That Rapist Feeling

At some point in time, I suppose that I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact that I am a rapist. No, this is not some kind of very strange Internet confession of a crime, and I have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever sexually assaulted anyone. If you are an officer of the law and are reading this thinking “We got one!,” you’re likely to be disappointed. Rather, it seems to me that I send off some kind of invisible signal, perhaps some kind of rapist scent, that flags me as a potential threat to women.

A short while back over this long winter break, I was crossing the street to Albertsons, and a young woman was standing at the crosswalk with me. This is usually the part of my day that I would have thought nothing about. However, as the two of us were crossing the street, the young woman started moving with a quicker pace, and then went around the rear of a car out of the cross walk. She was determined to go the long way. Now, at first, I would assume that she did this to maybe shortcut her way to the Starbucks on the far corner or some other valid, non-fear-for-her-life reason. However, the cynic in me quickly chimed in that I would see her again at the Albertsons when I arrived. And as I arrived at the entrance and looked to my right at the other entrance, there she was entering the Albertsons at the exact same time. She had chosen to go the long way around, through the parking lot, in the rain, in order to avoid me.

Kyle Bishop Abides, But Doesn't Rape

Truth be told, I wasn’t looking my best that day. It was in fact raining and dark out. And since I had just stepped out to grab something quick from the store, I wore my cheapest flip-flops. I was unshaven, and if I had pajamas on I would have probably looked a little something like a version of The Dude. I also came down my usual way, sliding down the side of a small hill from my building so I’m sure I appeared suddenly and unexpectedly on the sidewalk. However, flip-flops are hardly the optimal raping shoe in a rain storm. Aside from being not groomed and proper, I hardly thought as I walked out the door that I might raise the red flag of paranoid women everywhere.

And then, for added strangeness, I had to see this woman constantly while in the grocery store. It was a grocery store after all, and as I grabbed a sinful package of Twinkies while she was at the other end of the same isle I had to wonder if buying Twinkies raised or lowered my rapist score to her. Every part of my overactive imagination was trying to get inside this woman’s mind to see where the rationalization had come from to step far out of her way to avoid me. Perhaps, I should have shrugged of this incident as mere coincidence, or the act of a single frightened woman on a rainy night. I would have done that, however this instance was not singular. At times in the full sun when I have been (at least to my low standards) dressed to the nines, women have at this same crosswalk and other similar occasions, walked with their greatest strength to avoid me. The only way they could make their evasion more obvious would be to take one look at me, and run at full speed in the other direction while desperately attempting to dial 911 or at least post “Help! Rapist!” on Facebook.

I must assume that, at some point, all the women that I’ve met and befriended must have gone through some similar process. Each one in turn going through an inner monologue of  ”Well, he seems like a rapist… I could mace him just to be safe…” and then finally breathing a sigh of relief that they didn’t waste perfectly good mace on someone who wasn’t a rapist. How any of them are able to overcome their own intuitive fear of rape and spend time with me must just be a tribute to the strength of my friendly nature. Though, to be fair, I’m sure they check their drinks for roofies when I’m not looking, just to be safe. Who would blame them?

I also wonder how I obtained the rape scent. Perhaps back in Humboldt county, where prevalent rape and assault of women is the little secret that nobody has ever talked about or dealt with, I picked up some of the scent. Here in Irvine, rape is relatively uncommon per capita (along with most other crimes), so maybe the noses of women’s intuition are not desensitized to the scent as they were back in Humboldt. If it’s not some kind of scent, then what could it be? Perhaps some way in which my face is structured, or the way I walk. It’s extraordinarily hard to tell what particular trait of mine women must find so instinctually appalling. Women do seem to have some kind of sixth sense for danger, and I do not fault them for using it. However, it seems such a sense has backfired when someone like myself gets avoided.

The truth of the matter is that most men are not rapists. Most men are not dangerous. I am, in fact, about as far from a rapist as one can possibly be. Alexis de Tocqueville once observed, “The legislators of the United States [...] still make rape a capital offense, and no crime is visited with more inexorable severity by public opinion.  This may be accounted for; as the Americans can conceive nothing more previous than a woman’s honor and nothing which ought so much to be respected as her independence, they hold that no punishment is too severe for the man who deprives her of them against her will.” I am certainly within the camp of men that believes we perhaps made a mistake when we demoted rape as a crime and claimed it to no longer be a capital offense. I have a long history of supporting and considering the plight of victims of sexual assault. If women are somehow flagging me as even a remote threat, then my concern shifts to an old one that I have complained about many times before. Women, in an attempt to defend themselves from crimes of this nature, often throw the baby out with the bathwater. As a people, we spend so much time afraid that we forget to separate our enemies and the people out there that intend to do us real harm from the regular Joes who are just out to buy a couple frozen pizzas and a beer and go back to bed. Perhaps, women’s intuition, which worked wonderfully when humans were animals on the lookout for predators, needs to be trusted a little less, so that fear of our neighbors does not get in the way of meaningful human interaction.

Or maybe, I just need a really good cologne to mask the scent.

A Risk Adverse Economist’s Guide to Dating

Though this could also be titled: “My Normal Approach is Useful Here“

I guess it’s just a math heavy day today, mixed with a light sprinkling of rather standard insomnia. As I study for midterms and do my Econ-105A homework, I must have some internal desire to ground myself in things that I can attach more directly to myself. I had a conversation with a friend the other day that involved why I never ask anyone out. I claimed that the reason must be that I am highly risk adverse. Even though I meant this as a (albeit true) joke, as I sit here tonight doing way too much math, I distracted myself by thinking about how exactly I would model my own aversion to asking someone out on a date.

Since I’ve moved to Irvine, the old concept that there’s no such thing as a single woman has been pretty much entirely dissolved. This is a bizarre and foreign land where women seem to be, for no apparent reason that I can fathom, involuntarily unattached. Furthermore, the women here are of the highest quality in both beauty and intelligence, making the idea that any one of them would be involuntarily single all the more strange. I would say that perhaps it’s because the men don’t live up to their standards, but the men here are also of the same quality, so this seems unlikely at first glance.

All of this  is, of course, just a round about way for me to say that my usual excuse of “I can’t ask anyone out, because everyone is already taken” may not actually hold. I need an objective way to think about asking out women so that I can use it as a good rational for why I never do, and can thus maintain my well earned reputation as a cranky, lonely hermit.

So, for this model, we’ll assume that we’re presented with a choice between two options. The first option is to ask a girl out and the second option is to do nothing. For the do nothing option, we’ll assume that the expected utility of that option is zero. Some may say this is unfair, since you may suffer or may gain by choosing to do nothing. However, since we are only interested in the choice (or opportunity cost of doing one over the other), we only need to know if the expected utility of the ask-her-out choice is greater than or less than the expected utility of the do nothing choice. Said another way, we want to know if it’s better to have loved and possibly lost or to have never loved at all, and we’re measuring that based off of having never loved at all.

For the ask-her-out option, there are two potential outcomes. She can say yes, or she can say no. Let A represent the event that she accepts your offer, and A^c represent the event that she rejects your offer. Now, let U_A > 0 represent the utility gained by her accepting your offer and U_R > 0 represent the disutility caused by her rejecting your offer. The expected utility of asking her out is then given by the following equation:

EU = P(A)*U_A – P(A^c)U_R

Now, let k = U_R/ U_A. We’ll call k the heartbreak proportionality constant. The equation then becomes:

EU = P(A)*U_A – k*P(A^c)*U_A

EU = [P(A) - k*P(A^c)]*U_A

Now, we must examine the sign of the expected utility of asking her out. If negative, it’s better to do nothing rather than ask her out. If positive, it is better to ask her out. Since we know that the utility gained by asking her out, U_A, is always positive, the sign of this equation can be determined entirely by analyzing the sign of P(A) - k*P(A^c). Essentially, we can now say that the choice of whether or not to ask someone out can be determined entirely by two things. First, the probability that she will accept your offer. Second, by the heartbreak proportionality constant, k.

In this model, k represents how much one dislikes being turned down relative to how much one prefers being accepted to go on a date. First, consider a k = 1. This would represent a person that puts equal weight on being accepted and rejected. If it feels good to be accepted, then to this person it would feel just as bad if they got rejected. A person with a k = 1 would need to perceive that asking out his love interest would have at least a 50% chance of success in order for him to be at least indifferent between asking her out and not asking her out. If k > 1, then this person is strongly hurt by potential heartbreaks and would need greater than even odds in order to find the courage to ask someone out. A person with k < 1 is someone with a certain amount of courage. They value a potential relationship more than they value being hurt by rejection and will thus ask someone out even if they believe there is less than a coin toss chance of it being successful.

From this idea, it makes sense to determine the indifferent probability. Given a certain k, we must find the probability that a man would need to believe he would be successful in order for him to be indifferent to asking her out and not. This can be found using a little algebra:

P(A) - k*P(A^c) = 0

P(A) = k*P(A^c)

P(A) = k*[1 - P(A)]

P(A) = k – k*P(A)

(1+k)*P(A) = k

P(A) = k/(1+k)

If we know the person’s heartbreak constant, we can then determine by the above equation what probability of acceptance would be necessary in order to be indifferent to asking someone out.

And that’s where we can get back to me. I estimate that I dread getting embarrassed and rejected about twice as much as I like the idea of being accepted. Therefore, I must believe that the probability of someone accepting my offer would have to be greater than 2/3 in order for me to actually make an attempt. Since, however, I likewise believe that I am fundamentally undesirable to women since I am in fact a cranky, lonely, hermit economist secluded in my ivory tower, it is unlikely that I would ever believe, unless presented with extreme evidence to the contrary, that P(A) would ever be even close to 2/3.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a mathematically elegant explanation of why I will be single for the rest of my life. I guess my usual approach still doesn’t work here…