FtttG
User ID: 1175
I, @FarNearEverywhere and @Tollund_Man4 are Irish and live in Ireland, the former two residing there and the latter in France. @self_made_human and @mrvanillasky are both Indian, with the former residing in the UK.
As for the claim that the only people who care about those topics are people who live in Silicon Valley: have you not noticed that the entire world has been talking about AI nonstop for the past two years? Have you not noticed what a hot-button issue the trans stuff is in every Western nation, to the point that Trump signed an executive order banning men from competing in women's sports, and the UK Supreme Court recently had to rule on the definition of the word "woman"? Indian caste dynamics are of profound import to the 1.5 billion people who live in India (even if only 1% of those people express an opinion about caste dynamics, that's still five times the population of Silicon Valley), never mind the diaspora. There's been a nationwide campaign of arson against Tesla because of the outsized power Musk wields (wielded?) as part of DOGE.
Of the items on your list, polyamory and Aella sound like the only ones to me which are uniquely Silicon Valley-coded.
FtttG
2mo ago
I think this question came up before, and I suggested hard-line anti-abortion. It's easy for a wealthy conservative man to proclaim that no one should ever have an abortion, as by virtue of his wealth, he and his family are insulated from most of the "use cases" in which an abortion might be preferable to carrying a baby to term. Whereas a working-class woman who gets pregnant unexpectedly might find that carrying the baby to term is financially ruinous.
FtttG
2mo ago
Well actually my point is that there are plenty of self-identified trans women who don't even put on a dress or try to speak in a more high-pitched voice.
FtttG
2mo ago
The trans women you've met must pass a hell of a lot better than the ones I've met, or seen photos of.
FtttG
2mo ago
Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man
Vaginoplasties are only undertaken by a tiny minority of MtF people. The vast majority of MtF people have fully intact penises.
FtttG
2mo ago
I'd even go so far as to say - if you're seeing a therapist in hopes of receiving validation, therapy is almost certainly going to make your life or the lives of people around you worse.
FtttG
2mo ago
As of February last year he is still poly.
FtttG
2mo ago
I still thought it was funny.
For clarity, I did think the AITA story was funny, and I was laughing at the absurdity of it throughout. It wasn't so much that it was bad as just a little out of place: it would have been perfectly fine as a self-contained story. Even if the protagonist's "love interest" had been someone other than Alison (e.g. Linda, one of the protagonists of Private Citizens would have been a better fit), I think it would have been stronger for it: "Pics" is such a depressingly down-to-earth, plausible series of events, it just strained credibility for me that its protagonist could then immediately wander into this over-the-top absurdist satire. Imagine a hypothetical episode of The Wire which crosses over with Twin Peaks and that was pretty much my reaction.
Unless you have some external sources for this
I follow him on Instagram. Granted that I might be falling for the parasociality trap, but in my view he really does seem to do the whole "ha ha I'm ever so lonely ha ha" gag a bit too often for it to be wholly insincere. I could be way off-base.
I expanded on this review a bit with the intention of submitting it to Scott's book review contest, only to find out he's not running it this year. Quoting from my expanded review:
Obviously Tulathimutte was worried that he didn’t go far enough [in attempting to distance himself from The Feminist], so he labours the point by making various edits to “The Feminist” from its original publication, in order to put further distance between himself and the character (a strategy which, as mentioned above, he more or less cops to in the book’s closing “rejection letter”). In its original incarnation, I believe the titular character was intended to be read as Thai-American, given the way his Tinder bio mentioned how much he enjoyed cooking Thai food (which he presumably learned in the course of his Thai upbringing). This meant that the story was just as much about the sexual frustrations of Asian-American men unsuccessfully pursuing white American women as it was about the incel/Nice Guy™ experience more broadly. But in Rejection, The Feminist has been retconned into being a white man named Craig, and his Tinder bio now states that he enjoys Thai food, rather than Thai cooking. Likewise the fact that the Tinder bio is stuffed with broad yuk-yuk jokes (to show off his feminist credentials, the character describes himself as “Abortion’s #1 fan”) which were absent from its original publication: these are meant to reassure the reader that we’re dealing with a caricature, not an uncomfortably believable character who could easily serve as a stand-in for Tulathimutte himself.
To put it another way: I can imagine “Trans women are women (duh)” and “All body types very welcome!” appearing in Tulathimutte’s own Tinder bio, even if meant insincerely. “Abortion’s #1 fan”? Not a chance – he’s not that socially inept and clueless.
...
I have not read Private Citizens, and I think I will.
I can hardly recommend it highly enough. When thinking of all the books I've read in the past five years, I think the only one I enjoyed more is possibly Never Let Me Go. Obviously it was bound to be a tough act to follow.
I readily admit that there are women out there who enjoy casual sex (I've met plenty of them, including a handful who weren't French) and I'm sure Holly Math Nerd's therapist was exaggerating for comic effect, but I nonetheless think "demisexual" probably describes the modal female experience a lot more accurately than the sex-positive feminist tabula rasa account.
I read Rejection a few months ago ("Pics" was, in my view, the strongest story in the collection) and posted a mini-review here. Curious to see if you agree with any of my points.
FtttG
2mo ago
Agreed. The Little Friend was a massive disappointment. The Goldfinch had a very promising start, and the Las Vegas sequence almost achieved the dizzying heights of The Secret History, but she didn't manage to stick the landing.
I continue to wonder the extent to which this is the Bay Arean egregore poisoning a population for a phenomenon that would otherwise be known as "having close friends,"
I dunno, though. Everyone intuitively understands the concept of an emotional affair, and a lot of women (and probably a lot of men too) would see it as a betrayal if they found out that their spouse was sharing intensely intimate thoughts and feelings with another person of the opposite sex, even if their spouse hadn't yet fucked (or even kissed) the person. I don't know what Scott's love life is actually like, but to me it sounds like he has a wife and also a "harem" of other women with whom he has emotional affairs, achieving a degree of emotional intimacy greater than mere friendship, even if there's no fucking. I could be wrong, though: maybe what he calls his polycule is functionally indistinguishable from a dude who has a wife and a bunch of female friends, who treat him almost like their honorary "gay best friend".
FtttG
2mo ago
Agreed, tenure-track professorship is a high-risk, high-reward strategy.
I agree that most of the people trying to make it as rappers or streamers would probably not be able to carve out an impressive income elsewhere, but I imagine most of them, if they really applied themselves, could probably work their way up to being a supervisor at a big box shop or similar, a far superior outcome than squandering your twenties on a futile quest to get your mixtape out there and still being an unemployed nobody with no assets at the end of it.
Perhaps more clarity is called for. I'm using "therapy" to refer specifically to psychotherapy. At least in Ireland, "psychotherapist" is a protected term. Life coaches are hence definitionally not therapists, as no qualifications are required to call oneself a life coach. Nor are public speaking coaches.
"Everyone could benefit from guidance and mentoring from a third party" and "everyone could benefit from psychotherapy" are two very different claims.
FtttG
2mo ago
The fact that similar patterns are visible in other countries with a strong union tradition (e.g. France, UK) but without legal analogues to the American antitrust legislation you cite.
FtttG
2mo ago
Scott, by his account, has a good marriage, a tightly knit community and a pair of twins. He still finds poly a net-positive to his life. I know poly isn't for me, but if someone says it works for them, who am I to argue? Maybe you'd argue they should give monogamy the old college try so they can make an informed decision on which suits them better, but follow that line of reasoning far enough and you'll find yourself arguing that every man should have sex with another man just so he can be absolutely sure that he's straight and not just a closeted gay/bi.
FtttG
2mo ago
The Holodomor was a half-deliberate half-targeted famine which killed 4 million.
A quibble: some estimates put the death toll as high as 5 million.
The first example is spot on, and it's pretty much the same as the OnlyFans one (very attractive women stand to gain, others less so).
My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether the modal worker stands to benefit by joining one or not.
FtttG
2mo ago
Ah, interesting. Funnily enough, one of the few words in the Irish language I think the average Irish person could be expected to recognise and understand is "beangarda", meaning a female police officer (as opposed to garda, which is a male police officer).
FtttG
2mo ago
Don't feel like answering if you don't want to, but do you mind my asking - are you a Jewess?
FtttG
2mo ago
Although you raise a point I've found interesting: the arbitrariness of how some individual national demonyms encode gender (Irishman, Frenchman) and others don't (Nigerian, American). I presume it's entirely downstream of euphony, but it's still funny to think about. Also funny to think that it might be easier to come out as non-binary if you're American than if you're Irish ("Bambie Thug" is an Irishwoman, not an Irishthey; whereas Sam Brinton is just an "American").
FtttG
2mo ago
They made us add the feminine version to every job description
Many newspaper style guides, such as the Guardian's, explicitly recommend deprecating terms like "actress" and using "actor" as gender-neutral:
Use for both male and female actors; do not use actress except when in the name of an award, eg Oscar for best actress. The Guardian’s view is that actress comes into the same category as authoress, comedienne, manageress, “lady doctor”, “male nurse” and similar obsolete terms that date from a time when professions were largely the preserve of one sex (usually men). As Whoopi Goldberg put it in an interview with the paper: “An actress can only play a woman. I’m an actor – I can play anything.”
There is normally no need to differentiate between the sexes – and if there is, the words male and female are perfectly adequate: Lady Gaga won a Brit in 2010 for best international female artist, not artiste, chanteuse, or songstress.
As always, use common sense: a piece about the late film director Carlo Ponti was edited to say that in his early career he was “already a man with a good eye for pretty actors ...” As the readers’ editor pointed out in the subsequent clarification: “This was one of those occasions when the word ‘actresses’ might have been used”
As noted by the titular character of Tár, some of these gendered terms never caught on in the first place: I've never heard any spacefaring woman referred to as an "astronette".
Now available in Substack form!
Last week there was an interesting discussion about a brewing backlash against polyamory in rationalist circles. I theorised that this was an inevitable result of the rationalist movement growing to the point that it included many “normies”, and that while polyamory might work pretty well for the first-generation rationalists who were abnormal on one or more axes (gay, trans, asexual, autistic etc.), it will probably not work for people who are comparatively normal: just because something works well for oddballs, that doesn’t necessarily generalise to it working well for the more conventionally-minded. Specifically, I think that polyamory is unlikely to work well for anyone who experiences a typical amount of sexual jealousy, a category that asexual people almost definitionally do not fall into (or so I assume).
This got me thinking about Rob Henderson’s theory about luxury beliefs. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the gist is that Henderson thinks that the greater affordability of material goods and democratisation of fashion styles means that Veblen goods are no longer an effective signalling mechanism that a person is a member of the elite (when cars are so expensive that most people can't afford them, owning a car is a costly signal that you are rich; when they become so cheap that everyone can afford them, the only way you can stand out is by buying a really expensive one, and the visual difference between a Tesla and a used Honda isn't half as distinct as the difference between have and have-not). As an alternative signal of how cultured and educated they are, elites instead promote outré-sounding ideas which sound crazy to the average person, but putting these ideas into practice has devastating consequences for anyone who isn’t an elite. The reason these ideas aren’t devastating for elites is either that:
- while they promote them in the abstract, they don’t practise them themselves e.g. Ivy League-educated people talking about how marriage is an oppressive patriarchal construct and praising people who experiment with “alternative family structures” – while they personally waited to get married before having children, and have a family structure which would seem unsurprising to a time-traveller from 1950s America; or
- they do practise the ideas themselves, but their wealth insulates them from the consequences that would befall a poorer person who practised them (it's easy to be an advocate for defunding the police if you live in a gated community)
Regardless of what you think of the luxury beliefs concept (I know that @ymeskhout, formerly of these parts, vociferously disagrees with the entire framing), the discussion about polyamory has got me thinking of a related idea, the general case of which polyamory is a specific example. Essentially, it boils down to alternative social practices or lifestyle choices that share the following traits:
- if practised by a person who is weird or abnormal,1 it will work better than adhering to the status quo
- if practised by a person who is comparatively normal, it will be disastrous compared to adhering to the status quo
- weird and abnormal people start doing the alternative lifestyle choice, find that it legitimately works great for them (much better than the “normal” thing they were doing before, or could have done instead), and become proselytizers for the cause, effusively telling everyone they know how much the alternative lifestyle choice has improved their lives and encouraging them to give it a try (optionally being a bit more cautious and responsible about this, admitting that it might come with downsides or acknowledging that it may not work for everybody)
- the alternative lifestyle choice takes off in popularity, but some people quickly find that it isn’t improving their lives as much as they were promised, or may be actively ruining their lives
- but because our society glorifies being weird and different, and scorns being conventional (using terms like “normie”, “basic” etc.), lots of people refuse to admit that the reason the alternative lifestyle choice isn’t working for them is because they’re a relatively conventional person, and keep trying to “push through” their initial discomfort in order to reach the point at which the lifestyle choice actually will improve their lives. This quickly leads to a sunk-cost fallacy, and by the time they realise they’re a normal person for whom the alternative lifestyle choice simply doesn’t work, the damage may be severe and irreparable.
Offhand, I can think of a few alternative lifestyle choices other than polyamory which I think meet this description:
- Gender transition: In spite of my undisguised incredulity towards gender ideology and towards the hysterical claims about how medical transition is “lifesaving treatment” (and hence that denying it to someone who wants it is no different from denying chemotherapy to a cancer patient) – in spite of all that, I do believe that there may be rare cases in which certain people stand to benefit from medical transition, and may see an attenuation of mental distress and improved quality of life as a result. The operative word in that sentence being “rare”. In the West, the rates of people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria have skyrocketed over the past two decades, and even medics who work in this space are belatedly coming to recognise that, for many of their patients, medical transition isn’t the silver bullet they advertised and may even exacerbate their suffering (a realisation they are struggling to rationalise away). Eliza Mondegreen catalogues some of the mental gymnastics said medics will resort to, along with heartbreaking examples of people who’ve undergone some form of social and/or medical transition and found their dysphoria worsening and their psychic distress increasing – but when they turn to communities of like-minded individuals for help, they are inevitably gaslit about how it has to get worse before it gets better (and how detransitioners are traitors to the cause upon whom death is wished – you wouldn’t want to be one of those people, would you?). I am comfortable saying that, for the majority of people who have medically transitioned in the past two decades, their quality of life has probably disimproved, whether marginally or drastically; while a minority has seen their quality of life improve.
- Sex-positive feminism: Closely related to the original polyamory example, there is a widespread set of cultural messages which present casual sex, kink, group sex, multiple concurrent sexual partners etc. as the path to female empowerment, and which encourage young women to experiment with them on that basis. While I have no objection to women engaging in these behaviours on moral grounds, and don't doubt that there are some women out there who derive just as much pleasure from casual sex as the modal man – nonetheless, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that such woman are atypical, and that the modal woman’s self-esteem takes a hit after a one-night stand, while the modal man sees a boost to his. But because so much of sex-positive feminism explicitly or implicitly tells young women that being uninterested in casual sex is indicative of prudery (a message reinforced by every horny young man in their vicinity) and that regretting a one-night stand is indicative of “internalised misogyny” or whatever, many women continue practising casual sex long past the point at which it’s obvious that it’s making them miserable, as sadly documented in this post by a young Arab-American woman who avoided losing her virginity in college, while all of her female friends were repeatedly used and cast aside by their male peers. As much as I might deride the silliness of the term “demisexual”, I do understand that it might be the only way in the current cultural climate that a woman can express her preferences without being accused of being a “bad feminist”, or of slut-shaming her peers by implication.2
- Drug liberalisation: I believe this was one of Rob Henderson’s canonical examples of luxury beliefs, but it fits here just as well. There are some people who can experiment with psychoactive substances without becoming addicted or developing psychotic symptoms, but these people are rare, and addictive pathways for normal people are predictable and well understood. For most people, experimenting with psychoactive substances will be a net-negative, and you should not gamble on being one of the weird people who can take a lot of LSD and see no ill effects. Ergo, drug liberalisation is almost certainly a net-negative for most people and hence for society as a whole. But our society shamelessly glorifies drug use as exciting and transcendent, so lots of people who should know better keep doing drugs long past the point at which they know they’re in the normie camp (and it’s not just the usual physical and psychological addiction causing them to stick with it, but also a whole host of modern messages about how drug use is the way to open up your third eye, that people who aren’t “420 friendly” are squares etc.).
- Therapy: A hobby horse Freddie deBoer has been beating for years. Ever since Freud, therapy was generally understood as medical treatment, and going to a therapist when you weren’t mentally ill would have seemed about as logical as going to a GP when you didn’t feel sick. But in recent years, the idea that everyone should go to therapy, regardless of whether or not they’re in acute mental distress, has been growing in popularity. Hand-in-hand with this idea is the more or less explicit denial that therapy can ever result in iatrogenic harm, a concept that everyone understands perfectly well in the context of any other kind of medical treatment: “either therapy will help you,” these people argue, “or at worst it will be ineffectual”. (I’m sure some people in the “everyone should go to therapy” camp would flatly deny that there exists a person, anywhere, who isn’t mentally ill: after all, if everyone has trauma, then by implication everyone experiences post-traumatic stress and in turn suffers from [complex] post-traumatic stress disorder. This may be a weakman but it is not a strawman.) In my opinion, we were right the first time around and therapy should be understood first and foremost as medical treatment for people suffering from mental illnesses (even being in mental distress isn’t in and of itself evidence of mental illness, as anyone recently bereaved can tell you, and the mental health industry’s casual conflation of the two is irresponsible and appalling). For those people, therapy may be hugely beneficial. Most people, however, do not suffer from mental illnesses as generally understood, and hence do not stand to benefit from therapy. If you’re one of the many people who doesn’t suffer from mental illness, therapy is likely to have either no impact on your life at all (aside from being a huge waste of time and money), or actively detrimental to your well-being (obsessively analysing and ruminating on all the things in your life that make you unhappy doesn’t sound a great recipe for happiness) and/or the well-being of people around you (e.g. narcissists who go to therapy and learn lots of handy tricks and terminology for how to manipulate the people around them and rationalise away their own bad behaviour). But because our culture shamelessly glorifies mental illness3 and heavily implies that people with mental illnesses are more exciting and interesting than people without (the new term for people with autistic traits is “neurospicy”, for fuck’s sake), lots of people keep going to therapy long past the point at which they should know full well that they’re not mentally ill and are just an ordinary person with ordinary problems.
- “Follow your dreams”/do what you love: Sound advice, if you’re one of the tiny minority of people talented and/or attractive enough to make a living from acting/writing/music/sports/video game streaming/modelling/influencing etc., for whom working in a regular job would probably be a lot more frustrating and dissatisfying than it would be for a normal person. For most people pursuing careers in these areas, the erroneous belief that they are one of these rarefied individuals results in them neglecting to develop productive life skills which would serve them well in the event that they turn out to be a normal person with normal (i.e. unremarkable) levels of skill in one of the aforementioned domains. But because our culture glorifies working in the sports, fashion and entertainment industries, and scorns working in a normal job like a normal person (bullshit jobs,4 soul-crushing desk job etc.), lots of people keep pursuing their dream job long past the point at which it’s abundantly obvious that they’re not talented enough to make a living as a rapper or streamer. As documented in The Disaster Artist, there are few things more heartbreaking than a talentless wannabe actor still pursuing a career as a leading man well into his forties – and unlike Tommy Wiseau, most such people don’t have millions of dollars from real estate investments tucked away. This one is particularly interesting in that, unlike the previous examples, it has the appearance of a zero-sum game, and as such one would naively expect that successful actors, musicians etc. would be incentivised to discourage others from pursuing careers in their domain, or engage in rent-seeking behaviour like guilds and so on. But there may be an alternative dynamic at play, in which moderately talented actors etc. are savvy enough to know that flooding the market with talentless hacks will make the legitimately talented stand out all the more. For years I’ve been convinced that this may be a contributing factor to the recent “body positivity” trend, which I may write a separate post about.
- OnlyFans: Sort of, but not exactly, a sub-point to the above – I doubt there are many women for whom making a living from amateur pornography is their first career preference, or who would say they love making a living from pornography – but certainly there are lots of women who’ve been sold a bill of goods about how making a living from amateur pornography is much easier and more lucrative than doing so via a more conventional vocation, and being able to say that you're attractive enough to make a living from your looks is certainly a bigger flex than making a living from working in accounts receivable. In the case of women who forgo developing real professional skills in favour of setting up an OnlyFans account under their own names, the outcomes can be particularly disastrous. Not only do they quickly realise it’s a much more labour-intensive job than they were led to believe; not only are they quickly subjected to the rude awakening that they’re nowhere near as attractive as they thought they were (and therefore that all of their friends telling them that they were 10/10 bad bitches were just yasslighting them); not only are they quickly made aware of the diminishing returns inherent in the fact that a woman’s attractiveness is heavily determined by her youthfulness; not only do they quickly learn that the more attractive women have the vanilla corner of the market stitched up, and hence that the only way to stay competitive is by appealing to the fantasies of the gross fetishistic perverts – but on top of all that, images of their rectum paired with their name are now splashed out across the entire Internet effectively forever, potentially curtailing both their professional and romantic opportunities for years to come. (To note: I’m not disputing that this latter point may also be true of women who succeed in making a living in pornography. Just because there are some women who make bank by so doing, doesn’t mean that it’s globally a good decision even for them. My point is only that there’s no way someone like Lily Phillips could hope to have made nearly as much money from a more conventional job as she did from her pornography career, and hence that, from the narrow perspective of remuneration alone, the alternative lifestyle choice was better than the conventional one for her.) But because almost everyone thinks of himself as above-average in attractiveness, women continue trying to make OnlyFans work for them long past the point that they ought to understand that they are rather mid in appearance, and hence earning somewhere near the middle of the OnlyFans monthly income distribution, hundreds of dollars below even the lowest US minimum wage.
Any other examples come to mind? The more I write about this, the more trite and obvious it sounds, making me wonder if I’ve put a foot wrong somewhere.
One point that occurred to me immediately after posting this: this framework is distinct from the luxury beliefs concept insofar as not everyone who stands to benefit from the alternative lifestyle practice is an elite, and not everyone who stands to suffer from it is a non-elite. There are many women from working-class backgrounds who could stand to make a great deal of money from pornography, and many women from wealthy backgrounds whose reputations would take a hit were they to do the same. There are many people from working-class backgrounds who might benefit from therapy, and many people from wealthy backgrounds for whom therapy would only serve to make them more neurotic than ever before.
1 Not intended as a criticism or insult: per the expansive definition I’m using here, it includes people who are unusually intelligent, talented, physically attractive, fiscally responsible etc. but also people who are diagnosably and severely mentally ill.
2 I must here mention a favourite anecdote from Holly Math Nerd, who learned the term “demisexual” in a university lecture and explained it to her therapist:
Me: “Today I learned that I am deeply and profoundly oppressed by my status as a sexual minority.”
Therapist: (raises an eyebrow).
Me: “I in fact fit under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. A is one of those extra letters, and I am in fact a type of Asexual.”
Therapist, laughing: “What?!”
Me: “I am, I’ll have you know, an oppressed demisexual.”
Therapist: “What does that mean?”
Me: “A demisexual is someone who only experiences sexual attraction when they have formed a close emotional bond.”
Therapist: (nods, several times, thinks for about thirty seconds.) “When I was a boy, we had a different word for people like that. We called them, ‘women’.”
3 No doubt there are many who come to believe that they are mentally ill in part because they are seduced by the idea that it relinquishes them of being held responsible for their bad behaviour, along with providing them with a convenient excuse for why their lives didn't turn out the way they hoped. Regrettably, I speak here from experience, certainly on the latter point if not the former.
4 Based on a study which, like everything else in the ideologically motivated social sciences, failed to replicate. One can only assume the notoriously scummy and dishonest David Graeber was putting his thumb on the scale somewhere.
Richard Hanania is constantly beating the drum about "low human capital" people believing in conspiracy theories, which seems like the most obvious example. Working-class Dale Gribble voters believing in the New World Order, UN black helicopters, microchips in Covid vaccines etc. are so common as to be a cliché; the rare elites who believe in conspiracies are "man bites dog" stories.
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