The Slacktiverse

No More Mister Nice Guy

I used to be a Nice Guy (tm). Not a nice guy, not by any means; I mean I was one of those guys who tried to make friends with women I found attractive, solely because I found them attractive, in the hopes of manipulating them or tricking them or guilting them into sleeping with me.

I am very glad I never succeeded. I don't think I possibly could have, but either way I'm glad I didn't. I'd like to say I don't know what I was thinking, but that would be a lie. I know exactly what I was thinking, better now than I did at the time.

It started, I think, in high school. There was, of course, a girl; call her Emma.* Emma was approachable, likeable, friendly, and shared most of my nerdier interests. I decided to have a crush on her.

I mean that literally; it was a conscious decision, at least at first. I liked her as a friend, but wasn't particularly attracted to her. However, I thought maybe our compatibility as friends, and the general consensus of the boys in the class that she was not desirable, would better my chances. (As it turns out, I was not the only one to make this calculation; she told me a few years later she was something of a magnet for "lonely boys.")

I became borderline obsessed with her. I tried everything I could, took every excuse to get closer to her, to be dependable and likeable and non-threatening. I genuinely did like her, but I obviously didn't respect her, since I hid from her my real motivations for some time. Eventually I asked her out, and she said no, and instead of accepting it and moving on, either becoming just friends or letting it go, I began this twisted little dance. I was there for her, supported her through rough times (which she had plenty of--it was high school, we all did), but I also periodically asked her out or told her I loved her. She was obviously incredibly uncomfortable with it, but I kept on, because of my needy, obsessive, one-sided "love." I felt that if she did not love me, my life was meaningless and worthless, but as long as there was some tiny hope that she someday might, I could continue.

In other words, I laid at her feet, unasked for and unwanted, responsibility for my mental health. I told her about my fears and my pain and my (at the time, quite severe and undertreated) depression, and considered her my best friend even as I schemed ways to get her to be as dependent on me as I was on her.

Eventually, high school ended. She moved on to a distant college, and her fragmenting family meant she no longer had a reason to return to our region even to visit. I maintained online contact with her for a time, which slowly developed into something more closely resembling a normal online friendship, but ultimately we simply drifted apart.

As I entered college, my proto-Nice Guy phase developed into true Nice Guy-ism. I'd tried the grand romantic gestures with Emma; I'd been (in my own eyes) the doomed unrequited lover nobly suffering. I'd never felt entitled to Emma's love or to sex (though obviously I had felt entitled to her emotional support), but rather unworthy of it. But in college the romantic melodrama of adolescence gave way to the self-centered entitlement of extended adolescence, and my depression began to be under control. As I started to develop a fledgling sense of self-worth, my sense of entitlement exploded: I had suffered. I was owed. I deserved validation, and validation meant sex.

My freshman year, I spent a lot of time with a woman named Sarah. She'd been in my class in high school, but our social circles at the time were almost entirely non-overlapping (one of my best friends was her best friend's lab partner one year). The only reason I remembered her at all was that she had been fairly attractive; I have no idea why she remembered me.

By college age, however, she was no longer "fairly attractive"; she was drop-dead gorgeous. She was also, I quickly learned, fiercely intelligent, proud, independent, angry, curious, quick-witted, elitist, lonely, and most emphatically not interested in any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with anyone. I did not feel about her at all the way I did about Emma; there was no mooning, no longing sighs, nothing of that sort. I did not, even in the twisted sense I understood the word at the time, love her; she was more like a buddy and debate partner I very much wanted to have sex with.

She was, as I mentioned, lonely. Our college was a large state school primarily devoted to churning out interchangeable degrees that students could use to apply for jobs that didn't much care what your degree was in. The only real exceptions were the English department and the Economics department, and even there most of the students were primarily just there to get their degree because that was the next step in the plan, not because they wanted to learn.

Sarah, however, was a true academic, going to the state school because she couldn't afford better, and that isolated her. I was not in her league, but found the things she wanted to talk about genuinely interesting, and so I was one of the few people she could actually have a conversation with about her interests. Also, I tended to agree with her a lot--even if I didn't agree, I'd find a way to say something true that sounded like agreement--which I think helped make me seem like an ally. Of course I was making an effort to be extra-agreeable because I thought it might slightly improve my (nonexistent) chances of sleeping with her, but I don't think she knew that.

It was about this time I formulated a theory of human interactions. People, I believed, were basically black boxes. You could not know what went on inside them, so you shouldn't try to know; all that mattered was keeping track of what button-presses produced what results. If I could just keep a person around long enough, and keep their attitude toward me positive, given time I should stumble on the sequence of buttons that would lead to the outcomes I wanted, whether that was sex with an attractive woman, friendship with a likeable man (note the implicit, sexist assumptions that men are for friendship, women I find attractive are for sex, and women I don't find attractive are not acknowledged at all), respect from a peer, or good grades from a professor.

In short, I was looking at other people like video games, and seeking the strategies or cheat codes that would let me win. I don't think it's at all an accident that Nice Guy Syndrome appears to be extremely common in the geek and gamer subcultures.

In one respect, this strategy worked. In the first couple of years of college, I had several professors whose classes I was able to game: a philosophy professor who was easily impressed by allusions to modern physics, and a literature professor who allowed us to e-mail in papers and could be tricked into accepting a paper late if you changed the datestamp in the e-mail header before you sent it. However, by midway through college (which is also when I started pulling out of my Nice Guy Syndrome) I realized this was defeating the point of learning as much as I could, and began intentionally seeking out challenges instead.

I never told Sarah about my attraction, and after a year she switched to another school. We corresponded briefly, but quickly lost touch.

I was frustrated, angry, at her and at myself. I felt cheated; I had done everything right (according to my arbitrarily and unilaterally defined rules, anyway), and not received the validation I felt I deserved. It'd be nice to say I learned my lesson and rethought my approach and realized what a horrible little pukestain I was.

I didn't.

Amanda. Catherine. Others whose names, to my shame, I cannot remember. I decided my error with Sarah was focusing on one woman for too long without making my move. Instead I would befriend a woman I found attractive, hang out with her, do things she found fun, share confidences, until I started to feel comfortable that maybe she liked me, and therefore safe enough to ask her out. When she refused, I immediately broke off contact.

It never occurred to me that I might be hurting anyone's feelings or causing them to think I only valued them for their bodies (which I never admitted to myself was true, even though my actions proved it). They were the ones who wronged me, after all, by not holding up their end of the bargain we never made. I was just trying to get into a safe position from which I would not be, could not be rejected.

This is where Nice Guy syndrome most clearly fits into rape culture. It is based on the idea that it should be possible to be unrejectable, without acknowledging that the possibility of rejection is a necessary corollary to the requirement of consent--if you can consent, you can withhold consent, and therefore reject me. Nice Guy Syndrome is thus, ultimately, yet another thinly veiled rape fantasy.

By about halfway through college, as I mentioned, I was moving away from Nice Guy Syndrome. I'd like to say it was because I realized it was misogynistic, narcissistic, and self-defeating, but I didn't. I moved away from it because I found a *different* way to feel safe enough to ask a woman out, and it actually worked. I realized that the best thing to do was just make my interest known as soon as possible, and then let her decide. I also started to get over the idea of sex-as-validation--a year-long romantic relationship in which sex was not an option pretty much cured me of it.

Ultimately, of course, I did evolve toward feminism. With time, I realized how horridly I behaved toward the women I pretended to be friends with. I'm still guilty over that, and I regret the nascent friendships that could have become something real, but never got a chance to blossom because I was too focused on sex, and I regret the potential friendships I don't know about, because I ignored women I didn't find attractive.

Most of all I regret how long it took me to realize I was treating men differently from women, and treating women according to how attractive I found them physically. In other words, I was failing to treat all people as people. There's no way I can apologize. All I can do is, when I see younger friends or relatives expressing sentiments that remind me of younger me, try to talk them out of it.

--Froborr

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* All names have been changed.↩

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

The Problem of Proselytizing

I have always been an atheist. My parents made it pretty clear: From a young age I knew we were Jewish, and we did not worship or believe in God. (Apparently, I was less clear on the distinction between the two, which led to me being enrolled in Hebrew School until I could differentiate them.) I have no “atheist conversion story,” although I could tell the story of how I became a skeptic some time.

That is a different article, however. The point I am trying to make is that I am happy as an atheist. I have never felt any particular need to be anything other than an atheist, never felt that I wanted to be anything other than an atheist, and never felt that I was missing out on anything by being an atheist.

Being an atheist is a huge part of who I am. I could not stop being an atheist without completely revising my outlook on the world. Becoming a believer would not be as simple as switching the “God” switch from “Yes” to “No.” In order to believe that God (or gods, or an impersonal supernatural force that comprised a privileged reference frame from which to view questions of morality and value) exists, I would have to redefine my understanding of the word “exists” to be able to include things not made of matter. I would have to redefine my definition of “true,” my definition of “evidence,” my definition of “reality.” I would have to completely revise the way I view the universe, and to get there, I would have to completely destroy the way I view the universe.

And beyond the existential distress of utterly transforming my worldview, there’s the social distress, too. Would such a drastic change influence the way my friends see me? Would it change my relationship with my fiancee? Depending on which religion I turned to, would it hurt my relationship with any of my family members?

No matter how it happened, becoming a believer would be an extremely stressful and painful experience. I’ve been told, by people who have done it, that the other way around is just as traumatic.

***

Greta Christina posted last month ^[1] that, “For many atheists, our main goal is persuading the world out of religion.” She goes on in the same post to establish herself in favor of that position:

We don’t want to see this happen by law or violence or any kind of force, of course. But we think religion isn’t just mistaken. We think it’s harmful. Some of think it’s appallingly harmful. Some of us think it’s inherently harmful: that the very qualities that make religion unique are exactly what make it capable of doing terrible harm. What’s more, we see religion as not just hurting atheists. We see it as hurting billions of believers. So we’re working towards a world where it no longer exists.

So, according to Greta Christina, her primary goal as an atheist is to make most of the world’s population suffer the trauma of losing their faith, so that they can then be better (read: more Greta Christina-like) people with truer (read: more similar to Greta Christina’s) beliefs. And I should be okay with this, because she promises not to use legal coercion or violence to bring it about.

I am not okay with this.

For starters, I am a skeptic. I demand truth claims be backed with empirical evidence. So: Where is the empirical evidence that religious belief is harmful, either to believers or non-believers? I want a serious study here: A comparison of abuse of power in religious institutions to similarly structured secular institutions, say, or of domestic abuse rates between religious and non-religious households, corrected for factors known or suspected to influence abuse rates not directly attributable to religion (such as authoritarianism, substance abuse, and abuse rates in past generations). Give me hard, empirical data that religion is harmful--that bad religious people would be less bad if they were atheists, that good religious people would be better if they were atheists, that suffering religious people would suffer less if they were atheists.

Then prove that it is always better to be atheist than religious. Show that there is never a person better off as a religious person, never a person whose religious faith makes the world around them better. Because if there is even one such person, then a world with universal atheism is worse than a world of pluralistic belief.

I find it absurd I have to make this argument. Somehow, large numbers of otherwise clearly very intelligent atheists are able to avoid seeing the blatant irony and hypocrisy of insisting, with no evidence whatsoever, that belief without evidence is harmful.

Second of all, I like diversity. Diversity is powerful and useful. In most fields of endeavor, empirical data and truth are not of primary importance; you can do data entry equally well regardless of whether you understand electronics or think your computer is powered by tiny gnomes. Without religious perspectives in particular, art, literature, music, and architecture would be sadly diminished. Imagine a world with no Sagrada Familia^[2], no Angkor Wat^[3], no Eddas^[4], no Lord of the Rings^[5], no Bach^[6]… the list is unfathomably long.

It is clear that, misapplied, religious faith is a hindrance to scientific and technical endeavors--creationism proves that. However, the existence of non-religious anti-science movements such as global warming denialism and the anti-vax movement call into question whether it is actually religion that is the problem, or clinging to demonstrably false, harmful beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence, which hardly seems an exclusive problem of the religious. Meanwhile, the existence of religious scientists in large numbers (one 2007 study^[7] found that more than a third of biologists and psychologists believe in God or gods) suggests that religious faith is not an insurmountable obstacle to scientific endeavor, if it is even necessarily an obstacle at all (which I regard as, at the very least, not proven).

Third, and most importantly: You do not have a right to make others suffer for your beliefs.

No one has that right. Ever.

If Greta Christina’s assessment of religion were correct--if all religious belief is both false and inherently harmful--then religion would be not only a mental illness, but the most widespread mental illness in history. But even if that were true (and I do not believe it is), you do not have a right to cure people by force unless they are demonstrably an immediate danger to themselves or others.

I cannot reiterate this enough: Proselytizing is yet another word for making people suffer in order to transform them into what you think they should be, for no other reason than because they are not what you think they should be.

What Greta Christina advocates--what any atheist advocates when they suggest “increasing the numbers of atheists” as a laudable goal, what any adherent of any religion advocates when they suggest “increasing the number of members of my religion”--is evil in one of its purest forms.

--Froborr

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^[1] What Are The Goals of the Atheist Movement?↩

^[2] Sagrada Família↩

^[3] Angkor Wat↩

^[4] Edda↩

^[5] Lord of the Rings↩

^[6] Johann Sebastian Bach↩

^[7] How Religious are America’s College and University Professors?↩

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Clashing

I don't process color well. When I was very small, my parents worried I might be color-blind, because I was very slow to learn the names of colors. When presented, for example, with a red triangle and a blue square, I would call all triangles "red" and all squares "blue." Eventually my parents realized that I was able to see the color, I was just more interested in the shapes. They bought me toy cars identical in all but color, and I was thus able to learn them better.

But I still see color differently than most. I cannot tell navy blue from black unless I can see both at once. Many shades of purple look blue to me, and a few shades of blue look purple. I rarely remember color, and when I do it is often obviously inaccurate color, such as a person being orange. I was in my twenties before I had a dream in color. And most important for our purposes today, I don't see clashing colors. Put purple and orange together, I just see purple and orange, nothing special or significant about the combination.

I don't consider any of this a handicap. Brains are interesting and color is boring, so I'd much rather have an interesting brain-quirk I can explore and compare to how other people's brains work than have "normal" color processing.*

If someone tells me a color looks good on me, I have to assume what they say is true. Likewise if someone tells me I can't wear two colors together: I add it to the list of colors not to combine, and make sure not to buy any clothes in at least one of the colors.

When I and my fiancee both look at a purple-and-orange pattern, we both see the same light arranged in the same way, but she sees clashing and I do not. The underlying material reality is identical, but our perceptions of it differ.

If she were to say, "You see, these colors clash because they generate oppositely charged color energy that interacts explosively to generate clash waves, which sadly you are blind to," I would require quite a bit of proof from her because she is making a claim about underlying material reality, not just her perceptions. Likewise if she said, "Oh, purple and orange are both living things that hate each other and fight all the time." But if she says, "These colors appear clashing to me," I accept that her perception is different from mine. Even if she says, "These colors clash," I know that she's talking about her personal perception.

I suppose, if I wanted to be an arrogant prick,** I could argue that my view of color is somehow more objective, because I don't see "clashing" where it "doesn't exist." As the great Terry Pratchett wrote in Hogfather: "Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy." We might add, "One particle of clashing." But that's irrelevent. Justice and mercy are human constructs; they don't exist out there but that makes them no less real when we create them in here. Clashing colors are a much more trivial example of the same principle: There might not be any material sense in which a purple object and an orange object clash, but in my fiancee's mind, the perception of purple and the perception of orange create the perception of clashing.

She is describing a real phenomenon. If we knew enough about the brain, we could doubtless pinpoint where and how clashing exists. More to the point, she could take a test on optics or the science of color, and there would not be a single question we could point to and say, "She got this wrong because she sees clashing colors." There is no meaningful sense in which seeing clashing can be said to be more or less objective than not seeing clashing; there is no independently testable question on which a person who sees clashing will reliably have a different answer than a person who does not.

This is why I don't--why I can't--agree with the so-called New Atheists. Yes, some people's religions lead them to believe demonstrably false statements, such as that the Earth is 6,000 years old, you can cure cancer with acupuncture, or prayer can change the path of a hurricane. These people are wrong and should be argued with, as well as pitied. And yes, some people use their religions to justify causing great harm and suffering. These people are assholes and should be opposed.

But most religious people, which is to say most people, don't. Nothing in their religion leads them to believe anything demonstrably false, or that ever could be demonstrably false. There is thus no meaningful sense in which atheism is more or less objective, or more or less correct, than any of a host of religious worldviews, and most of the arguments otherwise are strawmen. True, atheism is more parsimonious, but parsimony is a standard of the scientific method; there is no particular reason to insist on it in other endeavors.

I'm not an acommodationist:*** If someone says something I know to be demonstrably wrong, I will generally argue with them. If someone advocates evil, I will call them out on it, and I will not accept religion as a justification. But if somebody's religion doesn't cause them to spout falsehoods or advocate evil? I still don't accomodate them, because there's nothing to acommodate. They haven't said anything wrong--just provided another fascinating way in which others' perceptions differ from my own.


*For the record, I've been tested, and my color vision is entirely normal. Whatever is going on, it's in my brain.
**I know, I know. "Too late."
***I'm not sure there actually are any; it may well be another strawman.

--Froborr
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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.