FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1hr ago
I never liked this argument. There are lots of words for things few people (if anyone) has ever done. We even have standard terms for hypothetical situations which have never come to pass and probably never will.
FtttG
1hr ago
I never claimed that a majority of gay men engage in cottaging. By "perfectly normal", I merely meant that it's a concept that most gay men could be assumed to be familiar with, and which most would consider unworthy of comment if it came up in conversation.
FtttG
1hr ago
You might say gay men arranging to have sex with each other in a toilet shows how disgusting gay men are, but I'm pretty sure it shows how much women class up the sexual experience. There would be a 10000x increase in straight couples having sex on oily cardboard in alleyways if women were down with it.
Agreed. Male homosexuality just shows you what male sexuality looks like when it's unconstrained.
FtttG
1hr ago
I think that's the modal response from the typical heterosexual of either sex.
Full disclosure: while I've never had sex with another man in a toilet cubicle, I have had sex with a woman in a toilet cubicle within a couple of hours of meeting her. So I'm not really one to throw stones here.
FtttG
3hr ago
I experimented with Grindr many years ago and was invited to a toilet cubicle in this shopping centre by an Irishman in his forties, who I can only assume had a wife and children. I decided I'd rather be sodomised for the first time by a handsome Brazilian in an actual bed in an apartment.
FtttG
5hr ago
My girlfriend and I live right next to a shopping centre. The public toilets are on the second floor, and owing to their relative seclusion (you have to walk down a long hallway, at least a hundred metres from the nearest shop) are a popular spot for gay men to meet up for dogging. They're generally used not by out-and-proud types, but by closeted gay men with wives and children who wouldn't be caught dead setting foot in a gay bar. Standard procedure is for these men to find an empty cubicle, open Grindr, and camp until a willing participant makes themselves available.
When I mentioned this to my girlfriend, she was appalled. It never ceases to fascinate me, the kinds of behaviours that are seen as perfectly normal within the gay community, and what straight people think of them when confronted with them. The gulf between the sanitised "love is love" omg yass queen slaaay portrayal of the gay community and the gritty reality (of rough sex in public toilets between two men who met each other all of two minutes ago, literally don't know each other's names, at least one of whom presents himself as straight and has a wife and children) is almost incomprehensibly vast.
FtttG
19hr ago
I've continually compromised on my standards (veganism, environmentalism, religion, wokeness)
Do you mean your ideal woman is vegan, environmentalist, the same religion as you, and woke? Or am I misinterpreting?
FtttG
20hr ago
This is roughly equivalent to just training a gun on them and saying "don't run or I'll shoot you", which police officers are generally not allowed to do.
Where did you get that idea? That's what arresting someone is.
FtttG
22hr ago
I need to measure consistently; I think I will always slip off my shoes and take my keys and wallet and phone out of my pocket before weighing.
Strongly recommend doing it completely naked first thing in the morning when you wake up, before you eat or drink anything. That will give you the most accurate reading, uncontaminated by water weight.
Nothing for the last two yet, predictably. I'm coming to realize that I have pretty cripplingly low self-esteem, which makes these two much more difficult. I'm not even sure if I want a girlfriend anymore. I had an embarrassing online relationship last year (she was a real woman, I promise) and I found that my anxiety was significantly increased about all kinds of aspects of her. I still have a huge amount of mixed feelings about relationships. I guess that that won't change until I interact with women romantically more, but the fact is that it's going to be painful and I wish I could just avoid everything.
Strongly recommend reading this book. I found it very insightful and helpful.
New Year's resolutions check-in (mainly just to keep myself honest, but feel free to post your progress as replies):
- Posted my first blog post of the year on Monday, about what the recent Bondi Beach shooting implies about the efficacy of Australia's gun buyback programs in preventing mass shootings. One down, twenty-five to go.
- Went to the gym twice last week and on Monday, going again at lunchtime today: can deadlift 1.68x my bodyweight, squat .77x and bench press .64x.
- Have not consumed any alcohol, fast food, fizzy drinks or pornography since waking up on January 1st, although I did unfortunately snack between meals on Sunday and Monday.
- Have completed the first of 11 modules in the SQL course.
- Have practised guitar for roughly one hour every day since January 1st.
FtttG
1d ago
Lose 10 pounds. Target weight - 84 kg.
Changing from imperial to metric in consecutive sentences? Boys, we've got ourselves a maverick.
FtttG
1d ago
If it's for a novel, I'd be happy to. Please DM me. I might even ask you to return the favour!
FtttG
2d ago
As mentioned in last week's Wellness Wednesday thread, one of my new year's resolutions was to write and record an album this year. To that end, I committed to spending roughly an hour practising guitar every day in January.
For the album I released this time last year, I recorded the guitars using a detuned standard electric guitar, for which I had a special nut cut so that I could put heavy gauge strings on it. On the advice of the luthier who cut the nut for me, for this album I've instead bought myself a baritone guitar: an electric guitar with an unusually long neck and scale length, allowing the player to tune down to lower ranges while maintaining string tension, essentially the missing link between a standard electric guitar and a bass guitar.
Much of my guitar practice has been spent just getting used to the longer scale length of this guitar when compared to a typical electric guitar. I thought a good way of getting the hang of it would be to learn some songs written for a baritone guitar, and it popped into my head that Carcass, a band I listened to a lot as a teenager, used baritone guitars. For the last few days I've been trying to master this song. Hoo boy can these lads play fast: the "playback speed" feature in YouTube is a godsend. I figure once I can play the rhythm guitar for this song cleanly, I can say I've mastered the baritone guitar.
FtttG
3d ago
70 pages into Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's a very inside-baseball take on cyberpunk/hard SF which approaches impenetrability at times, and Watts uses far too many italics for my liking, but I'm curious to see where it goes.
I saw a tweet awhile ago that said something along the lines of:
Going to therapy? You mean arguing with a liberal until you agree with them?
and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.
I went through a period in my life in which I was ruminating so much I found it difficult to concentrate on anything and I was very depressed. I will admit that several weeks of very specific CBT exercises did help. But I'm very sceptical of the efficacy of free-form undirected talk therapy. In particular, I find it frustrating how rarely it's acknowledged that going to therapy might be bad for you. The "just go to therapy" brigade generally claim that the worst-case scenario is that it'll be useless (which even then is not necessarily a trivial financial and opportunity cost): I have never heard these people suggest that going to therapy might make a happy person unhappy, an unhappy person even unhappier, a self-absorbed person more self-absorbed etc.
But this feels like a dodge - certainly what the defendent described as happening could happen.
It feels like a dodge for you to claim that his version of events could be what really happened. My prior is that people accused of wrongdoing will almost always deny the thing they're accused of. If they do concede that they did it, they will do everything in their power to make it sound more understandable and less wrong. This goes double if they're accused of an exceptionally heinous crime.
So: because the perpetrator did not inform his wife of what he'd done, he obviously knew that he'd done something wrong (at the bare minimum, done something he knew his wife wouldn't approve of). Once the older of the two children told the mother what he'd done, then short of accusing his three-year-old of lying, the game is up. The only way he can make what he did seem less heinous is by claiming that the children wanted to do it and he just permitted them to. I do not accept this version of events for a second, any more than I would accept a rapist's claim that the victim was a tease or a wife-beater's claim that his wife provoked him. I would put money on some form of coercion, manipulation or outright physical force being employed in this case.
Would you be okay with it if the defendant provided objective proof that it was consensual? (e.g. by a video recording)
If he provided video evidence of the crime, I would believe his version of events. I would not be "okay" with what he did, because child abuse is evil.
FtttG
5d ago
It does not seem at all obvious that this action, where there was not only consent, but the children actively engaged in the behaviour themselves, suggesting they enjoyed it ("...then allowed both children...")
I assume that "they wanted to do this, and I allowed them to" was the defendant's account of what transpired. Obviously there were no adults in the vicinity who can corroborate it. You'll note that essentially every adult charged with sexually interfering with children will at some point claim that the child in question seduced or took advantage of him. It was a cliché when Lolita came out, which Nabokov was banking on the reader recognising so as to understand that Humbert is an unreliable narrator.
No, I do not uncritically accept a convicted pederast's version of exactly how his act of child molestation transpired. It rather alarms me that you, apparently, do.
FtttG
5d ago
I had some thoughts about this back when that DignifAI thing was doing the rounds:
Unlike editing a photo of Trump so it looks like he's riding a skateboard or whatever, I don't think it's hard to understand why editing Alice/Bob's publicly posted photo to make it look more sexualised than the original is crossing a line: there's a significant possibility that people might mistake the edited photo for the genuine article, and Alice/Bob will take a reputational hit, as people will assume that they are the kind of person who shares thirst trap photos for public consumption. Even if the photos are obviously fake (as in the recent Taylor Swift "deepfakes", which look more like the kind of stylised fetish fanart which has been around for years before LLMs were a thing), I think it's still demeaning to reduce a real person to the status of a sex object without their consent.
Not at all. Not the worst but nothing swanky.
More options
Context Copy link