5 ms·

The Amanda Palmer problem

17 points by ValentineC 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- eridius 14y ago
  I think the author is simply assuming that a male musician would be inclined to sleep with his fans every night, but a female musician would not.
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    That is the assumption I am questioning. Why is it socially expected that a male musician would do or desire to do such a thing but a female musician wouldn't? Why is it necessary to enforce the gender distinction? I guess I'm sort of asking the nature vs. nurture question: Do we expect males to behave this way because people write articles like this which continually reinforce our assumptions about it in a way that was irrelevant to the point the author was trying to make? Or do males actually and inherently behave differently for biological reasons having nothing to do with social norms?
    - sokoloff 14y ago
      I'm attempting to answer your question, not advocate for a moral truth. A male invests so little in procreation relative to a female, that it's easy to imagine an advantage conferred to massive promiscuity among males. (anything that gives a higher percentage chance to reproduce would tend to beneficially differentially propagate a male-promiscuous geneticly driven behavior, in a way that it would not be selected for among females, since they are generally limited in procreation capacity per unit time in a way that males are not. Elements of this are seen in the animal kingdom, but I don't know whether it's generally accepted "fact" or not. If it is, and it's programmed as part of mammalian maleness, it's reasonable to assume that humans would also exhibit it naturally, and not just via locker room social pressure or other "buried" influences which might also be present.)
      - anonymous 14y ago
        Well, yes. But just because you can uncover such a mechanism doesn't mean you have an explanation for the behaviour. For example, in times of plague, people would put heavy stones on the graves of people to prevent them from raising again as vampires. Incidentally, since there were more dead than usual during plague, they were buried in shallow graves, which take less time to make, and dogs might dig them up, which increased the risk of contagion. By putting heavy stones on top, roaming dogs couldn't dig them up and there was less contagion and less death. So even though the behaviour had a perfectly reasonable mechanism by which it lowered the number of deaths, the mental explanation was way off. Also, just because someone might feel that way about men or women, doesn't mean we should be shaming women who want to have sex, now that there's practically no risk of unwanted pregnancies. Insisting that people act reasonably isn't some utopian ideal, but is more like the cornerstone of modern society.
      - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
        >A male invests so little in procreation relative to a female, that it's easy to imagine an advantage conferred to massive promiscuity among males. (anything that gives a higher percentage chance to reproduce would tend to beneficially differentially propagate a male-promiscuous geneticly driven behavior, in a way that it would not be selected for among females, since they are generally limited in procreation capacity per unit time in a way that males are not. But that doesn't answer the nature vs. nurture question because the same evolutionary forces apply at the societal level: Societies with norms that promote greater procreation will have more offspring who are then socialized under the same norms. It also doesn't explain the gender difference because females would presumably be under a similar incentive to procreate as much as possible, and doing so with multiple mates has various advantages, particularly if the initially chosen mate has some not initially obvious disadvantage (e.g. shares an unexpressed gene for a genetic disease with the female or is infertile). And the limited reproduction capacity doesn't resolve the issue because although it makes promiscuous behavior relatively less advantageous, it doesn't in itself create any disincentive for it and doesn't even entirely nullify its advantages. So there would have to be some kind of disincentive sufficient to outweigh the incentive. And there is a significant societal justification for it: A man who mates with a promiscuous woman can't be sure whether he is the father of her children. In consequence the males have the incentive to mate with as many women as possible but primarily support the children of the women thought to be monogamous. And that creates the incentive for the familiar social behavior in which monogamous women gain an advantage by "slut shaming" other women in the competition for male support for offspring by implicitly but publicly calling into question the paternity of the offspring or future offspring of the promiscuous women, and each woman meanwhile tries to avoid such a reputation for herself so that a mate will expect a child she bears to be his and be inclined to provide support. But that still doesn't answer the nature vs. nurture question because natural selection operates on both society and biology -- and it could actually be both. Over a long enough period of time society and biology influence one another. If females biologically predisposed to monogamy are preferred by males then they may proliferate, and when they are the majority they enforce a social order that provides incentives for their own biologically preferred behavior, which increases the biological evolutionary advantage of conforming to that social order and creates a feedback loop over many generations. The practical question is whether modern society has broken the future evolutionary advantage of that behavior as a result of contraception, scientific paternity testing, etc., and left us with a vestigial set of social norms that we would be best to question if not abandon.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Way to miss the point. This is what happens when you don't parse the sentence as a whole.
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    What is with your attitude? I understand the point. The point is not what I'm disputing. The problem is the moral judgment inherent in the delivery. But you know what, OK. People don't want to discuss this here, it's not really on topic, deleted.
- Avshalom 14y ago
  "fair" for a male musician but not noble. The implication of female musicians engaging in sex with groupie derails any follow up discussion into handwringing and slut shaming so quickly that the author just chucked the qualifier in there to (try to) prevent people from accusing Palmer of ¡having sex men! in addition to everything else.
  - andrewflnr 14y ago
    Basically, they tossed it in to avoid triggering precisely this discussion?
zethraeus 14y ago
This isn't a particularly new problem, and it's not all that related to crowd funding or the internet. It's just the 'haters gonna hate' brand of jealousy. When you attract attention doing something outside of the mainstream context, people analyse your actions but don't understand - or plain dislike - their context. We don't live in hamlets anymore, subcultures and like minded people can find each other. This is great. Try to ignore the noise!
taeric 14y ago
> because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties. And see, I feel the opposite. I don't go to sites like CNN or Vulture or whatever, because I have little interest in the fire hose of information that is available there. That is, for many of us, the ability to directly choose the information we see is the exact opposite of what this describes. Granted, this is brushing with my bitterness that my RSS reader of choice was recently tossed. And that too many places are wanting to "reach out to me" through the social giants. So, yeah, salt.
- vannevar 14y ago
  I think the point of the article is that even if you try to ignore those sites, mass media leaks through everywhere. The web really hasn't displaced mass media at all, but merely become an extension of it.
  - taeric 14y ago
    But the implication is that this is somehow a new thing. There is plenty of stuff on the internet that is not seen by the vast majority of folks out there. I would actually include this Palmer stuff. Sure, it is well known in certain circles. In particular, the TED crowd along with Gaiman fans. Outside if that, though.... Even the kickstarter that rose 1 million only had upwards of 25k donors, from the stats I recall. Hardly a majority of the internet.
    - vannevar 14y ago
      Sure, in fact I'd go as far as to say that most of the content available on the Internet has been seen by nobody. I would paraphrase the author's point as, hey, we've been told that the Internet provides a new way for an artist to communicate directly with her fans, and so it does; but it doesn't change the fact that even a message intended only for one audience will nonetheless be judged by another. Consider the recent sorority girl email that went viral, or the myriad of leaked sexts. The same connectedness that makes it easy to create targeted messages makes it just as easy to rebroadcast them to everyone. If the sorority girl had sent a letter 40 years ago, someone might've made copies and circulated them on campus but that's as far as it would've gone. The profanity would have prevented the mass media from picking it up, and while she might still have been fired, she would hardly have been the subject of worldwide discussion.
ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
I hate to be the one to say this but I feel it's true. If Amanda Palmer were Adam Palmer he could have messed up a hundred different ways, turned to drugs, fathered 10 children and abandoned them all and still not attracted the same lame attempted controversy. Every time I read controversy about Amanda its more forced and more angry & bitter than the last time. I'm convinced it's envy and jealousy. There's a lot of guys who dream of being in a band and seeing a woman (who's music is good but not great, and whose looks aren't bleached blond porn star) rise above them so quickly just pisses them off. So they do what they've always historically done. Attack that bitch and put her in her place. How dare she make it in this world. How dare she surpass them. === Kickstarter "Drag the Bitch Down" campaign list === - Amanda Palmer, Anita Sarkeesian, Susan Wilson & her 9 year old daughter. (if you don't know about Wilson: http://kotaku.com/internet-rallies-against-kickstarter-for-nine-year-old-459542190 http://kotaku.com/internet-rallies-against-kickstarter-for-n... + http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-kickstarter-rpg-mackenzie-wilson-susan/ http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-kickstarter-rpg-mackenzi... ) All 3 successful. At the time of their attack they had not failed to deliver to their backers. 2 of the 3 had their personal lives viciously verbally attacked by internet hate groups. Sarkeesian and Wilson were ripped a new hole. Palmer just invoked anger without the rage, probably because she has a lot of male fans. Men seem to avoid messing with women who have male fans, due to the possibility of getting their ass kicked. Search for "kickstarter controversies" on google and you'll get mostly Palmer and Wilson. === Kickstarter gentleman who are forgiven or forgotten. === - Josh Dibb, aka Deakin still hasn't delivered backer's rewards after 3 years. He isn't really talked about. - Schuyler Towne, big delayed delivery, broken gifts, mental breakdown. Have you heard of him? - Diaspora project, failure, long delays, needs more funding, 1 suicide. All 3 failed to deliver. No campaigns of hatred and revenge. If I'm missing something contradictory please let me know. I don't want to believe this is the world we still live in, but that's what current evidence is showing so far. Theoretical Lesson: If you're a woman and you're about to make a whole lot of men jealous. Make sure you have a picture of a strong, tall, beefy alpha male in your kickstarter video. Your chances of being messed with will be much lower.
- summerdown2 14y ago
  The thing is, I think you could be right AND there might be an interesting conversation to be had about Amanda Palmer's business model. There does seem to be a thing on the internet where women who divert from the norm get cut down much more viciously than a man would. I think this might be an interesting conversation to have and I've no idea what the fix might be other than time and generational change (which I think is coming). However, I think there is also a discussion to be had about how we fund the digital age, because it really isn't clear how artists will get paid in future. And a lot of the attempts so far do look like begging. My own view is that there is something awkward in the use of unpaid labour as a business model, but I'm not sure what else can be done. Eventually, the internet looks like it will trend towards to free access for everyone to all media at all times. My personal lack of comfort is that all the payment models I've seen so far decouple the product from the person. To some degree I would suggest that in the past we've paid for good product, but in the future we're increasingly asked to pay for a good person. The difficulty is that this favours the extrovert publicists over the quiet artists and I wish there was some way it might look like this latter group had a future, too.

17 points by ValentineC 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

eridius 14y ago
I think the author is simply assuming that a male musician would be inclined to sleep with his fans every night, but a female musician would not.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  That is the assumption I am questioning. Why is it socially expected that a male musician would do or desire to do such a thing but a female musician wouldn't? Why is it necessary to enforce the gender distinction? I guess I'm sort of asking the nature vs. nurture question: Do we expect males to behave this way because people write articles like this which continually reinforce our assumptions about it in a way that was irrelevant to the point the author was trying to make? Or do males actually and inherently behave differently for biological reasons having nothing to do with social norms?
  - sokoloff 14y ago
    I'm attempting to answer your question, not advocate for a moral truth. A male invests so little in procreation relative to a female, that it's easy to imagine an advantage conferred to massive promiscuity among males. (anything that gives a higher percentage chance to reproduce would tend to beneficially differentially propagate a male-promiscuous geneticly driven behavior, in a way that it would not be selected for among females, since they are generally limited in procreation capacity per unit time in a way that males are not. Elements of this are seen in the animal kingdom, but I don't know whether it's generally accepted "fact" or not. If it is, and it's programmed as part of mammalian maleness, it's reasonable to assume that humans would also exhibit it naturally, and not just via locker room social pressure or other "buried" influences which might also be present.)
    - anonymous 14y ago
      Well, yes. But just because you can uncover such a mechanism doesn't mean you have an explanation for the behaviour. For example, in times of plague, people would put heavy stones on the graves of people to prevent them from raising again as vampires. Incidentally, since there were more dead than usual during plague, they were buried in shallow graves, which take less time to make, and dogs might dig them up, which increased the risk of contagion. By putting heavy stones on top, roaming dogs couldn't dig them up and there was less contagion and less death. So even though the behaviour had a perfectly reasonable mechanism by which it lowered the number of deaths, the mental explanation was way off. Also, just because someone might feel that way about men or women, doesn't mean we should be shaming women who want to have sex, now that there's practically no risk of unwanted pregnancies. Insisting that people act reasonably isn't some utopian ideal, but is more like the cornerstone of modern society.
    - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
      >A male invests so little in procreation relative to a female, that it's easy to imagine an advantage conferred to massive promiscuity among males. (anything that gives a higher percentage chance to reproduce would tend to beneficially differentially propagate a male-promiscuous geneticly driven behavior, in a way that it would not be selected for among females, since they are generally limited in procreation capacity per unit time in a way that males are not. But that doesn't answer the nature vs. nurture question because the same evolutionary forces apply at the societal level: Societies with norms that promote greater procreation will have more offspring who are then socialized under the same norms. It also doesn't explain the gender difference because females would presumably be under a similar incentive to procreate as much as possible, and doing so with multiple mates has various advantages, particularly if the initially chosen mate has some not initially obvious disadvantage (e.g. shares an unexpressed gene for a genetic disease with the female or is infertile). And the limited reproduction capacity doesn't resolve the issue because although it makes promiscuous behavior relatively less advantageous, it doesn't in itself create any disincentive for it and doesn't even entirely nullify its advantages. So there would have to be some kind of disincentive sufficient to outweigh the incentive. And there is a significant societal justification for it: A man who mates with a promiscuous woman can't be sure whether he is the father of her children. In consequence the males have the incentive to mate with as many women as possible but primarily support the children of the women thought to be monogamous. And that creates the incentive for the familiar social behavior in which monogamous women gain an advantage by "slut shaming" other women in the competition for male support for offspring by implicitly but publicly calling into question the paternity of the offspring or future offspring of the promiscuous women, and each woman meanwhile tries to avoid such a reputation for herself so that a mate will expect a child she bears to be his and be inclined to provide support. But that still doesn't answer the nature vs. nurture question because natural selection operates on both society and biology -- and it could actually be both. Over a long enough period of time society and biology influence one another. If females biologically predisposed to monogamy are preferred by males then they may proliferate, and when they are the majority they enforce a social order that provides incentives for their own biologically preferred behavior, which increases the biological evolutionary advantage of conforming to that social order and creates a feedback loop over many generations. The practical question is whether modern society has broken the future evolutionary advantage of that behavior as a result of contraception, scientific paternity testing, etc., and left us with a vestigial set of social norms that we would be best to question if not abandon.
anigbrowl 14y ago
Way to miss the point. This is what happens when you don't parse the sentence as a whole.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  What is with your attitude? I understand the point. The point is not what I'm disputing. The problem is the moral judgment inherent in the delivery. But you know what, OK. People don't want to discuss this here, it's not really on topic, deleted.
Avshalom 14y ago
"fair" for a male musician but not noble. The implication of female musicians engaging in sex with groupie derails any follow up discussion into handwringing and slut shaming so quickly that the author just chucked the qualifier in there to (try to) prevent people from accusing Palmer of ¡having sex men! in addition to everything else.
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  Basically, they tossed it in to avoid triggering precisely this discussion?

zethraeus 14y ago

This isn't a particularly new problem, and it's not all that related to crowd funding or the internet. It's just the 'haters gonna hate' brand of jealousy. When you attract attention doing something outside of the mainstream context, people analyse your actions but don't understand - or plain dislike - their context. We don't live in hamlets anymore, subcultures and like minded people can find each other. This is great. Try to ignore the noise!

taeric 14y ago

> because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties. And see, I feel the opposite. I don't go to sites like CNN or Vulture or whatever, because I have little interest in the fire hose of information that is available there. That is, for many of us, the ability to directly choose the information we see is the exact opposite of what this describes. Granted, this is brushing with my bitterness that my RSS reader of choice was recently tossed. And that too many places are wanting to "reach out to me" through the social giants. So, yeah, salt.

vannevar 14y ago
I think the point of the article is that even if you try to ignore those sites, mass media leaks through everywhere. The web really hasn't displaced mass media at all, but merely become an extension of it.
- taeric 14y ago
  But the implication is that this is somehow a new thing. There is plenty of stuff on the internet that is not seen by the vast majority of folks out there. I would actually include this Palmer stuff. Sure, it is well known in certain circles. In particular, the TED crowd along with Gaiman fans. Outside if that, though.... Even the kickstarter that rose 1 million only had upwards of 25k donors, from the stats I recall. Hardly a majority of the internet.
  - vannevar 14y ago
    Sure, in fact I'd go as far as to say that most of the content available on the Internet has been seen by nobody. I would paraphrase the author's point as, hey, we've been told that the Internet provides a new way for an artist to communicate directly with her fans, and so it does; but it doesn't change the fact that even a message intended only for one audience will nonetheless be judged by another. Consider the recent sorority girl email that went viral, or the myriad of leaked sexts. The same connectedness that makes it easy to create targeted messages makes it just as easy to rebroadcast them to everyone. If the sorority girl had sent a letter 40 years ago, someone might've made copies and circulated them on campus but that's as far as it would've gone. The profanity would have prevented the mass media from picking it up, and while she might still have been fired, she would hardly have been the subject of worldwide discussion.

ChrisNorstrom 14y ago

I hate to be the one to say this but I feel it's true. If Amanda Palmer were Adam Palmer he could have messed up a hundred different ways, turned to drugs, fathered 10 children and abandoned them all and still not attracted the same lame attempted controversy. Every time I read controversy about Amanda its more forced and more angry & bitter than the last time. I'm convinced it's envy and jealousy. There's a lot of guys who dream of being in a band and seeing a woman (who's music is good but not great, and whose looks aren't bleached blond porn star) rise above them so quickly just pisses them off. So they do what they've always historically done. Attack that bitch and put her in her place. How dare she make it in this world. How dare she surpass them. === Kickstarter "Drag the Bitch Down" campaign list === - Amanda Palmer, Anita Sarkeesian, Susan Wilson & her 9 year old daughter. (if you don't know about Wilson: http://kotaku.com/internet-rallies-against-kickstarter-for-nine-year-old-459542190 http://kotaku.com/internet-rallies-against-kickstarter-for-n... + http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-kickstarter-rpg-mackenzie-wilson-susan/ http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-kickstarter-rpg-mackenzi... ) All 3 successful. At the time of their attack they had not failed to deliver to their backers. 2 of the 3 had their personal lives viciously verbally attacked by internet hate groups. Sarkeesian and Wilson were ripped a new hole. Palmer just invoked anger without the rage, probably because she has a lot of male fans. Men seem to avoid messing with women who have male fans, due to the possibility of getting their ass kicked. Search for "kickstarter controversies" on google and you'll get mostly Palmer and Wilson. === Kickstarter gentleman who are forgiven or forgotten. === - Josh Dibb, aka Deakin still hasn't delivered backer's rewards after 3 years. He isn't really talked about. - Schuyler Towne, big delayed delivery, broken gifts, mental breakdown. Have you heard of him? - Diaspora project, failure, long delays, needs more funding, 1 suicide. All 3 failed to deliver. No campaigns of hatred and revenge. If I'm missing something contradictory please let me know. I don't want to believe this is the world we still live in, but that's what current evidence is showing so far. Theoretical Lesson: If you're a woman and you're about to make a whole lot of men jealous. Make sure you have a picture of a strong, tall, beefy alpha male in your kickstarter video. Your chances of being messed with will be much lower.

summerdown2 14y ago
The thing is, I think you could be right AND there might be an interesting conversation to be had about Amanda Palmer's business model. There does seem to be a thing on the internet where women who divert from the norm get cut down much more viciously than a man would. I think this might be an interesting conversation to have and I've no idea what the fix might be other than time and generational change (which I think is coming). However, I think there is also a discussion to be had about how we fund the digital age, because it really isn't clear how artists will get paid in future. And a lot of the attempts so far do look like begging. My own view is that there is something awkward in the use of unpaid labour as a business model, but I'm not sure what else can be done. Eventually, the internet looks like it will trend towards to free access for everyone to all media at all times. My personal lack of comfort is that all the payment models I've seen so far decouple the product from the person. To some degree I would suggest that in the past we've paid for good product, but in the future we're increasingly asked to pay for a good person. The difficulty is that this favours the extrovert publicists over the quiet artists and I wish there was some way it might look like this latter group had a future, too.