Author Archives: ozymandias42

The Inherent Goodness of Human Nature Or Lack Thereof

My basic model of humans is very Mr. Rogersian. I think humans are basically well-meaning and want to do the right thing; when we do bad things, it’s because we’re wrong or irrational or weak or stupid, but not because we actually want to do wrong. So for instance I think that people really do want to help sick children; they just give to Make a Wish Foundation instead of the Against Malaria Foundation because they’re not very good at the whole helping sick children thing.

(This is part of the reason I’m so big on accurate beliefs. Because sometimes people believe that God wants them to fly a plane into a tower, or that Jews are Always Chaotic Evil and bent on destroying Germany, or that it will work very well to turn Russia into a dictatorship of the proletariat via a revolutionary socialist state, and then their attempts to do the right thing go disastrously wrong.)

Recently, I’ve started reading Overcoming Bias, because pretty much the most productive thing I can do while depressed is archive-binge blogs, and a blog I really like span off from it. Robin Hanson, who blogs at Overcoming Bias, really fucking hates people. He calls humans homo hypocritus, because we don’t actually want what we say we want; instead, we want to signal our abilities and loyalties.

Robin Hanson (if I understand him correctly) would argue that the person giving money to the Make a Wish Foundation doesn’t actually want to help sick children; they want to feel nice, like the sort of person who helps sick children, and– more importantly– they want everyone else to believe that they’re nice people who help sick children.

My initial reaction to this is “No! That’s horrible! You terrible person!” Unfortunately, “you’re a terrible person!” is not actually an argument that something is not true. My sense of revulsion at that idea is nothing more than a sign that I’m biased in favor of the “humans: basically nice” explanation.

The problem is that I can’t figure out a way in which the two theories make different predictions. I can point out that sometimes people figure out that the Make a Wish Foundation is less good at helping sick children than the Against Malaria Foundation is and stop giving to the Make a Wish Foundation; but Hanson would say that that just means they want to signal that they care about effectively helping sick children. Hanson can point out that people often give more to charity when their friends encourage them to or give to charity themselves; but I’d reply that I never claimed humans were purely altruistic, just occasionally altruistic, and it makes perfect sense for people to give more if you get two things you want (social approval and happy sick kids) rather than just one.

And yet it seems intuitively like there ought to be a difference between these two Grand Theories of Human Nature. I mean, it doesn’t just boil down to “humans boo!” or “humans yay!”, right? So I decided to throw up my hands and ask my commenters what they think.

About these ads

Ozy’s Thoughts On Pickup Artistry

[Content note: some discussion of rape later in the post.]

I’m actually less anti-pickup than most sex-positive feminists: I think a lot of pickup tactics probably do work. DHVs (the jargon term for “having cool traits”) work. Congruence (the jargon term for “not passing yourself off as something you’re not”) works. Peacocking (the jargon term for “really awesome clothes”) works. (At least, my ex-girlfriend once said that if Mystery wanted to fuck her, all he’d have to do is not say something so dumb that it outweighed his being a skinny pretty pale gothy dude in eyeliner.)

Even the stuff that probably doesn’t work is decent as a Dumbo’s Magic Feather. If you believe the neg hit works, you’ll go hit on more girls. As long as it doesn’t actively turn off women, you’ll believe it’s the neg hit, rather than the neg hit improving your willingness to hit on women.

I think my biggest complaint is that pick-up artists in general are extremely dishonest about what their systems prove– namely, they believe they have a General Theory of What Women Are Attracted To. However, most pickup artists admit they target twentysomething, conventionally attractive women. In addition, the most common forms of game are “night game” (nightclubs) and “day game” (talking to strange women going about their everyday activities); women who like nightclubs and strangers talking to them on the street are almost certainly more extraverted than average, and probably different on several other personality metrics. Not to mention the filtering effects of PUA techniques themselves: some evidence suggests a correlation between women being attracted to people who use PUA techniques and women being sexist.

You don’t have a general theory of women’s sexuality; you have a general theory of the sexuality of Sexist Outgoing Twentysomething Conventionally Attractive Women Who Like Nightclubs And/Or Street Harassment. Which is fine! That’s what you’re aiming for! But generalizing from that sample to all women is about as plausible as me saying that all women are attracted to dudes who make out with each other because that gets you laid at YaoiCon.

Pickup artists’ ideas of what women like have to stay remotely within the bounds of the plausible; if a tactic gets a drink thrown on you every time, you will eventually stop doing it. On the other hand, as regards men’s preferences they may go on the most wild flights of fancy in the world. Thus we get claims like “[the ugliness of older women] is why you will see older women in porn work the penis like a piston with their mouths and hands– hard, firm, and unrelenting tactile stimulation is the only way they can get a guy off,” which is pretty much the most gloriously self-refuting sentence of all time.

(Seriously, did you think I could get through a whole post about pick-up artistry without picking on Heartiste at least once?)

It gets worse when they start trying to explain why their tactics work, because they will inevitably explain it with Evolution, despite not knowing the first thing about evolution. I’m not even asking that they know gender theory. But seriously, basic anthropology (gatherers provide most of the calories in most cultures, hence no such thing as beta male provider) and biology (r/K selection is on a species level, not an individual level, and hasn’t been a popular theory for twenty years anyway; there’s no such thing as an alpha wolf) are not that hard.

My other major beef with pickup artistry, other than it actively making people have dumb beliefs about gender, is that some pickup artists recommend raping women. This is… a pretty huge beef, to be fair.

I feel like to a certain degree that’s a natural consequence of specifically trying to figure out the best method to fuck the most women possible. After all, raping women is a very effective method of getting your dick wet.

Obviously, I’m not saying that everyone who wants to get laid more will inevitably end up justifying rape. What I am saying is that adopting a particular narrow view– where your goal is to collect notches on your bedpost rather than to engage in mutually satisfactory sexual and/or romantic relationships– is likely to lead some people to think “hey, if I just ignored those stupid women saying ‘no’ I’d get WAY more notches.”

Fuck Your Theory

In principle, in a free market, hiring discrimination should not happen. (Barring certain odd circumstances– for instance, if white people prefer to have other white people as waiters, and people of color don’t care, then restaurants would rationally hire only white waiters.) If everyone discriminates against people of color, then the business that hires people of color will get talent for cheaper and outcompete everyone.

In practice, hiring discrimination does happen. Like. There are studies.

An absurd number of people seem to believe that “in theory, hiring discrimination shouldn’t happen” is a valid objection to “hiring discrimination happens.” It’s not. Facts beat theories. If your theory says something shouldn’t happen, and it happens, your theory is wrong.

Now I’m not saying there are no plausible objections to studies of hiring discrimination. But the objections are all fact-level, not theory-level. You can criticize study methodology all you like; you can propose an alternate theory that explains the data; but you cannot say “my theory says this data is wrong, therefore it is.”

This happens all the time. For instance, a very common objection to utilitarianism is that it is in principle impossible to compare utility between one person and another. On the other hand, yesterday I let my housemate have the last cookie because I was full and she’d missed lunch, and therefore she’d get more utility from it than I would. Seriously, I decide “this thing would make you happier than me” all the time, which is basically what utility comparison is.* Therefore, although they seem convincing, I am quite confident that the philosophical arguments which suggest that this is impossible are mistaken somehow. If you have an airtight proof that something is impossible, and I keep doing it, it’s not actually impossible.

You also see this a lot in Bad Social Justice. If you have responded to “men experience more violent crimes than women do” with “but men can’t experience sexism, this is a patriarchy,” your feminism is bad and you should feel bad.

I feel like I should wrap this up by pointing out a time that I did it and saying “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” because I try not to criticize other people’s bad logic unless I can show that I’ve done it too. I actually can’t think of a time I did. But if I do it in the future smack me upside the head, kay?

*Preference utilitarians, feel free to sulk at me in the comments.

Defining Sex-Negativity

Cliff Pervocracy wrote a really nice post about what he means by sex-positive, so I figured I would talk about what I mean by sex-negative. (While glaring at the feminists of a generation ago who couldn’t think of any better words.)

I think a lot of times people think of sex-negativity as the Forces of People Who Hate Sex. Admittedly, people who really hate sex do exist: St. Jerome taught that he who loves his wife too ardently is an adulterer (wooo Church Fathers). And certainly it seems like the current batch of sex-negative people don’t like fucking too much, what with the trying to keep birth control from being covered by insurance and the abstinence-only sex ed and so on. 

But I think that the Forces of People Who Hate Sex model oversimplifies the situation, at least when you aren’t talking about early Church Fathers. I think sex-negativity and compulsory sexuality are two sides of the same fucked-up coin. Look at two things that I happen to know a lot about, and that I would call glaringly sex-negative: modern Protestant fundamentalism and Cosmo magazine.

Modern Protestant fundamentalism is very obsessed with people not fucking until they get married. In fact, some people will choose not to kiss until their wedding day for fear that that might lead them to commit sexual sin. But they don’t see themselves as anti-sex: in fact, they recommend purity because they believe that sex is better when you’re married and you’ve only had one sex partner.

Once you’re married, women are expected to give their husbands sex regularly, even if it is uncomfortable or painful. Not wanting sex is “defrauding” him of his marital right. Before marriage, you can only say no; after marriage, you can only say yes. 

…Okay, that’s really depressing. 

On the less depressing and more stupid department, Cosmo! In Cosmoland, there are two kinds of sexual activities: there are Hot Sex Moves He Secretly Wishes You’d Try, and there are Creepy Things Weird People Like. I’m not sure about Cosmo’s logic here, because toilet paper bondage is on the Hot Sex Moves He Secretly Wishes You’d Try list, and girls in drag is on the Creepy Things Weird People Like list, even though I know way more people who are into girls in drag than toilet paper bondage.

(Please tell me I have a reader who’s into toilet paper bondage, that would make my life.) 

About half the sex tips articles will assure you that these are the hot and kinky kind of sex tips, not the scary and kinky kind. (This is often phrased as “no whips and chains,” because Cosmo is Not Original.) Every month we have the Sexy vs. Skanky list; literally every human behavior has been put on one side or the other.

This is the difference between sex-positivity and sex-negativity. Sex-negativity is the model where there is a Right Way To Fuck and a Wrong Way To Fuck. It doesn’t matter what the content is: whether you’re a defrauder if you don’t fuck after marriage but impure if you fuck before, or unsexy if you don’t like spanking but creepy if you want to use a paddle, or a tease if you don’t put out but a slut if you put out too much, or– hell– anti-feminist if you don’t care about your sexual pleasure but also anti-feminist if your sexual pleasure involves being tied up. It’s all the same bullshit.  

Sex-negativity is the belief that anything not forbidden is compulsory.

Sex-positivity, the way I see it, is the belief that as long as you and your partners are happy no one should give a fuck about the sex you’re having. If you or your partners are not happy, we can give you some advice about how to fix that, but if you are? It’s none of my fucking business. 

Assorted Thoughts On The Definition of Racism

I have concluded that part of the problem with talking about racism is that the word “racism” can be interpreted to mean about four different things.

Some people use “racist” to mean “having explicit beliefs about someone based on their racial background, particularly if those beliefs are derogatory.” (We can call that Racism-1.) Other people use “racist” in a broader sense, which encompasses subconscious, unintentional racism and systems that tend to treat people of different racial backgrounds differently (even if nobody means to treat people differently based on their race). (We can call that Racism-2.) At the same time, some people use “racism” to refer to an individual’s beliefs (Racism-A) and some people use “racism” to refer to an overall societal structure (Racism-B).

This causes much confusion, because anti-racists are usually working under the Racism-2B definition and ordinary white people are normally working under the Racism-1A definition (or maybe 1B). So you get a lot of conversations like this:

Anti-racist: You’re racist!
Ordinary white person: (checks beliefs, still doesn’t believe that black people are inferior) No, I’m not. I’m not racist at all; I’m colorblind.
Anti-racist: Of course you’re racist, all white people are racist.
Ordinary white person: …That’s really racist.
Anti-racist: No, it’s not, you can only be racist against people of color.
Ordinary white person: …
Anti-racist: …

I tend to use the Racism-2B definition myself, so I would like to say some words in its defense. Most white people don’t explicitly believe that people of color are worse than white people; we’ve had a very successful forty-year propaganda program explaining that people of color and white people are equal and Martin Luther King is great. However, most white people do get more scared when they walk by a black person late at night than they do when they walk by a white person, we do feel more comfortable living in a majority-white neighborhood than in a majority-POC neighborhood, and we do all kinds of other racist things we don’t explicitly know about.

Because the non-explicit-belief racism is more common, it’s also more damaging. Most of the hiring discrimination against black people isn’t because people believe black people are terrible. It’s because they want to hire someone who fits in, you know, is like us, is in tune with the culture of the company, who seems competent and together and smart, and what a coincidence all the people who are like that are white.

And the thing is… it’s totally possible that some majority-black company will not hire me because of my race. (Although people of color can be biased in favor of white people too– it’s not like people of color live in a Magic Not Picking Up On Cultural Racism Bubble.) But I’m in a much better situation than a black person, because most companies are biased in my favor and against black people. An act of hiring discrimination has very different effects on a white person and a black person; you can’t look at the act itself without looking at the context within which it takes place. Which is why I call discrimination against white people “prejudice” and discrimination against people of color “racism.”

Thinking About Slurs

[Content note: I use a lot of uncensored slurs in this piece. Might want to skip it if you're at work and your job would frown on you reading something with racist slurs in, or if you don't want to read uncensored slurs.]

Slurs are weird.

Think about “tranny.” From a certain perspective, it’s odd that trans people consider “tranny” insulting. It’s literally just a diminutive of “trans.” People use “tranny” to refer to transistors all the time.

The rest of the slurs are also… really incompetent insults. Near as I can tell, slurs fall into two categories: either they’re a variation on the name of the group or a former name of the group (“retard,” the famous “nigger”) or they’re an essentially random collection of letters complete with unsourced etymological explanations that explain why these letters insult that group (“spic,” “kike,” “fag”). When slur-makers do attempt to be creative, we wind up with slurs like “sand nigger.” See, they’re bad like black people, but they live in the desert, so sand!

Condescending Wonka.

I think that’s where the “it’s just a word, why do you let it hurt you?” brigade is coming from. It seems absurd that I am insulted by an essentially random collection of letters– what’s more, that I feel threatened, attacked, scared because someone used a diminutive for a label I own proudly.

But… it does make sense. Because those words are meaningless. The only thing “tranny” means is “you’re trans, and I hate you for being trans. You being trans is despicable and wrong. I don’t even have to bother to come up with an insult; the mere fact of your existence is insult enough.”

The very meaninglessness of the words make it worse.

And that’s why only the people a slur is used against can reclaim a slur. Because we’re saying “fuck you, our existence is not an insult.” We’re saying “I know you hate me, and I don’t care. I know you think I should be ashamed, but I refuse to be ashamed. This is who I am.”


[Tyrion Lannister, from Game of Thrones: "Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you."]

It is, of course, somewhat less effective to wear who someone else is like armor, and that is why white people are not allowed to call themselves “niggers.”

Perks of Being A Camgirl

I am, like, the queen of shouting about how sex work is a job, not a form of empowerment. It doesn’t matter whether you’re getting in touch with your sexuality or freeing yourself from patriarchal sex-negative constraints or whatever! It is perfectly valid to do sex work because people will give you money for it, just as it is perfectly valid to stock shelves at Wal-Mart because people will give you money for it.

Therefore I am a bit shamefaced to admit that, in fact, sex work has empowered me and helped me get in touch with my sexuality.

I had a lot of body image issues. I was socialized female, I felt gender dysphoria every time I looked at myself in the mirror, and I was a shy socially phobic nerdy kid, which all added up to “people literally only want to have sex with me when they have no other options.” I was on my fifth or sixth sexual partner by the time I worked out that it is a bad idea to have sex with people I’m not attracted to because what if they are the last person who will ever be attracted to me and then I never get sex again.

On the other hand, while camming, I can put on a miniskirt and makeup and have a dozen people telling me I’m gorgeous and that they want to come on my face and they’re masturbating right now looking at my lips. I have been forced to admit that, in fact, people find me sexually attractive. I can totally hold out for sex with people I find attractive! It’s astonishing!

The other thing is… when I’m camming, I’m usually not enjoying myself very much. I pretend to really enjoy self-spanking or fucking myself with my fingers in the way that makes really nice noises but doesn’t actually feel like anything; I pretend that my vagina isn’t sore; I pretend that I find you, O dude on cam, incredibly attractive; I pretend to be super-into foot fetishes and racist-ass cuckolding and Magic: the Gathering. I fake orgasms. While masturbating. It’s that sad.

I also have had a bad habit of having sex that I don’t particularly enjoy because I don’t want to disappoint my partner. And then one day, part of the way through receiving thoroughly unenjoyable cunnilingus, I thought to myself, “…I could be getting paid for this.”

Seriously. I make four bucks a minute pretending to enjoy myself; why the fuck would I do that for free?

So I have instituted my new policy, which is that if I don’t want to have sex with you I’m not going to, and if I don’t enjoy a sex act I’m not going to do it, and so far it has led to far less sex but also I don’t have to stare at the ceiling doubling numbers in my head anymore. Thanks, camming!

On Consent Paranoia

Ozy, having sex: “Do you want this? Are you sure you want this? Really sure? I don’t want to pressure you into anything you don’t want! I’m totally okay with not doing this thing! I just want to do what you want. I’ll be really happy regardless of what we do. Are you sure you want this? Sure you’re sure?”

Part of my consent paranoia might be that I have an anxiety disorder and anyway tend towards scrupulosity, but I feel like consent paranoia is relatively common among people who take good consent seriously. Obviously, we all stop when our partner says “no” or “stop” or “not feeling it” or “ow that hurts” or “safeword,” because not doing that is rape and if you do you are a rapist.

But a lot of times people don’t really want sex, but don’t say no for whatever reason. In my case, I know it from personal experience: I’ve had sex I didn’t really want because I wasn’t sure how to say no, or because I didn’t want my partner to be upset, or because I thought it would be bad or unfair of me to object. And you know what? Having sex you don’t want to have sucks! It’s generally unpleasant and awful for everyone.

So I get paranoid and start asking repeatedly whether my partners are absolutely sure that they want to have sex or try a particular sex act. Absolutely positively sure? You don’t have to! I don’t want to pressure you!

I imagine this gets very annoying to my sexual partners.

Worse, I get so concerned about pressuring people that I don’t ask for what I want because what if I ask for something and they feel like they have to give it to me? There are a lot of problems with this logic. First, I want people I’m fucking to ask for what they want and am continually frustrated by sex partners with no preferences whatsoever. (“I dunno, I just like sex. Sexy sex.”) Therefore people I’m fucking almost certainly want me to express my desires. Second, if my partners can’t say no to something because I asked for it, our relationship has problems that cannot be solved by not asking for things.

So this is a bit of a problem.

Ultimately, consent paranoia– in addition to being incredibly annoying to oneself and others– is disrespectful of my partner’s bodily autonomy. I do not get to decide what kind of sex they want; they do. If they say “I want this,” it isn’t my job to audit whether they really do.

I mean, good consent is still a thing. I can make saying “no” as pleasant an experience as possible (stopping as soon as my partner says “no,” not questioning their “no,” continuing to be affectionate and loving and affirming). I can check in if my partner seems to show signs of withdrawing or not being into it. I can ask my partner about their limits and respect those limits. I can be totally cool with my partner changing their mind. If my partner has issues with saying “no” to sex, we can talk about that and figure out how to cope with it.

But ultimately, they are the ones who have to say no, they are the ones who have to respond with “yeah, not feeling it” after a check-in, they are the ones who have to say what their limits are or whether they’ve changed their mind, and they are the ones who have to say “sometimes I have trouble saying ‘no,’ can you…?”

There’s a part of me that wants to Save Everyone, Everyone In The World. It’s hard to admit that I can do everything right and shit can still go wrong. It’s really hard to accept that some things are out of my control. I have to trust my partners, and sometimes that feels like jumping off a building without a bungee cord.

So basically guys if you’re having sex with me please say “no” when you don’t want something it will give me much less panic.

On Boston

[This post by request from Mike, my lovely boyfriend, and also a response to this prompt.]

In my perfect world, no one would cover terrorist attacks. Oh, sure, the local news would tell people what had happened and what they need to do to stay safe (stay inside, be on the lookout for people that look like the suspect) and help others (house displaced runners). But national news? No. 24-hour news coverage to the point that you can’t get away from it and have to take a social-media break until it’s over? Fuck no.

The average person cannot do anything about public violence. Donating blood doesn’t help, because the blood needs to have already been donated to go to patients; blood banks will simply have an oversupply the week after the disaster and possibly an undersupply once the blood expires and the people who donated blood once haven’t been cleared to donate yet. Other than that, our options are mostly just being sad and scared, and spreading news so that more people can be sad and scared.

Overcoverage of public violence leads to dumb policy. Because of the availability heuristic, it’s easier for people to remember shootings and terrorist attacks than less-covered things like heart attacks or infectious diseases. That means we think that shootings and terrorist attacks lead to more deaths than they really do. We spend billions of dollars on law enforcement and security theater to prevent shootings and terrorist attacks, instead of relieving poverty or scientific research or literally anything else. (The TSA alone costs eight billion dollars a year, or approximately ten thousand grants to study snail sex.) We start calling for gun control or more mental health treatment or national registries of mentally ill people or an end to immigration or a war in Afghanistan, not because these policies are supported by evidence and in our best interests, but because they might have prevented this one flukey thing that we think is more common than it is because people keep covering it.

It also leads to discrimination. Any act of public violence is inevitably blamed on people of color, Muslims, mentally ill people, or some combination, and then people of color, Muslims, and mentally ill people have to put up with people being assholes against them because they assume that we are going to commit violence. (I feel bad for mentally ill Muslims of color. They just have the deck stacked against them.)

I think my biggest grudge against news coverage of public violence, though, is that it makes people afraid. Perhaps because I have an anxiety disorder, I am pissed off at people being made afraid of something that they shouldn’t have to be afraid of.

Let me be clear: I am not policing your response to public violence. I was scared too. It is perfectly natural to be scared when people are covering some shocking act of public violence 24/7; that’s just how brains work. It’s as if the news decided to have 24/7 coverage every time an orphaned puppy got brain cancer. It is perfectly normal to be sad when orphaned puppies have brain cancer; it is also perfectly fair to be upset that the news is making a bunch of people sad for no reason.

I know why people cover this kind of violence. It’s because it’s interesting, it makes people feel things, and it drives clicks. But I look forward for the day when the media says, “giving this attack attention is exactly what the attacker wanted” and turns away.

Intent Is, In Fact, Fucking Magic

A common slogan in the social justice community is that intent is not fucking magic. Usually, people say that when someone does something oppressive, someone else calls them out on it, and the first person says “well, I didn’t mean to.” Intent is not fucking magic! If you hurt people, then they’re hurt, regardless of why!

…Except that intent kind of is fucking magic.

For instance, let’s say someone refers to me with female pronouns. Regardless, I’m misgendered, and I get that twinge of oh fuck oh fuck wrong pronoun. (It feels like being stabbed in the gut with an icicle.) But it is different if the context is:

  • My boyfriend, who knew me as “she” for a year and previously had pronouns in read-only memory;
  • A friend who is trying but still sees me as a girl;
  • A random person on the Internet who assumes I’m female because I talk about gender;
  • Someone who hates me and is deliberately misgendering me as a sign of disrespect. 

The primary difference in these situations is intent. The difference in intent between “fuck, I’m used to your old pronouns” and “okay, but you’re a girl REALLY” and “I didn’t know” and “I want to hurt you.” It is reasonable for me to get more upset at someone wanting to hurt me than I am at someone making a mistake.

And you know what? If it’s an ambiguous situation, and it’s possible that they misgendered me to insult me and possible they misgendered me because they thought I was a chick, I would really appreciate it if they would clear the matter up. This is not just about their culpability, although that matters. It’s about my ability to assess how safe that person is and how much I should trust them. If you think intent shouldn’t matter, you are making it more difficult for oppressed people to distinguish people who will hurt them from people who won’t. That is the exact opposite of social justice.

Of course, I think most of the time “intent is not fucking magic!” is used when someone does a shitty thing over and over again and says “I didn’t mean to!” as if that makes it better. But you know what? If you make a sexist joke, and someone explains why that’s bad, and you make another sexist joke and then defend it with “I didn’t mean to be sexist!”, your intent was not good. If you mean well, you will act the way a well-meaning person acts.

How do well-meaning people act?

1) Apology. A real one.
2) Try to understand why the people believe that that thing was wrong.
3) Take steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
3a) If you disagree that a thing was wrong, take reasonable steps to avoid doing that thing in front of people who are bothered by it.
3b) Or admit that, in fact, you DO intend to make sexist jokes and upset feminists, which at least has the virtue of being honest.