I've met plenty of women who seem hellbent on making this analytical leap, and about zero men who think that way at all.
Hello, I'm the strawman you're suggesting doesn't exist. I personally find body hair, including pubic hair, unattractive on women for the same reason I prefer shorter women with smaller breasts (and bigger eyes!), because I see signs of physical maturity as unappealing in this context. Yes, I am aware that this is weird/creepy/gross/pedo-ish of me, but that's how the concepts connect in my head, femininity is right next to neoteny, and while I'm aware that most men don't think the same way, I didn't feel I could let the idea that men in general don't think that way stand.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
I remember being young and finding this terminology collapse confusing myself. I think gay men were responsible? For them the distinction would become rather blurry.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
This is extremely relatable, and serves as a good reminder (of what should already be obvious) that encouraging AGRs without restoring functioning sexual morality is worse than nothing.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
Though he's a villain rather than a hero, I take Absalom as a Biblical ur-example here.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
I'm somewhat more sympathetic to the "representation in media" complaint here, but it actually slightly cuts against the complaint about real AGRs. The problem is that the fictional relationships are rarely actually being depicted as AGRs. A fifty-year-old actor is playing a Generic-Age Man and a twenty-year-old actress is playing a Generic-Age Woman. If the script was actually trying to portray an AGR - which it may well be likelier to do if AGRs were more culturally accepted - the implications would be quite different.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
I'm surprised that even the strawman doesn’t invoke eschatology here.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
I personally find it fascinating to notice how the cultural stereotype of the incel is actually a sort of amalgam of two different archetypes of men, and one of them is indeed the established pickup artist who's lost his fucking mind. That really puts the lie, IMO, to the idea that "incels" hate women as a sour grapes thing; by far the most vicious misogyny I see in those online spaces seems to trace back to men who have led terribly disordered and promiscuous lives; they were already quite misogynist in the first place but got worse when their lifestyle proved unsatisfying. I think there's something of a feedback loop between the celibate woman haters and the caddish woman haters, but the latter are much more aggressive and manic in any case, where the former are more depressive and blackpilled.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
I feel like "in it for the money" is a bad cultural concept in this context, which conflates the natural class interests that go into marriage, especially for a woman, with prostitution. The problem with "gold diggers" isn’t that they find wealth a critically important quality in a man, it's that they simply plan to extract it and leave.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
While I'm pretty sure it doesn’t outweigh the social instability of the large single male population, this situation feels like a decent argument for polygamy. There's an obvious local equilibrium there in "the man takes the secretary home, marries her also, and sweetens the deal for the first wife by giving her an elevated position of authority over the second (and third, and so on)".
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
RE: your footnote, I vaguely associate that trope with the kept Queen herself being closer to the young man's age than the King's. I wonder to what extent that's part of the original trope and to what extent that's something imposed by later adaptations as an instantiation of modern values.
DiscourseMagnus
5d ago
I agree that it has the ring of truth. Where I think it collapses some is that:
- Social contagion isn’t a dynamic unique to FTMs
- The male version of social contagion tends to be more crudely sexual in nature, spreading through vectors like pornography and fetish communities
- Regardless of the apparently lower rate of bisexuality in males, this sexualized MTF social contagion disproportionately affects men for whom both the HSTS and AGP pitches have meaningful appeal
DiscourseMagnus
6d ago
This analysis is obviously correct, but in addition to the surface-level unattractiveness of the common lesbian gender presentation, I would add that you cannot cleanly separate sexually-motivated lesbianism from politically-motivated lesbianism. Accordingly, a woman avowing lesbianism is a pretty strong signal that she isn't merely unattracted to men, but is instinctually and ideologically misandrist. Some guys are actually into that on some level or another, but it certainly complicates the naive "two women, twice as hot" interpretation. It is extremely likely that a lesbian would not merely be unattainable to a straight man, but would be interpersonally unpleasant towards him in a platonic context.
DiscourseMagnus
7d ago
Yes, I generally find that "heretofore-unheard-of modern degeneracy" is a bad framework for thinking about this kind of thing, when it would be better to remember the nearly forgotten examples from antiquity, and think of them as regressions. Trans women are equivalently just the modern version of Grugg the castrated male temple prostitute; "multiple systems" are just the modern version of Grugg stalking around the village and gibbering, possessed by fifty demons. These aren't new challenges to the Christian order; they’re reemerging aspects of human nature that Christianity stamped out pretty well.
DiscourseMagnus
10d ago
Whether you're using geographic or magnetic compass directions, east and west do not cancel each other out that way.
DiscourseMagnus
10d ago
The existence of map projections does not make the Earth flat.
DiscourseMagnus
10d ago
The presence of measurements on distance is an extraneous detail that gets it thinking of it as an instance of the generic question "should I walk or drive SOMEWHERE that's X distance away". And also the real answer is even more obvious than the answer it gives, to the point that it assumes no one would ever actually ask it that.
DiscourseMagnus
10d ago
I think there are two separate cognitive skills involved in correctly answering a trick question like this - both important, but the mix of them can make the results a bit confusing. One is the general intelligence to come up with and understand the right answer. The other is the social intelligence to recognize that you are being asked a trick question, and should round off any confusion you have to that trick question and not to the non-trick-question it's mimicking. It's common for models to give a trick question like this the wrong answer, while noting in their reasoning that the question is trivial as written and they assume whoever wrote it made a mistake.
Note that this second skill, of trick question detection, varies highly among humans as well. It's common for simple trick questions to go viral on social media as a kind of ragebait. And in addition to the throngs of people who fail the first-order IQ test and give the wrong answer, there's often a bizarre number of people who fail a second-order IQ test and somehow miss that the question was deliberately constructed as a trick.
DiscourseMagnus
12d ago
I'm slightly reassured it was only 72 men over 9 years and not, like, a thousand. Suggests the candidate pool is not a vast ocean.
She was in late middle age.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
There are definitely a lot of people who use the preferred pronouns of trans people they like and not mass murderers, it's just not a position with intellectual support on either side of the aisle.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
I've come to interpret most tightening of laws after a tragedy as being symbolic. The buyback after Port Arthur probably didn't have much effect, but it was expressive. The point was for the government to communicate, "We care, and we are taking this seriously."
Nope. It's so that anytime they want, the government can with maximum ease send men to your house to tie you up, rape your wife, kids, and pets to death in front of you (if you have any), and drag you off to some blacksite to do medical experiments on you for the rest of your days. That's what "monopoly on force" means.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
It's unfalsifiable, but the obvious course isn't hiding the suicide, it's reporting it but avoiding romanticizing it directly or giving it more coverage than you'd give a tragic accident. Robin Williams is the classic example of the wrong approach on both counts; it was all over the press with loving tributes endorsing his decision to kill himself.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
If you decide that it all traces back to that one forum post, then it makes the chud gamer side looks really bad, which is why the feminist side usually frames it that way.
This is not my impression at all; it seems to me that exactly the opposite of this is true. The feminist side is the one that tries to obfuscate the specifics of the incident and make it a general culture war thing, because the specific incident did look really bad for them, and it pains me to see their opponents buy into that frame.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
I suspect a synthesis where women are having less casual sex than a redpiller believes and more casual sex than a normie conservative man believes.
DiscourseMagnus
17d ago
They're in US territory and I don't think we ought to give them up, so they should assimilate. Ideally we would acquire even more territory and make the people there assimilate too.
Fair enough! Though the reasons to be skeptical of self-reporting on this particular issue are fairly obvious.
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