Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zozbot123 2712 days ago
I suspect that "how assertive should I be" is the wrong question to ask-- there are many ways of being "assertive", only some of which work well! As a society, we are still in the process of developing-- and raising awareness about-- workable and effective sexual/dating "scripts" that men can stick to, and trust that they won't run into obvious problems. As the article hopefully makes clear, even the outwardly-trivial problem of how to ascertain full consent in a way that doesn't "ruin the mood" for the typical girl who was expecting the guy to "just man up and go for it!" is far from easy to solve. (This is not to say that such solutions, and more generally, such workable scripts don't exist somewhere already - the whole problem however is how to coalesce trust around them, from both the "male" and "female" perspective.)
1 comments
MRD85 2711 days ago
If we develop a set of working scripts to indicate availability, then women will still go for men who are "bold" enough to deviate from the script and seize the day. It's a complex issue, and it's my belief that the traits that women find attractive in men and the traits that women would like to find attractive in men are two different sets with less overlap than you'd imagine.
link
krapp 2711 days ago
>If we develop a set of working scripts to indicate availability, then women will still go for men who are "bold" enough to deviate from the script and seize the day.

Some will, some won't, some will in some circumstances and won't in others. Women aren't actors playing roles to deceive men or buggy data sets for which a properly efficient sexual algorithm has to be discovered, they're just human beings and you just need to deal with them as individuals, get to know them as people, and communicate with them. And accept that if they don't find you attractive, or don't want to sleep with you, that's fine.

link
zozbot123 2711 days ago
> ... women will still go for men who are "bold" enough to deviate from the script and seize the day.

There will be lots of ways to signal the kind of "boldness" you (and women) want, while still staying well within the 'script'. So hopefully this won't be a big issue in practice. (Though it's hard to say since we don't even have broadly-acknowledged 'scripts' yet!)

link