FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
4d ago
In reference to his divorces, Stewart was once quoted as saying, "Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house."
So weird, my boss told me this quote the other day but he thought it was from WC Fields.
FtttG
8d ago
I truly believe boy-obsession fits the bill of a mental illness and not a voluntary vice. I mean, have you been there? Feeling like you can’t even breathe or think or eat or sip water until you get that text back? Women are so desperate for respite from the psychological stress, that we came up with the term ‘distraction showers’ to describe trying to stop fixating on a problem with a guy. This isn’t the sort of behavior people need to do to distract themselves from voluntary vices such as gossiping – you don’t need to hop in the shower to avoid talking badly about someone, but you do perhaps when you’re struggling with addiction.
It was bad enough when people would speak disdainfully of "catching feelings", as if romantic infatuation was a bacterial infection. We have now reached the point at which we're clinically pathologising the experience of falling in love.
The difference being that, in your examples, the claimed reason for doing X really exists, and continues to exist even in the absence of the evolutionary "goal" to which it is directed. It's true that tasty food tastes good; it's true that orgasms feel good. Lots of tasty food is lacking in nutritional value, and lots of things can result in orgasm even though there is no chance of procreation resulting. People can and do consume tasty food just because it tastes good, paying no mind to the nutritional content thereof; people can and do pursue orgasm just because they feel good, paying no mind to whether or not reproduction ensues as a result.
But the assertion "I dress up for myself" directly implies that dressing up would be equally enjoyable regardless of whether one has an audience or not. But if dressing up only feels good if you have an audience, then the claimed reason for doing X is simply untrue. Unlike the obesity crisis and porn addiction, there is no widespread societal epidemic of people spending thousands on clothes and makeup just so they can sit at home "feeling good" in their fancy clothes and makeup (obviously being an aspiring camgirl or influencer doesn't count: a virtual audience is still an audience). The audience is a necessary component to the activity in question feeling good: ergo, the claims to be dressing up "for myself" are an obvious post hoc rationalisation to rebut accusations of narcissism or attention-seeking, in a memetic environment in which women explicitly admitting to putting stock in or deriving positive feelings from male attention is seen as déclassé.
By way of analogy, if everyone who claimed to be eating food "just for the taste" incidentally happened to be consuming a varied, balanced, nutrient-rich diet and expressed no interest in consuming tasty food with little nutritional value - it would be reasonable to discount their claims that this was their real motivation. Likewise if every male person who claimed to be pursuing orgasm purely for its own sake incidentally happened to only engage in sex acts which were likely to result in procreation (i.e. unprotected vaginal intercourse with nubile fertile ovulating females) and expressed no interest in pleasurable sex acts with little likelihood of procreation resulting. Or moreover, the counterfactual world in which food only tastes good if it's rich in nutrients and tastes disgusting otherwise; or in which orgasms only feel good if they are likely to result in procreation, and feel uncomfortable or painful otherwise.
It sounds like you're just rephrasing @faceh's point in different words. I don't see how "evolution gave us a brain that feels good when a person looks attractive when they have an audience, but not when they don't have an audience" is a meaningfully different assertion from "any woman who claims she dresses up 'for herself' is full of shit". Surely if dressing up feels good if and only if you have an audience, that logically implies that no one is really dressing up "for themselves".
FtttG
4d ago
Because if it felt good to be sexy even in the absence of an audience, women would dress exactly the same way while lounging around at home as they do when out in public. No woman spends an hour applying makeup just so she can rot in bed watching Netflix, ergo the audience (whether male, female or both) must be a necessary ingredient in the cocktail.
FtttG
5d ago
It Starts with the Egg by Rebecca Fett, a book I literally found on the side of the road and which, serendipitously, is uniquely germane to a project I'm conducting research into.
FtttG
5d ago
Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez
Wow, I thought she was like a decade younger. Fair play, I suppose.
FtttG
9d ago
For years I was under the impression that the term "fuckboy" was the spear counterpart to "slut": a highly promiscuous man. Last year I was talking with a female friend of mine who was single at the time, and who'd recently had some sub-optimal experiences on dating apps which she was feeling bitter about. (Thankfully she's now in a serious relationship with a wonderful man who I like very much.) She linked this article to me, which explained that a "fuckboy" isn't just a slutty man, but rather a man who leads a woman to believe that he's interested in pursuing a serious committed relationship with her and essentially treats her as his girlfriend for the duration of their casual dating stage, only to abruptly drop her without warning as soon as he gets bored.
Fuckboys reel women in with what appears to be romance. They ask women on dates. They want to get to know women on an intimate emotional level. They want to be vulnerable, hold hands and kiss in public. And they definitely want to fuck. What they don't want is a relationship, which after all of the intimacy, romance, and of course fucking, leaves women confused as to what the hell they just experienced.
All, I could think was - man, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Some components of gender politics really are evergreen.
FtttG
4d ago
(Presumedly) white men really not beating the allegations!
It was game over as soon as I watched Mulan.
FtttG
8d ago
I'm constantly reminded of Tom Hanks' son Chet as a reminder for how far the apple can fall.
Look, someone had to tell us it was a white boy summer.
FtttG
9d ago
I remember reading an article (can't find it now) in which a trans man had recently started taking testosterone and was driving to a session of his trans support group, when another driver cut him off in traffic, which so enraged him that he found himself experiencing the worst episode of road rage he'd ever have had in his life: heart racing, temples pounding, furiously cursing, to the point that he had to pull over his car to calm himself down. He'd never felt anything like it. Upon arriving at the trans support group, he described this experience and how unlike any previous road rage episode it was, whereupon the older members of the group smiled knowingly and explained that he'd gotten "boy angry" for the first time.
Male aggression is qualitatively different from female: like most stereotypes, the male urge to punch holes in walls or break things when you feel angry or frustrated has a large basis in fact, and seems comparatively rarer among women. It must be very alarming to experience this all of a sudden without the benefit of a years-long puberty in which to acclimate oneself to it.
I admit I can't explain why "feminist" in the public imagination is sex-positive.
My pet theory from last month is that sex-positive feminists are highly psychologically atypical women who are almost as interested in casual sex as the modal man is, and who erroneously attribute their interest in casual sex as evidence as their having transcended the internalised misogyny (read: false consciousness) that their peers fell victim to.
FtttG
9d ago
So much of this reminds me of Jugaad Ethics.
I don't think anyone really disputes that the Palestinians, collectively, are oppressed. Where we differ is who we blame for oppressing them (the modal leftist pins the blame solely on Israel, whereas I would say that the Hamas leaders, the broader Arab world and Iran bear some of the blame); what the fact of their oppression implies for the moral rightness of their behaviour (the modal leftist believes that, because Palestinians are oppressed, they cannot be held accountable for their actions in the same way an oppressor could; I disagree); and what the fact of their oppression implies for the pragmatic pursuit of their goals (the modal leftist believes that, because Hamas was morally justified in committing the attacks on October 7th or firing rockets at Israel more or less indiscriminately, that therefore implies that doing so was a sensible goal; I disagree, as I am unable to fathom a hypothetical turn of events by which gunning down revellers at a music festival brings Palestinian statehood an iota closer).
FtttG
8d ago
Having now read the article in full, two points:
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When someone scrupulously provides citations for some of the factual assertions they make, it makes me doubly suspicious when they neglect to provide citations for others, especially when that factual assertion is phrased in a weaselly way (e.g. "how many women compromise their health by letting men use no contraception, to which 1 in 4 women have turned to emergency contraception – women are taxed with pregnancy scares for the premium of male sexual pleasure."; "a significant portion of women who undergo abortions do it as a result of pressure from their male partner")
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If her claims to being a virgin and voluntary female celibate (volfemcel?) are true, I believe that Khalidi's obsessive fixation on the worst exemplars of the male sex are a cope to rationalise her own emotional avoidance. She's not really scared about getting pumped-and-dumped, or being coerced into anal sex, or having her nudes leaked - she's scared of being emotionally vulnerable with someone and getting rejected. But she's too proud to admit that, so instead she insists that the reason she doesn't date men is because they're all pigs. It's a fig leaf.
emotional abuse
Maybe the term gets "abused", so to speak, but "emotional abuse" seems like a perfectly reasonable way to characterise a pattern in which e.g. one partner in a romantic relationship routinely insults the other, calls them names, accuses them of infidelity for no good reason, belittles them, lies to them etc.
FtttG
12d ago
Which is to say, Israel postures like it is responding to an existential threat, but it isn't.
Hamas alone does not present an existential threat to Israel, agreed. But for most of Israel's history, they weren't just facing a threat from Palestinians, but from the entire Arab world; and even today, as little as two years ago they were facing a combined threat from Hamas, Hezbollah, Qatar and Iran. I think it's fair to say these four belligerents combined constitute an existential threat to Israel.
Scott made a point years ago that I've been thinking about for years. The conventional wisdom in so much of psychiatry is that mental illnesses are "historicist" i.e. caused by a personal experience that the patient in question had. It's not common to hear people state "I have an anxiety disorder as a result of being in an abusive relationship", ascribing a direct causal relationship between a certain series of events and a certain constellation of symptoms. In the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, the historical framing is right there in the name - in order to be formally diagnosed with PTSD, one must have gone through a traumatic experience.
But of course, not everyone who goes through a traumatic experience (or experiences) exhibits PTSD-like symptoms, and many people develop said symptoms who have never gone through a traumatic experience. And it's not so long ago that the received wisdom in the psychiatric community was that autism was a direct result of a child having a cold, emotionally remote mother. Now We Know Better and autism is now understood as a condition primarily determined by genetics, but it's remarkable how little self-reflection the psychiatric community has engaged in when it comes to the historicist paradigm undergirding so many other psychiatric diagnoses. We might soon learn that there's a genetic basis for what we now call PTSD which is only activated in the case of profoundly elevated cortisol levels over an extended period of time, and the idea that someone might suffer from PTSD in the absence of said gene expression will seem as preposterous as the idea of children with emotionally remote mothers invariably developing autism as a result.
Per your twin studies example - because WEIRD people spend most of their time in hermetically sealed antiseptic environments, there's a tendency to conflate "environmental" with "social", and assume that anything which isn't caused by genetics must be caused by social influence in some nebulously defined fashion. But of course, that isn't the only thing that "environmental factors" can refer to. Maybe schizophrenia will eventually turn out to be caused by pesticides that only one twin was exposed to, or a pathogen of some kind (e.g. if one twin is more promiscuous than the other and catches an STD). Maybe the recent surge in PTSD diagnoses will turn out to be a side effect of the fact that we all have microplastics in our balls/breasts. Who can say?
FtttG
12d ago
Has Gaza been ethnically cleansed, or is this ethnic cleansing ongoing? If so, that's news to me.
FtttG
8d ago
not even "we decided to live together in a polycule
My understanding is that Scott is still polyamorous even after getting married.
FtttG
5d ago
As documented in the Tinker Tuesday threads, I recently completed the first draft of a novel which began as a project for last year's NaNoWriMo. On Friday the 11th I'm going to start working on the second draft, and I've been doing some additional research in the interim.
I've never found comparisons between how the Nazis treated the Jews and how the Israelis treat(ed) the Palestinians to be even remotely persuasive. The Holocaust was cold-hearted systemic murder on an industrial scale, whereas the Israel-Palestine conflict looks exactly like every other interminable conflict in the Middle East or North Africa for the last ~100 years. Even the much-ballyhooed apartheid legislation in Israel, in which Palestinians are subject to different legislation to Israelis, is also true of e.g. Syria.
FtttG
11d ago
If you're suggesting that the war in Gaza is a genocide because half of all deaths in Gaza were civilians rather than combatants, that would imply that virtually every modern war was a genocide, as many wars had a vastly higher ratio of civilian to combatant deaths (as high as 9:1 in some cases). If you're happy to call the Korean war, the Gulf war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq genocides, all well and good, just as long as we're consistent.
I know the feeling.
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