I still agree, by and large, with my last post, but I took a minute to go back and read some of the background posts, the comments, and some more of Dizzy’s stuff… and I feel compelled to write some more.
So first, a more clear take on this whole “hints” business.
Nick says “everyone of every gender is guilty of having ‘hinted’ at one point or another for the simple sake of social lubricant” …and he’s right. Although one — or infrequent — hints does not make someone a hinter, nor does it mean that that person is unable to criticize the behavior.
But hinting is a social lubricant. Most people would have a very tough time dealing with blunt truth all the time. That said, it suffers all the same problems that I mentioned in the last post. That is to say that knowing with any degree of certainty what a person means by their hints requires two things. It first requires that you know that they’re hinting — that their statement means something beyond the direct meaning of the words. It also requires, truth be told, that you know that person. Two different people could say the same thing, with the same tone of voice, and mean two totally different things.
There’s no set way to get from Point A (what was actually said) to Point B (the meaning intended). It’s true, there is a continuum of hinting from obvious to horribly obscure, and the obviousness or obscurity is based on our social experiences. There are two problems here — one is that a hint is rarely as obvious as it seems to the hinter (as judged by a disinterested third party)… the second is that if the hint is something the target doesn’t want to hear (like getting shot down in a bar) it’s going to seem much more obscure than it would seem to that same disinterested third party.
These problems, though, don’t keep people from hinting… and they don’t keep people from hinting obscurely. Why they do it is a much bigger issue, but the fact is that people drop weird hints that they want to be picked up on. This is normal and, in many ways, good.
The bad thing, though, is what happens when a person doesn’t pick up the hint1. The ineffective communicator drops another hint, no more obvious than the one before it. The effective communicator gets more obvious. How much more obvious? Well, how clueless do you think your target is? If you’re trying to communicate (and not trying to build up ammunition for blog posts) you need to try to get to a common ground in as few iterations as possible.
Good communicators and people with excellent social skills do this very well. They are observant and can get a pretty good read on someone. They know how obvious they need to be and these folks tend to have few problems with people not picking up their hints — again, much different from someone who intentionally ignores hints.
Now, in Dizzy’s specific case, she claims to deal with a large number of people who either don’t pick up her hints or people who do, but ignore them. I don’t know with any degree of certainty what the actual cause of this is. Though I have always believed that a string of coincidences in interpersonal relationships, very rarely is. Demotivators may have said it best. But, again, she might just be horribly unfortunate.
What I can say is that she is the only person I know of who has the problems she claims to have with anything near the same frequency or to the same extent. I know some people who get hit on a lot (usually people who flirt a lot). I know some people who have had one or two creepy stalker types (usually a simple misfortune). I know some people who, when they do get hit on, have a devil of a time getting rid of the guys (usually because they fail to communicate well). Nobody comes anywhere near the frequency or extent that Dizzy experiences. Now, it’s entirely possible that her class is filled with people who do these sorts of things and they stay confined to their own class, but at least in my class, the number of guys who do things like this is vanishingly small.
At the end of the day, “hints” are just another tool for communication… and they frequently fail for obvious reasons. When they do, it is often as much a failure on the part of the communicator as the listener. After all, there’s a pretty sure-fire way to get your message across: be blunt and honest.
This is much, much different from someone who gets the hint and ignores it.
Pete, you really shouldn’t insinuate that this is her fault without having an actual reason to believe that it is. Simple frequency isn’t enough–especially for someone who by her own words, “date[s]. A lot.”
It’s really unfair for someone to be blamed for what other people do, and it’s bad enough that for some reason she and many others often react to this sort of thing instinctively by blaming themselves. Our time would be better spent asking people to break out of this wrong conception than it is perpetuating it.
Frequency and degree say a lot, especially when she frequents the same bars as many of my friends and when she’s talking about law students.
It’s entirely possible that this is random chance. It’s also entirely possible that there’s something about her, her character, or her personality, that makes this sort of guy more attracted to her than a) they are to anyone else and b) than other types of guys are to her.
I’m not excusing the behavior that is inappropriate or “blaming the victim” but I find it peculiar that she has so many examples while friends that I’ve asked about this have very, very few and in almost all of the cases they’re no where near as extreme.
There are some other possibilities: 1) She’s embellishing for the sake of her blog and her argument. 2) She’s using examples of non-law school guys to impugn the law school. 3) She’s blowing things out of proportion. 4) She sets such an unreasonably high standard for men that everyone who’s interested in her looks like a bumbling idiot. I’m sure there are more… but if her examples are accurate and she’s not being overly sensitive, then there simply has to be something more than a pure coincidence (otherwise it would have an increasing chance of suddenly stopping as time progressed).
And as for this: “Our time would be better spent asking people to break out of this wrong conception than it is perpetuating it.”
As with the rape discussion, I do not have friends who do this sort of thing, so there is nobody for me to ask to stop. I don’t associate with guys who behave like she has described. Not to mention the fact that there’s plenty of time to do both. AND, frankly, if you have something that happens to you repeatedly you would be a moron not to ask if there’s something you’re doing to increase the odds of it happening.
Think of it this way… if you get mugged on the subway twice a month, do you chalk it up to bad luck or do you try to figure out why, exactly, you’re being robbed at a rate that is several standard deviations from the norm?
Yes, it very well could be happenstance… but not only are the odds of that incredibly low, you’re not going to hurt anything by doing some introspection. If you are causing or exacerbating the problem, in whole or in part, then you have something you can do to cut down on the number of times you’re getting mugged.
Of course, you could be stubborn and say that you shouldn’t have to change your behavior just to avoid being victimized…and the cost of standing up for that principle would probably be your continued mugging. It doesn’t make subway muggings right, but the fact that something is a crime doesn’t mean you shouldn’t proactively try to avoid becoming a victim of it.
Another more obvious example: why do you lock your car/house? What would you think of someone who left their house or car unlocked on the principle that “we shouldn’t be asking them to lock their car, we should be asking criminals to stop stealing”? Did they deserve it? No, but you can certainly understand why their car, the one that was unlocked, was robbed before the locked cars around them.
This whole notion that there is only one simple cause for everything (either the victim OR the perpetrator) is ridiculous. For any particular instance there is a long line of causes. As a society we should try to condition out the ones that are beyond the control of the victim, but as potential victims ourselves we should probably strive to reduce our odds of seeing that potential victimhood actualized.
Much like locking your car door, this is all just common sense, and the group of people who perpetuate this notion that we shouldn’t try not to become victims are doing far more harm than good.
This is NOT analogous to the rape blog war from last year. The argument advanced by the whole “approach the situation by going after men” crowd missed the obvious point that criminals were beyond persuasion and preventive measures had to be taken.
In this case, the behavior is well within the bounds of persuasion because it involves situations where people make stupid assumptions or have stupid expectations (such as people reliably picking up on hints). If you point that out to someone, they might very well listen and react. Not so with violent criminals, since they know what they’re doing is wrong and they don’t care.
For the “prevention” argument to be of any use here, we would actually need to know that there is something she’s doing to cause it, and we don’t. All we know is that she’s related more incidents of douchebaggery than most. Even if we assume she’s attracting douchebags at a higher rate than others, we don’t know that its being caused by anything about her in the first place (after all, it could be random, and random does not mean it’s going to be the same for everyone, it means there will be clusters) and even if it is, we don’t know that it’s because of something voluntary (for example, maybe there’s just something about her appearance that attracts the douchebags while intimidating the nicer guys). Personally, my best guess is that the cause is probably because, much like the “best” female catches are around here, her “best” male candidates are off the market, and what’s left is pissing her off.
And finally, there’s a world of difference between suggesting that someone might try to find out whether there’s something they can do to improve their situation and insinuating that the situation is really all her fault. The tone of the post, with the “you are the weakest link”/”dysfunctional” graphical reference in particular, was accusatory and thus falls into the later category.
Some problems with your response:
I guess my bottom line is this — if you’re going to bad-mouth an entire school of people through anecdote and hyperbole, well, there’s going to be rebuttal and discussion about the veracity of the stories.
Thank you Ken. I think you get what I’m saying.
Pete, I think you don’t. And honestly, based on things like, calling my point of view “abjectly stupid,” I don’t think you’d notice a mack truck of rude if it ran over your foot dear.
Oh, wait, let’s make sure I don’t mischaracterize your statement. You said, precisely, that it would be abjectly stupid to believe WHAT I HAD JUST TOLD YOU I BELIEVE TO BE TRUE. So yeah, that certainly wasn’t rude, insensitive to conversational nuance, or I dunno, a tad clueless.
Oh, let’s make sure I don’t mischaracterize your statement. You said, precisely, that it would be abjectly stupid to believe WHAT I HAD JUST TOLD YOU I BELIEVE TO BE TRUE.
Which just makes a world of difference…
(Shit, I was going to stop with the sarcasm… my bad).
Dizzy, “dear”, I just call it like I see it.
You tell me that you expect a man to know (not “try to find out”) when a woman that he doesn’t know would like for him to speak to her (or at least when she would be amenable to it). This is nothing other than expecting omniscience. Period.
“Honey”, expecting men to be omniscient for any reason, but especially for the sake of your own convience is abjectly stupid. If that’s not what you meant then, while your words were chosen poorly in the context of the discussion, you don’t fall within the scope of the abjectly stupid or down-right crazy. Simple.
Of course, you saw the problem too — you started stepping back away from that opinion and spinning it a different way. Awesome! Welcome back.
And, as I’ve said before, based on the things that you write on your blog, we have a pot & kettle situation with the rudeness if, in fact, it’s rude at all to characterize an opinion that is tantamount to “I expect women to be flying pixies who can grant me three wishes if I give them an orgasm” as such.
Anyway, “sweetie”, the bottom line is this: if you don’t like being called out for saying ridiculous things, don’t say them in my comments. It’s pretty simple.
No, I expect him to TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for knowing. By trying to find out. Someone has to take responsiblity. And you say it should be me because the guy can’t always read the hint, so it’s more efficient. Of course he’s going to be wrong sometimes. That’s just the way the world works. But it is his job to try to find out if the girl wants to be approached, not just make an offer and hope it works out. Because he is making an unsolicited offer. Which most people consider rude in most circumstances. I really don’t know why you’re carving out an exception for sex.
This rule is not for my convenience. It’s for the sake of not being a total douche. So it’s to his benefit.
And from what I’ve read. You don’t understand what I’m saying or why I’m saying it. At all.
So how is a guy supposed to find out that a girl wants to be approached without approaching her? Concentrate really hard and hope the answer comes to him? Or maybe just be omniscient?
I understand precisely what you’re saying and I can say this with 100% confidence: it should never have been added to the end of my post from a few days ago because it is horribly out of scope and, for that reason, incredibly misleading and confusing.
I made the mistake of assuming that your comment was actually a response to my post. It wasn’t. If it was, it shouldn’t have been.
As for why you’re saying it? I have my theories, but I certainly don’t_know_… nor do I care, particularly. I don’t think people’s motives for writing things are all that interesting.
I will say, unequivocally, though, that there is one thing that all of us are responsible for, regardless of what we want or don’t want: being a clear communicator.
If those hints you’re dropping aren’t doing the trick, getting pissy and posting about it on your blog doesn’t help. Being more clear does. Then, by all means, get pissy and post about it… but if you have to “hint” to someone 10 times, your hints are obviously not good enough for the person you’re hinting to.