Cats, Dogs, and Jerks: a description of human social interaction

[nancylebov]

Do you think this is accurate?

[Note: this is going to sound at first like PUA advice, but is actually about general differences between the socially-typical and atypical in the sending and receiving of "status play" signals, using the current situation as an example.]

I don't know about "good", but for it to be "useful" you would've needed to do it first. (E.g. Her: "Buy me a drink" You: "Sure, now bend over." Her: "What?" "I said bend over, I'm going to spank your spoiled [add playful invective to taste].")

Of course, that won't work if you are actually offended. You have to be genuinely amused, and clearly speaking so as to amuse yourself, rather than being argumentative, judgmental, condescending, critical, or any other such thing.

This is a common failure mode for those of us with low-powered or faulty social coprocessors -- we take offense to things that more-normal individuals interpret as playful status competition, and resist taking similar actions because we interpret them as things that we would only do if we were angry.

In a way, it's like cats and dogs -- the dog wags its tail to signal "I'm not really attacking you, I'm just playing", while the cat waves its tail to mean, "you are about to die if you come any closer". Normal people are dogs, geeks are cats, and if you want to play with the dogs, you have to learn to bark, wag, and play-bite. Otherwise, they think you're a touchy psycho who needs to loosen up and not take everything so seriously. (Not unlike the way dogs may end up learning to avoid the cats in a shared household, if they interpret the cats as weirdly anti-social pack members.)

Genuine creeps and assholes are a third breed altogether: they're the ones who verbally say they're just playing, while in fact they are not playing or joking at all, and are often downright scary.

And their existence kept me from understanding how things worked more quickly, because normal people learn not to play-bite you if you bare your claws or hide under the couch in response ! So, it didn't occur to me that all the normal people had just learned to leave me out of their status play, like a bunch of dogs learning to steer clear of the psycho family cat.

The jerks, on the other hand, like to bait cats, because we're easy to provoke a reaction from. (Most of the "dogs" just frown at the asshole and get on with their day, so the jerk doesn't get any fun.)

So now, if you're a "cat", you learn that only jerks do these things.

And of course, you're utterly and completely wrong, but have little opportunity to discover and correct the problem on your own. And even if you learn how to fake polite socialization, you won't be entirely comfortable running with the dogs, nor they you, since the moment they actually try to "play" with you, you act all weird (for a dog, anyway).

That's why, IMO, some PUA convversation is actually a good thing on LW; it's a nice example of a shared bias to get over. The LWers who insist that people aren't really like that, only low [self-esteem, intelligence] girls fall for that stuff, that even if it does work it's "wrong", etc., are in need of some more understanding of how their fellow humans [of either gender] actually operate. Even if their objective isn't to attract dating partners, there are a lot of things in this world that are much harder to get if you can't speak "dog".

tl;dr: Normal people engage in playful dog-like status games with their actual friends and think you're weird when you respond like a cat, figuratively hissing and spitting, or running away to hide under the bed. Yes, even your cool NT friends who tolerate your idiosyncracies -- you're not actually as close to them as you think, because they're always more careful around you than they are around other NTs.

By PJ Eby.

I'm not signing onto the idea that everyone who's uncomfortable with teasing should learn how to handle it or they're missing out on a lot of the good in life. As a strongly catlike person, I'm curious about whether the description of interactions is plausible.

I suspect that a lot of social difficulty is caused by dog types who *don't* know how to dial it down with cats, or are so in love with their usual behavior that they feel they shouldn't have to. They aren't jerks (those who enjoy tormenting cats), but they can look rather similar.

And as for real cats and dogs, I've met at least one cat who grew up with dogs and does a pretty good approximation of tail-wagging. Most of the tail motion comes from the base-- the tail isn't as stiff as a dog's tail, of course, but you don't see the full feline tail thrash-- and the cat isn't upset.

Comments

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

I have a different read on this.

Two people who are behaving rudely in public have trouble understanding each other. Would you advise them to try to understand each other's behavior as a function of the ways their brains work? OK, that's fine, but how about this advice: follow ordinary boring social rules. Don't demand that someone buy you a drink in a bar. Don't offer to spank a stranger for not saying please. If you want to have genuine relationships and be close to other people, be genuine and don't play stupid games.

Miss Manners has a rule about teasing. You tease people you like about things of which they might justifiably be proud. Polite teasing is affectionate, it's not assault, as this example is.

The truth is, I don't get the whole pickup in a bar scenario anyway. I never found a lover that way. I met my spouse in synagogue where we discovered we liked each other by discussing literature, chocolate, politics, music and movies. I never got the point of teasing and I still managed to have successful social relationships in school and in adulthood. What is the point of playing verbally abusive games? I can't see one.

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

Reading the scenario at the original website, I was having a lot of trouble with it. A woman walks up to a man at a bar and asks him to buy her a drink. His correct response is supposed to be to say something insulting to her, as the response she's hoping to get, because it displays that he's aware of the proper social jockeying that she's really proposing.

As opposed to my (catlike) response of "Yeah, right. Get your own drink" (which is still not the same as the suggested wrong response of "What kind of drink would you like?"). It may also be that I'm reading this wrong because I am not socialized as a male and I don't hang out in bars.

I do not get it. The expected social behavior is anti-social, both in the begging for drinks and the insults, and just looks broken to me. At a basic level, I don't see the social benefit of making friends with people who don't notice when their behavior is insulting, because then you end up with people who insult you as friends. This is not a worthwhile goal.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. Wouldn't it just be easier to post an ad in Craig's List for a hookup and have consensual sex without strings attached? Because who the hell wants to have a relationship with someone who hangs around in bars picking up people for one-night stands? If this is all supposed to be something like witty banter, it fails.

[madfilkentist]

I had thought that the guy's response was a way of telling her to buzz off, which is polite according to some social rules which are foreign to me -- more Martian vs. human than dog vs. cat. If it's a response which she expects, it's even more Martian to me that way.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I can understand the interaction as a certain kind of coded language:

"I am arrogant, because I am so good looking and desirable that I am worth it."
"I will be even more arrogant back, showing that I have even more to offer than you do."

It's 100% not to my taste, and I blanch at the idea that it shows MORE social ability than acting in a mutually affirming exchange, but if people want to play those games, this interaction is consistent.

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

That explanation makes sense, thank you. For me, it's handy if people have a shorthand way of identifying themselves as someone I wouldn't want to talk to anyway.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

I did a little googling and found a link on, well, a pickup artist site : http://www.sosuave.com/articles/at/buymeadrink.htm

Basically in this case it doesn't so much seem to be a teasing thing (in terms of the lady expecting a spank offer) as recognizing an opening gambit, even beyond "I am arrogant" but more like "will you cave?"

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

You're saying that this example is assault as if that were an objective statement rather than completely subjective. Assault is in the eye of the beholder. If neither of the participants in that conversation consider it to be assault, then it isn't, regardless of what the eavesdropping person at the next table might think about it.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

It's just assault in the sense of threatening someone with bodily harm, that's all. It might not qualify in a court of law if the person hearing the threat didn't take it seriously, but if you tell a stranger, "I'm going to hit you" -- as this dialogue seems to do, right?--and you look like you actually might (which maybe isn't happening here) that's assault.

I googled to verify my impression that threatening violence was the legal definition of assault, and Professor Google spits this out--

Generally, the essential elements of assault consist of an act intended to cause an apprehension of harmful or offensive contact that causes apprehension of such contact in the victim.

The act required for an assault must be overt. Although words alone are insufficient, they might create an assault when coupled with some action that indicates the ability to carry out the threat. A mere threat to harm is not an assault; however, a threat combined with a raised fist might be sufficient if it causes a reasonable apprehension of harm in the victim.

So yeah, I don't think I would tell a stranger that I planned to spank her.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize that you were restricting yourself to the legal definition of the word.

Even so, I wouldn't want to try to convince a jury of it.