A clear example came up recently and, even under analysis, it still has me bamboozled.
Over at Clarisse Thorn's "Ethical Pick-Up Artistry" thread, I have got into a discussion about the meaning and significance of "right now" in the context of "I’m not interested in a serious relationship right now." In the specific example, it was used by a man, but my reaction applies equally.
When or if I, personally, hear this phrase (or read it in a personal ad online),what happens is that the "not" fades and becomes less significant (as we're told NLP tends to work), and the "right now" becomes more significant. I hear:
I’m (not) interested in a serious relationship right now.
Which effectively becomes, "I could be interested in a relationship with you at some point, and it could become serious even if it isn't now".
In my head, the phrase "right now" almost demands the question, "Okay, when?" and, while that would obviously be a tactless thing to say out loud, I would certainly be in a situation of thinking someone was available, if I played my cards right, and be thinking about how best to do that.
So in the context of PUA, I said that I felt that this was deceptive and leading someone on only to dump her later.
I was surprised when several people came back saying I had this one wrong.
Hugh Ristik:
I completely disagree. Actually, as far as norms go for people show relationship disinterest, his statement reads as pretty damn blatant.
Xakudo:
I agree with Hugh. I do not know how much more explicit you can get than to actually directly say, “I’m not interested in a serious relationship right now.”
I mean, really. If that does not communicate what he intended (i.e. the literal meaning of the sentence), then I have no idea what does.
Infra:
I’m inclined to side with Hugh and Xakudo when it comes to signaling that he had no interest in a relationship (though I’d differ from Xakudo in saying that there are clearer ways of saying it, such as “I’m not relationship material” — they’re just difficult to voice without introducing negative associations, given the image of male sexuality as exploitative).
I found myself completely thrown by all this.
Two further points came up in their comments:
Hugh Ristik:
As the Kitzinger research found, people have trouble making direct and explicit refusals, and one refusal strategy is “not now” to make a permanent refusal. As you point out, there was potential for “no means yes,” but interpreting his resistance as “token” was done at her own risk. She took the risk, and she struck out. But if someone sets a boundary, and you push it, that’s often what happens.
...
As Kitzinger suggests, people shouldn’t have to voice an explicit and permanent “no” to be understood as refusing, and this principle applies to emotional boundaries, not just women’s sexual boundaries.
All of which is undeniably true, inasmuch as a person interprets it as resistance at all, but as discussed above, that phrase "right now" turns "no" into "maybe if you're lucky" on a deep level in my brain. The absurd thing is, I will understand quite clearly a lot of more subtle, implicit "no"s (some of them not even meant that way) - maybe because I'm used to rejection and "expect" it, so I am on the look out for the "no".
Infra spotted something else of concern:
Something was bothering me about your interpretation, but it took me a bit to put my finger on it. It’s this: adding the “right now” qualifier is, in the main, the only honest way to make the statement as a way of describing the speaker, as distinct from describing a goal. To say that this is open-ended is to say that the speaker’s life is open-ended, but still has the qualities that it has in the present, and I fail to see how that’s a bad thing.
It might not be the kind of explicit statement that would set fully defined limits to what can and cannot occur, especially over time. But instead of this being unclear, a neg, playing hard to get, etc. — isn’t this one of the main ways in which we acknowledge and communicate our humanity?
To be honest, I can't quite appreciate the positions being taken in this comment because to me, another person's humanity is taken as read from the off, and it's communicated in so many other ways. I also can't see why "right now" changes the focus from "goal" to "speaker". To me, both statements "I'm not interested in a serious relationship" and "I'm not interested in a serious relationship right now" describe the speaker's relationship to the goal of "a serious relationship". The first one says to me that it is not a current goal of the speaker; the second one says to me (as outlined above) that it is not the primary goal of the speaker, but that zie is open to persuasion.
In amongst those interpretations, the astute reader may have spotted that I said "I am not looking for a serious relationship" to me was not a universal, permanent rejection: I used the qualifier "currently". Another underlying thing for me is that it carries the unspoken words, "with you", so that it can be either "I'm not looking for a serious relationship with you", or "In the time frame we're talking about, I am not looking for a serious relationship." This is the assumed humanity of the speaker in my mental approach, as opposed to the explicitly signalled humanity that Infra suggests is going on.
I spent some time trying to rephrase the statement, and I realised hat it is actually quite hard not to want to put some kind of vague time-related clause on the end. So I started to think about what sort of clause of that type would signal to me, personally, that I have no chance of getting something longer-term out of a hook-up.
"Right now", as discussed, is no good. "At the moment", "for the time being", and so on all have the same issues for me as "right now". "At this stage" would be even more perilous because that would say to me "until I know you better", and that would make me think I really had a chance!
Eventually, I hit upon "...at this stage in/of my life" as a good one, because it carries strong implications of a long-term ongoing situation. "Any time soon" was another one that I think would work.
The other way to make the equivocation I hear in "right now" disappear is to make the immediate goals explicit: "I'm not interested in a serious relationship right now, so please understand this is strictly short-term."
At which point, I know where I stand. Since at my current stage of life, I definitely am interested in a serious relationship, I might very well decide at this point that the answer is "thanks, but no thanks" (although short-term sex-centred relationships are not completely ruled out for me).
But yeah - the way my mind works, which seems to be alien to the ways of the other commenters @ the PUA thread, "right now" is dangling the prospect in front of me and leading me on. I would feel used if someone did that to me.
I'm pretty much as alien-ated as you are, by this whole example and discussion. In a culturally relativist fashion I can identify this ethics as an ethics. But it isn't one that is particularly congenial to me.
ReplyDeleteIf the feminists are going to come up with a pua manual I'd certainly like it to feel different than this. It seems like compulsory masculinity to me. I'd like to see what is behind door three, please.
You know, I also felt disoriented by the whole conversation. And I think in part that's because, like you, I'm also looking for a serious relationship, and am really not terribly interested in "hooking up" anymore.
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear a statement like "I'm not looking for a serious relationship right now," I basically figure that it's time to let it go. Either the person isn't interested, or for now, it's all about short term stuff. So, I have to go back to my own goals. What do I really want. And since I don't really want to play around anymore, that statement tells me what I need to know. For now, what I really want won't happen with this person.
Now, I think this is a lot easier to handle when it's someone who isn't a long term friend or isn't someone you see on a regular basis. It's more difficult when that person continues to be around, and maybe offering mixed signals while spending time with you. I'm kind of in one of those situations currently, and find that this is where it's most challenging to not think "it might happen in the future."
One problem with all of this language stuff, though, is that sometimes the words said aren't really accurate. The person doesn't know what to say, or is under stress, or confused, and so you can sit and parse out every last syllable, but at the end of the day, you really don't know for sure.
(Short reply -- just got back from an eye exam and my vision hasn't gotten back to normal yet.)
ReplyDelete"To be honest, I can't quite appreciate the positions being taken in this comment because to me, another person's humanity is taken as read from the off, and it's communicated in so many other ways."
I don't see any incompatibility between this and reading humanity from the off; it's about expression, not presence or absence. And I'd agree that it's communicated in a number of other ways; conveying that our lives are open-ended but still are what they are at the moment is just one of them.
Maybe you saw what I was trying to say as something far more limited than it was.
@ Infra:
ReplyDeleteI will be blunt here: what I felt you as saying was actually, "your feelings about this are wrong feelings to have, because we need those words to be able to express our humanity."
So I reacted by saying, "no, we don't need those words in that particular sense, so it's okay for me to feel the way I do."
I can appreciate intellectually that maybe to most people the implication is fundamentally different from what it is for me, but that's the whole point about feeling like an alien. I feel like I need consciously to pause and translate what I understand back into what other people understand, before I can deal with them.
I did take on board the point about "open-endedness". I responded to it by:
a) I pointed out that I read it automatically in the blank statement without "right now", and
b) I looked at a couple of ways it could be made explicit in the statement without raising the hopes of someone like me.
"I will be blunt here: what I felt you as saying was actually, 'your feelings about this are wrong feelings to have, because we need those words to be able to express our humanity.'"
ReplyDeleteWell... then I think that "far more limited" would be a charitable way of putting it.
Explaining the speaker/goal thing might help to clarify what I was trying to get across. What I see with the addition of "right now" (or similar words) is a shift of emphasis: from "not looking for a serious relationship" to "not looking [...] right now." The one is a goal, while the other is a state, and this is what produces the shift from goal to speaker.
If a person focuses on state, of course, that comes along with some possibility of change -- simply because the amount of control that we have over our futures, and our ability to predict the course of our lives, is always within constraints, always involving unknowns. We always are as we are, in the moment and in the future that we foresee. But it's that matter of constraints and unknowns -- the domain of possibility, freedom, and exposure to the unexpected -- that defines a core aspect of what it means to be human, alongside how we are at any given moment in time.
On that last point, might or might not disagree. But that's what I was trying to say.
@ Infra:
ReplyDeleteI feel like we are talking at cross-purposes here. I said, "This is how I feel when I hear the phrase", to which you said "This is what I mean when I say it". In the context of Clarisse Thorn's thread, you went so far as to say you were "troubled" because of the difference, and seemed to present your point as a refutation of my point because of that (i.e. "what I mean is more important than what you understand"). To be honest, reading your comments here I do not at present feel as though you have accepted my emotional reaction as valid and real.
I am unconvinced by your point of view theoretically (and of course, it has no bearing at all on the practical emotional reaction that I have on hearing the phrase). But in my OP here I took your point on board and tried to think of ways around it so that people could still express verbally this "domain of possibility, freedom, and exposure to the unexpected", while at the same time not leading people on with terms that emotionally appear to be offering hope.
(Apologies -- I misquoted the line, there. But correcting it from "looking for" to "interested in" still preserves the point about state. "Looking for" just makes it more explicitly.)
ReplyDeleteI focused on clarifying what I was saying because none of it had anything to do with criticizing your emotional reaction, or viewing it as invalid. (I was "bothered" in a "There's a thought here that I haven't been able to flesh out yet" way, in relation to using negs and playing hard to get as parallels.) I thought that explaining what I was saying would show that.
ReplyDeleteWe don't agree on the interpretation, especially in terms of the equation of the statement, in Clarisse's thread, with a neg or with playing hard to get. But I don't think that the feelings that you have are wrong ones to have, and never did.