On Being Attracted

To women, specifically, but some of this probably generalizes.

This will be a three-parter:

1. Thoughts on and reactions to Sympathetic Opposition’s how and why to be ladylike (for women with autism).

2. Looking at some key concepts there from the male point of view.

3. Can the attraction-resentment cycle be mitigated?

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Sympathic Opposition’s “how and why to be ladylike” is low key one of the most important sociocultural posts I’ve ever read just for being the first to point out to me the true relationship between unrequited attraction and intense negativity. Regardless of whether or not it was her wholly original observation, “being overtly sexy hijacks people’s attention on a level that they don’t have much control over–and the overt hate/dislike that they respond with is an attempt to wrest back some control over their responses” is, again, one of the most important statements I’ve read in terms of modeling the world I live in. This has implications not just for sexual attraction (though I’m intending it will remain the subject of most of the rest of this post), but for all other kinds of attraction-adjacent concepts from marketing and advertising to all manner of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations.

Tangent: do people enjoy hating things versus is it a compulsive defense mechanism versus is it signaling games all the way down? I think about this a lot because I seem to hate fewer things and less passionately than most of the rest of the world vis a vis social media. To clarify, I’m not asserting that people are secretly attracted to the things they hate, merely wondering if there’s a major component of this where some element of their life is stealing away their attention in a way that results in a need to be passionately negative about something; and I think perhaps in non-sexual situations this isn’t one-to-one in terms of the object for both¹. Are feelings of control over one’s life on the opposite end of an axis from generalized anger?²

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This tangent has a topical further tangent; while I was writing this one of the few remaining pharmacists I follow on Twitter retweeted something by one of the thousands of accounts whose entire existence seems to be complaining about PBMs³, tweet in question:

4.83bn prescriptions filled in 2023 in the USA. That’s almost 15/Citizen. 89% of this industry is under mafia control of 3 corporations. It’s an absolute crisis. It’s a national disgrace that legislators in-spite of bipartisan support cannot reform the #pbmafia

My reaction was to ask if this framing is something that’s interesting or useful to anyone not involved in pharmacy—point being that I’m curious if this kind of activism has any actual impact. One of my bugbears with the pharmacy profession generally (and the activists especially) is how much they like to complain about problems instead of taking any steps towards actually fixing them beyond complaining about it on social media. Another of my followers remarked:

This is an unfortunate underpinning of the profession as a whole: identify a problem, emphasize how bad the problem is or could be, but when asked for a solution, repeat how bad the problem is.

Most obvious in our response to drug-drug interactions but applies elsewhere/nonclinical contexts too

Also somewhat topical in that this kind of thing is sort of the key point of one of Scott Alexander’s recent posts.

But anyways, it got picked up by a different pharmacy clout farming account⁴, so I had a fascinating afternoon of being accused of being a PCMA shill (???⁵) by a host of people whom one might suspect prefer to just be mad about things.

Thinking on it, I guess this one has a maybe-too-obvious relationship between a lack of control (shitty independent pharmacy reimbursement rates) and anger (bitching at strangers on Twitter).

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Anyways, back on track. Sympathetic Opposition on young girls discovering their social options:

the third, very obvious option is to be overtly sexy. this is a very appealing strategy especially to young girls who maybe had trouble making friends and aren’t used to getting any attention from other people at all. all of the sudden people will pay more attention to you, do you favors, like you more than they did before, want to be in your good graces. your mom will warn you against this one but frankly you and your mom don't really understand each other very well. she won't be able to explain this in a way that’s understandable for you, and you don’t have the skills to parse what she is saying. plus she is likely to say much more about how this strategy is bad for you, which isn’t true (yet), and less about how it’s annoying for other people around you and they will resent you for it.

but, over time, you will notice that this is a high variance strategy. a lot of people will resent you for it, loudly. women will be wary of you. men will often go from liking you extremely to shit talking you. and it will feel unfair and maybe scary.

being overtly sexy hijacks people’s attention on a level that they don’t have much control over–and the overt hate/dislike that they respond with is an attempt to wrest back some control over their responses. it’s simple epistemic hygiene. and the girls don’t like it bc they feel competed with and defected against and they feel it’s unfair and unpleasant. when they feel unfairly competed against sexually, they are going to respond by upping the social competition, and it will suck for ppl like us because we have already established we are not good at that

another reason that men might kind of split on you, really liking you at first and then getting mad at you, is that they feel screwed over. they were being nice to you because you seemed sexually available to them, you weren’t, they feel cheated and also dumb. that’s their problem–except, you’re doing all this in the first place as a social strategy, and when the social strategy doesn’t work, that’s your problem. morally they’re probably in the wrong here for expecting something you never said you would give them but we have to talk strategically here

This contains two important truths, the first being what I alluded to previously wrt attention-hijacking. It also importantly explains the attracted => feel embarrassed => hater cascade and we’ll come back to this.

The second is the soft meta-defection in making explicit what is often left deeply implicit wrt female sexual competition, also:

if you’re a weird woman who legitimately gets along better w men, that is valid. but that being said there is a certain amount of competition for limited male attention going on socially. bc its easier to get men to be nice to you than women. but if you are monopolizing male attention it will make other women uncomfortable & they will not feel the need to be nice to you & frankly its fair

also when women can tell, or believe, that you are doing something painful/uncomfortable/dangerous/inconvenient (or, specifically, doing something more painful/uncomfortable/dangerous/inconvenient, than they want to do) to be more sexually attractive, they will feel defected against. obvious plastic surgery hits this really hard, a ton of makeup hits this really hard, very high heels, clothing that’s revealing enough to limit movement. this isn’t about clothes but relatedly, girls will feel defected against if you eat in a way that they believe would be uncomfortable for them & they believe that you’re doing it to be skinny(er than they are). they could be totally wrong about why you’re doing it, & they’re likely to be totally wrong about whether it would even be uncomfortable, but there it is. 

don’t get too down about this because there are a lot of ways to increase how attractive you are without triggering other women to think you’re doing sthg unfair. you can figure out which colors & styles of clothing look best on you; that won’t usually make other women uncomfortable. you can get invested in your health in a way that makes you look better but also doesn't make other women feel defected against. if you eat in a way that obviously actually makes you feel better, or exercise in a way that obv actually makes you feel better or gives you a skill, then ppl will feel less defected against bc its plausibly deniable that you're just competing w them

This goes a long distance to explain female normie behavior for the non-normie girlies but also for a lot of us men, autism-or-no, to whom this might otherwise seem deeply arcane. Conventional wisdom can lead one to the conclusion that nobody hates women more than women, and here’s a lot of why. This strongly recontextualizes a lot of things, especially with regards to sex-negative feminism.

Before Tiresias became a prophet he had spent seven confusing years as a woman, and made two important discoveries about women.  First, that women get more pleasure from love making than men.  When he told this discovery to Hera and Zeus, Hera, in a rage, struck him blind, which lead to his second discovery: not all women want to hear this.⁶

It’s not only about signaling, but also in the price of what’s sacrificed for the signal.

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We can also glean some wisdom from how Sympathetic Opposition proposes one mitigate the problems of being socially-unacceptably-sexy:

acting like a lady is leveraging your attractiveness (whatever degree of it you might have) while also giving yourself/the people you’re interacting with, plausible deniability that you’re leveraging your attractiveness. now this might sound kind of fucked up. and i’m not saying it’s never fucked up. also i'm not saying this always works, you just don't have total control over other individuals sadly (or you wouldn't have to strategize like this at all). but even in the worst case scenario idt it’s any more fucked up than being overtly sexy & then not putting out for the ppl who are nice to you. and in most cases it is far less fucked up, because the best way to execute that plausible deniability, is to give people something they will actually value. so then the structure of what happens is that they are initially nicer to you bc you're attractive, but you give them something else that they like enough that they won’t feel cheated.

For one, there’s an important generalized socialization secret there: giving people something of value to make up for not giving them what they want⁷. There’s a lot of underappreciated value in leaving a line of retreat. I described something kind of similar in terms of social maneuvering in the long-winded additional third section of my pharmacy explainer wrt customer service as a skill:

Anyways, customer service is a lot like [improv], you want to try to get into these kinds of conversational flow states, because it feels pretty good for everyone involved and feelin’ good is the paramount goal in customer service.  Doing this well is a skill you’ll have to practice.  Always be thinking of where you want an interaction to go and try to build a rhetorical road to get there. Often times it will be as simple as “I want to sell this prescription and get them out of my line” or “this person is weird and off-putting but has a question and I need to get through it so I can get back to work” and so on.  If it’s not something that comes to you naturally, learn to build up an internal library of generic reactions to common generic situations and stories that you can use to buy time.

I hope it isn’t too absurdly reductive to describe being gracefully sexy in this manner as akin to customer service.

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So there’s part 1 and I also maybe accidentally speedran through a good chunk of part 3, how about part 2: how can I make this about me I mean what is the male perspective on sexiness I mean how can I make “what is the male perspective on sexiness” sound less stupid and more high brow?

I’ve written before that I don’t think there is an explicit “pure” pattern of heterosexual male arousal⁸, but rather than it can be generalized as a reaction to perceived femininity. Now, given that something like “perceived femininity” can be so vague it’s kind of cheating, this covers a lot of bases:

• Different cultures having different popular conceptions of femininity or what’s considered attractive

• Popular trends in what’s considered attractive changing over time even within a culture

• That sexual attraction is malleable around a basic, common-but-fuzzy reference point fits into any evopsych puzzle without pigeon-holing all of humanity into the same set of survival-fitting specific physical preferences

• Accommodates explaining a wide variety of basic sexual preferences and/or unusual fetishes

• Enables and explains conscious or subconscious attraction to objects or other people who are not actually female but are being perceived as female⁹

• Can imbue the elements of sexual attraction to something without physical sex being involved¹⁰

• Lastly, of course, man-see-woman-get-horny

I suspect this is even a theory you could test and so I wonder if someone already has, though I’m not strictly eager to go Googling or digging through psychology research on this subject.

We can further suggest that the context of sexual attraction guides the response. In cases of object attraction or attraction over a distance, this inspires a more, uh, self-directed approach to gratification, likewise paraphilias have a range of invoked responses that can tend to vary outside of direct “try to have sex with it”. Elsewise, a woman being directly provocative is more likely to be inviting action whereas passive attraction is socialized to punish uninvited action.

Through this lens, we can see how Sympathetic Opposition’s point that being ladylike providing a measure of plausible deniability is spot on in that it provides a sort of contextual redirection for automatic (or unwilling, “attention hijacking”) attraction. However, I suspect it’s not just that manners signal unobtainability (lord knows there’s many a man who won’t balk at pursuing the impossible) so much as setting the expectation for a sort of social sacredness. A high-class woman is not merely unobtainable, she is meant to be, in a sense, collectible¹¹; uniquely difficult to obtain—someone who must be won over—who is thus rare thus must be preserved, with an element of status gaming in that being seen as with someone of high class imparts high class. This all redirects the pattern of sexual attraction from the natural urgency of testosterone to respect for a taboo that demands (and maybe theoretically rewards) self-control¹².

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Some more Sympathetic Opposition:

when you’re sexually attractive to a man you’re talking to, it hijacks some of his attention, and it’s not easy for him to wrest it back. sorry for sounding like a middle aged schoolteacher explaining dress code to you. overt tits and ass hit the hardest with this but showing lots of leg & fetishy shit does too. the thing is he won’t really mind when he feels like you might be having sex, but if it ever becomes clear that that’s definitely not happening, then frequently the tool he will use to wrest some of his hijacked attention back from you, is feeling negative feelings about you. another aspect is that he might feel that he could never hijack attention in the same way, that he could look good but what you are doing to him is something he’s incapable of–so the easiest, most available go-to negative is resentment, which is very poisonous. people don’t like feeling manipulated unreciprocally without payoff. 

that being said, the more old-fashioned/more stereotypically ladylike/more formal/more expensive (sorry but cost does matter) the vibe of your outfit is, the more overt sexuality you can get away with without triggering this–bc all of those signal unattainability–when you actually are unattainable no one will be surprised

& also if you’re good at managing people you can get away with more overt sexuality without triggering this

From the male side of this, on a broader context we’re sort of indirectly talking about the friend zone, especially inasmuch as “negative feelings” describes how the incels of the world choose to react to unrequited attraction poorly. Being a little tongue-in-cheek here again; before I even came across ladder theory—the ancient internet underpinnings of what eventually became friend zone/incel discourse¹³—I’d already had an experience where I’d gotten “just friends”’d by a girl who was conspicuously hiding a boyfriend to string me (and, as I found out later, two other guys) along. I didn’t take it very well. I wouldn’t say this radicalized me or anything, but it was enough to forever after be like oh yeah this is definitely a real phenomenon and anyone trying to wholesale deny it is either an idiot or trying to obfuscate their own poor behavior.

Problem is, look, ladder theory is a systematic failure of modeling too. For one, the idea that every man would voluntarily sleep with every woman screams precocious virgin. Second, modeling potential friends versus potential lovers, especially as an immovable dichotomy, is a flawed understanding of social dynamics¹⁴. Third, sometimes the “just friends” gambit is earnest, they’re not always hiding the boyfriend and relationships can actually be ruined by irresponsible intimacy. There is some degree to which ladder theory is a fair and accurate assessment, but it’s oversimplifying a lot in order to unfairly justify poor behavior and, again, being mad about it isn’t going to get you laid either.

I think reasonable minds would agree with how Sympathetic Opposition frames it here, that intrasexual social dynamics can frequently cause there to be an unavoidable mix of feeling manipulated and misled about sexual availability, which can be packaged as “attention hijacking”, and that the result tends to be guy-hates-the-girl. There’s probably always going to be disagreements over who is more at fault and to what degree¹⁵ (especially on the subject of where guy-hating-the-girl goes too far) and one’s thoughts on this might change over time, which is certainly true for me. “Being ladylike” is an elegant compromise, both in that it doesn’t duck some amount of responsibility for this problem while saying at its core “look we’ll give you some of what you want if you cool it when you don’t get the whole deal”, we can compromise here. Given how hostile relationship discourse can get I think any amount of olive branching is extremely admirable.

I think you could also point to something like “being gentlemanly” as a similarly unstated reciprocal of this—something that likewise a lot of men understand and practice somewhat innately without having a formalization for it laid out like was done here with Sympathetic Opposition’s post. In the same way girls can harvest some of the natural rewards of attention grabbing by being “tastefully sexy” to prevent both the appearance of defecting in the competing-for-attention game and causing uncomfortable parasocial outcomes, you as a guy have the option of realizing there’s a game being played here and metering your attention-giving with a pre-baked understanding that it’s strictly look-but-don’t-touch. There’s a probably-more-good middle ground between obnoxious male feminist/reddit fedora milady bullshit/closeted aspiring rapist and pickup artist/incel influencer/unrepentant misogynist for being “tastefully only a bit of a creeper”.

Testosterone blows and your attention is going to sometimes get hijacked beyond your ability to expect and predict, and yes this is very unfair, but knowing is half the battle and it’s still ultimately your responsibility to assert some self-control without lashing out. And nobody likes coomers, y’all are nasty.

1. Or in other words, I think that people’s tendency to develop negative feelings for the object of their desire seems to be relatively unique to sexual attraction or other explicit addictions.

2. “Malignancy”? “Malthymia”?

3. I realize this footnote is going to be utterly pointless because the people who are going to get mad about me pointing this out are not going to read this and are going to jump to the conclusion I’m somehow defending PBMs anyways, but to make it clear for those of you who actually do read this, I am not defending PBMs. They’re pretty bad.

4. This is only slightly tongue-in-cheek, the Angry Pharmacist is admittedly kind of a legend in the ancient pharmacy blogosphere but he disappeared for a very long period of time only to resurface somewhat recently to reinvented himself on Twitter as kind of a generic angry guy influencer type.

5. I literally don’t even know what PCMA is an acronym for in this context…

6. From this TLP classic.

7. This doesn’t quite fit contextually here but this also reminds me of discovering how titles are a “social lubricant”—it’s easy as an inexperienced socialite (introvert) to see positional vernacular (titles) as being kind of dumb and arbitrary and socially divisive but in basically every case they act as a form of obligatory flattery that neither strictly debases one for participating nor uncomfortably humbles the person being flattered. Call me Dr. Pantera and I’ll think it’s sort of weird if technically correct but I will appreciate that you’ve taken an extra step you didn’t need to, unless you do it sarcastically or I already think you’re kind of a blowhard in which case I’ll think you’re a bit of a blowhard.

8. In other words, there isn’t a unified pattern of man-see-woman-get-horny in the sense that you can’t use a single conceptualization that establishes a common baseline of attractiveness to all men. In other, other words no two dudes are gonna be turned on by the same things, like look guys as a congress can’t even agree on tits or ass. This seems a little dumb and obvious to say out loud, but think cognitive blind spots here—what I’m getting at is that it may not be intuitively obvious to everyone that the things that get their rocks off may not hit the same for everyone else.

9. The archetypical modern example of this IMO is men playing as female characters in online games. If it’s not something you’ve spent time noticing and thinking about and/or is something you’ve never done, it’s worth a try just to see how much different other random strangers treat you casually even if they know you’re male IRL. (The more social a game is the more apparent this will be.)

In the inverse, there’s reportedly a lot of women who enjoy playing male characters just because people tend to be more willing to ignore them.

10. I guess this might be another fancy way of restating “unusual fetishes”, but here I have in mind something like, say, online or long-distance relationships where there can be an intensity of attraction but no physical possibility of hittin it.

11. Not in the sense that you gotta catch ‘em all, but that they are to be treasured. Yes, this is objectifying, but in the spirit of Sympathetic Opposition’s frankness on taboo subjects wrt female sexual competition I’m going to point out that we all know the truth here is that everyone—not even just women—likes objectification as long as it’s coming from a desired source.

12. Sexual restraint, as with other forms of self-deprivation, can be a potent status symbol, the potential rewards of impulsivity sacrificed to the social ritual of proving one isn’t merely some savage beast.

13. Was tempted to lump in MGTOW here but that’s a strictly different flavor of a similar sort of misguided-post-hoc-justified misogyny.

14. Chiefly, there’s a failure to appreciate time scales here, which I think reflects a degree of youth that hasn’t yet learned that all relationships shift over time.

15. In case it isn’t obvious from the rest of this piece, my take here is that the real villain is testosterone. All the cool muscle stuff aside, and in a more serious sense there’s definitely much of all the cool stuff in human history being the result of guys doing T-fueled guy shit, but most guys don’t really understand how much it also kinda fucks us up and the girls don’t have a clear picture of what they’re missing out on.