really seems more like a strictly either/or situation. Also I am not really sure if people ever really “know” each other the ways they feel they should, my outlook is more existential/autistic that people can never really be sure about others, or even themselves.
You seem to be re-interpreting the questions I asked to suit your outlook. Asking “what is a respectful expression of interest” is hardly “figuring out what’s wrong with the rest of society for not appreciating things like Cat Calls”. As I understand it, anyway.
I create social norms as much as anybody else does, so it’s not a case of “everybody” versus “me”. What most people posit as being “interpersonal relationships” tend to come across as fickle and selfish. Much of my life has been a push to live according to the arts and sciences, and to participate maximally in society as my civic duty. And this is how I try to respect others as well. When many people only ever do things with certain people because they decide that they like them for whatever vague reasons is what seems more antisocial to me.
But if you conduct yourself in a way that ignores how most people are likely to react to something like “being loudly sexually objectified in public by a complete stranger” just because you prefer a more direct approach then you’re the one being selfish. It’s not a “social norm” if most people feel differently about it than you do.
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How do you figure? It’s not as if I get anything out of it. And all people are strangers, which just seems to be part of being separate organisms - I can’t help it if people imagine it differently. I simply don’t play favorites by assuming that some people are my friends while the rest aren’t.
People only establish norms through consensus, and this process requires communication. We do this in our daily interactions with each other. I don’t have any honest way to know what “most people” supposedly think, any more than you do. And there is the danger of infinite regress if the norms people communicate themselves appear to be essentially antisocial. Norms which are apparently based upon being deliberately obscure are of no help to anyone.
But that excuse only goes so far if you’re constantly saying or doing things that most people find offensive.
For example, I couldn’t go around telling strangers they looked fat and then act surprised when they took offense. After all, how was I supposed to know that most people in this culture don’t consider “fat” a compliment? Because I wasn’t raised by wolves and I don’t actively ignore the social norms of my culture, that’s why.
Now, there are doubtlessly some people who would enjoy being called fat by a complete stranger, or even entire subcultures where doing so might be completely appropriate. But just because you might get away with calling someone “fat” at BBWcon2015 doesn’t mean you should expect the same response from the average person on the street.
The same thing goes for behavior like catcalls. Most women don’t enjoy being loudly sexually objectified by strangers just for walking down the street. You don’t have to be psychic to realize this, you just have to be willing to pay attention to the world around you.
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No kidding. What I am getting at here is neither complaining about the situation, nor concern with how I am perceived. What I have been trying to discuss is the contradictions at the root of this outlook, and how it works out in practice. For something which people claim is such an obvious and pervasive protocol, it is completely contrary to how people work from the experience of my sexual relationships. Also, people harp on about the importance of consent, but then simultaneously insist that people discussing sex is improper, it’s more than a bit contradictory. Knowing that this makes normative sense to some people doesn’t seem to help account for it in any practical way.
And as I explained before, I see sex as an experience rather than a commodity, so there are no “objects”. When people do it, they do it together. And whether they are male, female, or anything else doesn’t seem to be a factor.
“Discussing sex” ≠ “crudely propositioning complete strangers who just happen to be walking down the street and give no outward signs that they are seeking such attention.”
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What are “outward signs”? People communicate through words. Except, apparently, when they are actively discouraged from discussing certain topics. Sorry, it’s probably obvious that I find this all rather troublesome!
How about this:
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If you see a woman you don’t know who appears to be going about her daily routine, don’t proposition her for sex.
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If you see a woman you don’t know who is giving you a come-hither look while waiting in line to enter a sex club and wearing a cutoff T-shirt that says “I FUCK STRANGERS FOR FUN,” knock yourself out.
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Why do you keep referencing “women”, specifically? And since when does sexual consent involve wearing a literal sign? For a topic supposedly about norms (vague and contradictory as they may be) I should point out that nobody seems to do it this way.
There seems to be a tendency here, that whenever I point out some quirky social protocols for people to make the topic into a discussion about me. I am interested in the protocols and motivations at work here. It seems to me (although I could be wrong) that people make this deliberately complicated, deliberately obscure, and I think it is interesting to know more about. What exactly are such protocols implemented to achieve? Are they generally effective at this?
One thing I find disturbing about this is the poor integration between sexual relationships and daily life. This appears to be true at a fairly low-level, where people aren’t supposed to casually speak of, witness, or engage in sexual activity. Yet, it is apparently a fairly universal category of activities/behaviors. And most people apparently don’t go into special clubs to do it, or there would be many more sex clubs. I am not convinced that this “pseudo-hidden” approach to sexuality is particularly healthy. Knowing that people tend to not be open about sex does not elucidate how or why, nor explain whatever weird games (and they do appear to be games) people use to rationalize how they go about it.
OK, let’s say for sake of argument that sex is no different than other casual activities like eating lunch or playing basketball and the taboos against discussing sex with complete strangers are unnecessary and overblown.
Would you stand on a street corner and shout “HEY BUDDY, WANNA SHOOT SOME HOOPS? NICE GUNS, I BET YOU CAN DUNK LIKE A PRO!” to random athletic-looking guys who happened to pass by on their way to work? Of course not, unless you were some kind of creepy weirdo. If you were looking for a partner to shoot hoops with then you’d seek out the right context to find a partner, such as heading down to your local basketball court and keeping an eye out for someone who looked like they’d appreciate a teammate.
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I am so getting that tee shirt.
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People communicate through words.
Nonverbal communication is the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless (mostly visual) cues between people. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to as body language (kinesics), but nonverbal communication encompasses much more, such as use of voice (paralanguage), touch (haptics), distance (proxemics), and physical environments/appearance.[1] Typically overlooked in nonverbal communication are proxemics, or the informal space around the body and chronemics: the use of time. Not only considered eye contact, oculesics comprises the actions of looking while talking and listening, frequency of glances, patterns of fixation, pupil dilation, and blink rate. This subject is diverse in meaning, relative to culture and not limited to these definitions specifically.
Even speech contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, rate, pitch, volume, and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation, and stress. Likewise, written texts have nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words, or the physical layout of a page. However, much of the study of nonverbal communication has focused on interaction between individuals,[2] where it can be classified into three principal areas: environmental conditions where communication takes place, physical characteristics of the communicators, and behaviors of communicators during interaction.
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I’m honestly trying to figure out what you’re saying.
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When you walk down the street on an average work day, do you think that some of the people walking on the same sidewalk as you would be open to having sex with you at that time if you simply asked them?
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Do you understand that people walking down the street have their own thoughts and lives, and are on a schedule you know nothing about?
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Have you always had first-time sex with people despite never interacting with them socially first for at least a few hours or days or weeks?
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Sure, this seems obvious enough. I counter people suggesting that there are arguments to the contrary, but these have tended to consist of hand-waving more than anything else.
If I knew they were on their way to work, there wouldn’t be any point. Besides this obvious consideration, I don’t know much about basketball.
Sounds like a personal problem! I strive to avoid judging people, or having personal problems.
That’s fine. It works because basketball is not a hidden activity. But there doesn’t seen to be anything analogous for sex. Which is weird, because not everybody plays basketball, but everybody supposedly exhibits some kind of sexual behavior. Maybe I need to look into organizing a town orgy or something!
This might be the same communication incongruence I was asking about earlier. I would not see that somebody was interested, I would need to ask them if they are. If somebody looks like they are having sex, they are probably busy enough already! Other than that, all I could do is ask or guess, and asking seems like the more respectful option.
Definitely, I have read a fair amount regarding these areas. But the specifics seem to involve only descriptive literature. When I ask people what they think prescriptively about, say, the number of blinks somebody does per minute, and what they mean, they never say. People claim to have basically no opinions about this stuff, which makes it impossible to make much sense of pragmatically.
You are almost literally complaining that since nobody can accurately provide a count of the trees they can’t say it’s a forest.
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