Some thoughts on sexual harassment

I.

Autism and social awkwardness don’t generally cause you to sexually harass people.

Here I’m talking about the unambiguous, uncontroversial, clear examples of sexual harassment. I’ll talk about the gray areas a bit later.

A boss asks out their employee, or a hiring manager asks out someone they’re considering for a role, or a mentor asks out their mentee. Someone asks out someone they know to be in a monogamous relationship. Someone approaches someone they don’t know crudely with a sentence like “nice tits.” Someone repeatedly asks someone else out, even after they’ve been clearly rejected. Someone grabs someone else’s breasts without their consent, or rubs their genitals on someone else without their consent.¹

Now, is it possible that someone somewhere in the entire history of autism has sexually harassed someone in this sense, out of a sincere misunderstanding, because they’re autistic? Yes. It is not uncommon among autistic preteens and teenagers, who don’t yet know how to handle the new emotions of sexual attraction.² Some autistic people are severely affected in a way that makes them struggle with even clearly communicated social norms—although I am skeptical that anyone who has this problem winds up being a boss, a hiring manager, or a mentor. It’s too obviously disqualifying.

Nevertheless, these are not confusing or ambiguous social norms. “You are not allowed to touch people without their consent” is a social norm taught explicitly to two-year-olds. “You are not allowed to ask people out if you are their employer, mentor, or considering them for a job” is generally covered, explicitly, in employee sexual harassment training. If you have managed to get through life without anyone explicitly telling you that you shouldn’t hit on people in monogamous relationships or tell complete strangers they have nice tits, consider this me telling you this fact. You’re welcome.

The world is full of confusing social norms; dating and relationships, even more so. These are not the confusing ones.

Indeed, autistic people I know are vastly more likely to make the opposite error: to become so self-effacing romantically and sexually that they never express romantic or sexual interest in anyone, and end up loveshy.

In general, sexual harassment is caused by:

1. A person believes incorrect things about dating in general (“women secretly like it when you crudely compliment them”) or about this situation in specific (“that person is so into me that they want me to hit on them even though I’m their boss”).

2. A person knows they’re coercing someone else into sex or a relationship, or knows that they’re making someone uncomfortable, and is doing that on purpose because they want to.

Now, you might assume that #1 is a thing autistic people do, because it involves misunderstanding social situations. It is mostly not. Autistic people like following clearly laid out rules for social interaction. “My illegible social intuition says I can override the clearly laid out rules for this social interaction and it’ll be fine” is an allistic social problem.

I think this misunderstanding is common for two reasons.

First, a lot of shy awkward people feel nervous about the possibility of accidentally sexually harassing someone. If you’re a decent person, it can be hard to understand why anyone would want to coerce people into a relationship or make people uncomfortable. And if you tend to be diffident and unassertive, it’s hard to imagine how someone could have no social skills disability and still be so delusional as to think that a monogamous person they just met wants to cheat on his spouse with them. So you end up asking yourself “why would I do this if I were in this person’s shoes?” and the answer you come up with is “I was profoundly confused about the basic norms of social interaction, because somehow I had gotten to the age of 35 without anyone telling me you’re not supposed to hit on people in monogamous relationships.” Because you’re scared that you might be making an equally grave mistake, you want to treat sexual harassers with a level of kindness and sympathy they don’t deserve.

Second, some people are sexual harassers or apologists for sexual harassers. They benefit from a system in which they’re held to low standards. If you’d like to get away with hitting on your employees, then of course you’re going to conjure up some kind of social-skills disability that leaves you unable to understand you’re not supposed to hit on your employees, but mysteriously still leaves you able to handle every other part of being a boss.

I urge shy awkward people who have a knee-jerk sympathetic reaction to sexual harassers to reconsider their choices. I understand why you do; I’ve been there. And, without meaning to, you are providing cover to predators—predators who are very likely to victimize people like you, shy awkward people who don’t understand social norms, because those people are easy to victimize. Have more solidarity for your own side than for the predators using you as a human shield.

II.

But there is the gray area, right.

Sometimes you can talk about sexuality (in a scientific way, or a joking shitposty way, or as gossip) at a party. Sometimes you can give people sexualized or romantic but not crude compliments, like “you have beautiful eyes” or “your legs look fantastic in that skirt.” Sometimes you can hold someone’s hand, or put your arm around their shoulder, or caress them, or play with their hair, or ask to do those things. Sometimes you can hit on people while you are drunk. Sometimes you can say perfectly neutral things, but communicate with your body language and tone of voice that you really, really want to fuck someone. Sometimes you can ask people if they’re going to Folsom next weekend. Sometimes you can ask people out!

No one except three radical feminists and four purity-culture weirdos wants a community where all of these things are unacceptable always in every circumstance. But all of these things have some chance of making people uncomfortable. And it’s… you know, bad? To make people uncomfortable?

And, realistically, if (conventionally attractive) women are continually having to fend off men asking to hold their hand or telling them they have beautiful eyes or subtexting their desire to fuck, they’re not going to want to go to your events. Your community is going to have a gender ratio that’s absolute shit.

Some people who don’t often get sexual attention (straight men, or less conventionally attractive straight women, or less queerly attractive queers) find it confusing why sexual attention would be a bad thing. But it makes sense! Imagine being hit on by someone you don’t find attractive at all (maybe someone of the wrong gender or orientation for you). It can be awkward. You are worried about letting them down gently and letting them save face. You are worried about not leading them on. You are worried about making them feel unattractive or unwanted. And since women tend to be socialized to be people pleasers and not to make a fuss, they often feel all of these worries much more acutely.

Now imagine getting hit on by someone who is larger and stronger than you and can beat you up, or someone who is more popular than you and hosts all the cool parties, or someone whom you know to be mean and vindictive when they get mad, or even someone where you don’t know how popular or how vindictive they are. Suddenly you’re worried about rejecting this person in a way that doesn’t make them mad or make them hate you. You don’t want to be yelled at or insulted. You don’t want to quietly stop getting party invitations, or have nasty rumors spread about you. And—even if you live in a culture where people don’t violently attack each other—there is still that lizard-brain that thinks this is the savannah and you don’t want to piss off the person who can murder you with their bare hands.

I don’t mean this to say that it’s bad or wrong to ask people out even if you might get rejected. It’s not. Asking people out can also be a good thing, because it can lead to romantic love and sex and friendship and babies and mutual support in times of trouble and growing old together still as in love as the day you met. Even if someone turns you down, they’re often happy and flattered to be asked! But, you know, “I don’t want to deal with delicate social interactions where I have to be careful with other people’s feelings” is also a natural, understandable desire.

I have thought about this a lot, as a Giver of Dating Advice. It is difficult to target your dating advice to the right demographic. Some people need to be advised to be bolder; other people need to be advised to be less bold. Some people need the advice “it isn’t an unthinkable moral horror to mistakenly make someone feel uncomfortable”; other people need the advice “before you say something, you need to think about how it might make other people feel.” Some people need both at once!

And there isn’t a single objective right level of boldness this margin is too narrow to contain. You can be bolder, without making anyone uncomfortable, if your community’s norms welcome sexual boldness. If you are attractive. If you are good at reading people and backing off when they give subtle signs of discomfort. If you come off as well-meaning and friendly and chill. If you tend to flirt with people who aren’t often flirted with but would like to be. If you’re white, or cis, or don’t have body language associated with neurodivergence.

Many of these are unfair! Some of them are oppressive! It’s still true.

I have mostly erred on the side of recommending boldness, because in my experience meeting my readers you guys all tend to be way too shy.

Also, being meek doesn’t always make women comfortable either. I have observed in several male-dominated spaces that conventionally attractive women get swarmed by a dozen men, all of whom clearly want to date and/or fuck her, but none of whom ever make this fact explicit enough that she can turn them down. This is unpleasant if you’re the center of the swarm and would like to have normal conversations without navigating the risk of hurting the swarm’s feelings or giving them false hope. My thought process here is that, if men instead make their desires more explicit and get rejected, they will swarm less and women will be more comfortable in the long run.

But… there is a risk, when I give this advice, that I’m giving it to entirely the wrong people. That some people are going to hear me say “be bolder, ask people out, don’t worry too much about making people transiently uncomfortable, we should all be more normal about sex and stop treating it as inherently taboo” and interpret me as saying “you should talk about sex whenever without paying attention to whether other people feel grossed out or embarrassed. You should tell every woman you think is pretty that she’s pretty regardless of circumstances or her likely feelings. Every conversation can have sexual subtext if you try hard and believe in yourself.”

III.

Some straight men ask a lot of women out. Like, a lot of women. Like, every woman they know and find minimally attractive.

This behavior:

1. Even in the best of circumstances, makes some women feel unhappy, either because they didn’t like having to turn the guy down or because they don’t like being hit on by a man who would just as happily go out with anyone else with boobs.

2. Is very effective for getting laid.

I don’t think this behavior, like, is evil or makes you a bad person, as long as you take no for an answer and avoid actual sexual harassment; I quite like some people who do it (although I also generally advise them to cut it out if the topic comes up). But it sure does make you obnoxious at parties. If more than a few guys are nonstop spamming out flirtation, an event can become unpleasant for every woman there.

But there’s not a hard line between good and bad behavior here, right? It’s not like the International Union of Feminists and Allied Women’s Groups have ruled that men can ask out no more than one woman per week, unless he can provide four reliable witnesses testifying that he has refrained from flirtation for at least three months previous. If you hit on more women, you are more likely to find someone who wants to have sex with you, making you and her happy (yay!). You also annoy more women and, if you’re indiscriminate enough, make more women feel like they’re primarily valuable as a validation dispenser and self-cleaning Fleshlight (boo!). You also burn the commons for other men, who are more likely to be assumed to be spamming out flirtations at every woman that moves (boo!).

When do the negatives outweigh the positives? Uh, shit, I don’t know. Probably listen if your friends tell you to hit on fewer women? Definitely listen if you’re at a con and conference staff tells you to hit on fewer women? But if your friends think spamming out flirtations is fine (because they’re friends with you so they probably think your behavior is fine), and if your behavior isn’t violating conference policies because you avoid outright harassment or aren’t at a con in the first place, then ????

Like, it would be one thing if this behavior were Definitely Bad, the way it’s bad to hit on your employees, and we could just ban it. But I don’t know how to think about people whose behavior improves their own lives, improves the lives of some other people, and often harms third parties. I would urge them to have good judgment, I guess? But “have good judgment” is almost uniquely terrible advice. If your judgment is bad enough, you always think you have good judgment.

I guess the economist solution is to tax it. Every time a straight guy hits on someone he has gotta pay $5 into the fund and at the end of the month we take the money and buy all the women and enbies ice cream.

IV.

I’ve been mostly talking in generalities here, because I want this post to be useful to people who aren’t embroiled in the topic du jour. But there is one point I do want to make specifically about Red Means No, the consensual nonconsent orgies organized by rationalist and sexologist Aella.

I have seen many claims that effective altruist and rationalist women feel ambient social pressure to go to Red Means No because of all the excellent networking there. As far as I can tell, the networking at Red Means No is… not… that great?

People I know are divided into two groups:

1. [very small group] “Yay! Red Means No is fun! It makes me happy that I can go to it.”

2. [extremely large group which includes me] “You couldn’t pay me enough money to go to Red Means No. Fortunately, this is a completely optional activity and I face no consequences whatsoever from refusing to attend.”

This is not because people I know are universally chill, emotionally stable people who trust that the quality of their work will show regardless of who their friends are. I have been subjected, quite against my will, to an enormous amount of discussion of the coworking space Constellation, who works there, who is trying to work there, who used to work there but doesn’t anymore, who has a real office and who is consigned to trying to find an empty call booth from which to take meetings, what criteria Constellation staff is using to make all these determinations, why Constellation staff should use alternate criteria that give the speaker a real office, etc. etc. From this, I conclude that Constellation is useful for networking and Red Means No isn’t.

There are some people who work in AI safety who attend Red Means No, but almost everyone who attends Red Means No doesn’t work in AI safety. Other effective altruist cause areas are even more poorly represented. “Some people who work in AI safety attend this event” is an honor that Red Means No shares with any number of recurring dinners, craft nights, singing nights, hiking clubs, SCA wars, D&D groups, niche freeform roleplay communities, rock climbing groups, Burning Man camps, and Starcraft guilds. Hell, I meet a bunch of the AI safety people I know by taking my kid to other children’s birthday parties, and I wouldn’t conclude from this that the AI safety community is pressuring everyone into having babies.

The majority of people at Red Means No are not rationalists. They are kinky people who enjoy a particular form of edgeplay BDSM, in a safe context, among other people who are enthusiastic about this form of edgeplay BDSM. Not all events founded by a rationalist have majority rationalist attendees. We can talk to non-rationalists, you know. It’s not illegal.

Furthermore, Red Means No is not very large. Even if all five or ten AI safety advocates who sometimes attend Red Means No took a solemn oath to only network with people they meet at sex parties, you could network with literally thousands of other people working in AI safety. In the real world, you could also network with these people the 362 days a year they aren’t attending a niche controversial sex party.

I say this not to defend the honor of AI safety. If I actually thought that women in AI safety were being expected to attend orgies for professional networking purposes, I would be the first to object. But I’m worried that if a bunch of people are saying “you have to be okay with consensual nonconsent orgies to be a woman in AI safety” then the vast majority of women—who, like the vast majority of people, couldn’t be paid enough money to attend a consensual nonconsent orgy—are going to select out of working in AI safety. Why bother if you’re always going to be locked out of the highest echelons of the community because of your sexuality? Why bother if men only see you as, not just a sex object, but a sex object for a single, specific, relatively rare, disturbing-to-many-people kink?

Like, the guest list for Red Means No is (quite rightly) private. You can’t ever know that people aren’t attending consensual nonconsent orgies. If some people are making this claim very confidently, it makes sense that a lot of people would believe it, because they have no access to evidence that it’s bullshit. But as far as I can tell it is bullshit?

The AI industry, effective altruism, and the rationality community surely have enough problems with gender dynamics already. We don’t need to be making up problems with which to terrify women newly entering the community.

V.

Here’s an interesting little game to play about your favorite group of people well-known enough to have cancel mobs whipped up about them. I always find the results enlightening, especially if the cancel mob purports to be feminist or acting in the interests of women or trying to make women welcome.

• What percentage of the people cancelled are women? How does this compare to the overall demographics in the group?

• Do women get cancelled for different things than men do? In particular, do men get cancelled for things like “is a rapist” or “embezzled huge amounts of money” while women get cancelled for things like “made a tasteless joke” or “wrote a story I think is Problematique” or “I don’t like her vibe”?

• Are there men who are doing the exact same thing the woman is doing without being bothered?

• If a man is cancelled, are the women around him cancelled for not disowning him quickly or fervently enough? Do these cancellations take into account any reasons she might have for not disowning him (e.g. financial dependence, child custody, abuse)? Does the same thing happen if the genders are swapped?

• If a man does something wrong, do people condemn him less enthusiastically than they condemn a nearby woman who failed to stop him?

• What percentage of the women cancelled are Bad? That is, what percentage are queer, or trans, or gender-non-conforming, or sexually promiscuous, or sex workers, or noticeably fat, or unphotogenically mentally ill, or otherwise doing something Our Culture Believes It Is Bad For Women To Do?

• What percentage of the people cancelled are queer men, trans men, gender-non-conforming men, or nonbinary people assigned male at birth whom everyone’s misgendering?

• What is it called, legally, when you target someone for harassment based on their sex, perceived sex, or behavior that doesn’t match the expected behavior for their sex?

You can take this too far. Women and nonbinary people can be bad actors too, and I have seen women and nonbinary people claim that they’re being cancelled because of misogyny when they were actually being cancelled for theft, blatant plagiarism, sexual assault, or stirring up harassment mobs. If your identity shields you from scrutiny, bad actors will take advantage of that. You always need to consider the merits of every individual case on its own and not just assume that members of some demographic are safe.

And, indeed, someone can legitimately be a victim of misogynist harassment and also be a bad actor who is hurting people. You must be able to both condemn misogynist harassment and condemn whatever bad stuff the victim actually did.

But, you know, I do recommend taking a step back and thinking about what percentage of the rage directed at this person is because of something they actually did wrong. Ask yourself: what percentage of this rage is clearly because— as a few completely random examples with absolutely no connection to any specific person— she’s a woman who openly talks about sex, or a woman who sells sex, or a woman who is edgy and courts controversy even though she knows perfectly well only men are supposed to do that, or a hot woman who doesn’t take many showers and therefore dares to be Not Pleasing To This Specific Man’s Boner?

Huh. Wow. Fascinating. What a bizarre coincidence. I am sure this means nothing.

Read Hot Allostatic Load, guys.

(and is also clearly the largest-scale victim of SlutCon-related sexual harassment)

1. This is actually called “sexual assault” or “sexual battery” and it is illegal.

2. Some of my readers are cringing right now remembering their own bad behavior in seventh grade.