FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
16d 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.
FtttG
16d ago
"Sapiosexual" must be the single most self-aggrandising adjective in the English language.
FtttG
16d ago
Anecdotally I know at least one extremely (to me at least) physically attractive girl (a dancer) who has had similar offers (though not from Arabs, or not to my knowledge) but has refused them (so far.)
Is she Japanese?
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
16d ago
people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia
Well, I can't imagine any way that could possibly be abused.
they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs
In fairness, I don't remember ever personally encountering any trans women who didn't fall into one of these categories or the other. I'm sure there must be a handful, but based on my own personal experience it wouldn't be unreasonable to round it off to these two categories (increasingly heavily weighted towards the latter).
Fair enough. If I'm accused of seducing women via lies and deception, it's a charge I'd strongly rebut. If I'm accused of having had sex with women I had no interest in pursuing a serious romantic relationship with - guilty as charged.
FtttG
16d ago
I would resent being called a fuckboy (under the definition we're discussing here), as I don't like the implication that the only way I can get women into bed is by lying to them or deceiving them.
FtttG
17d ago
I've seen some people on Tumblr encouraging the use of "androphilia" and "gynophilia", the main disadvantage of hetero- and homo-sexuality being that they are relative, rather than absolute, terms: you need to know the speaker's sex before you know the sex to which they are attracted. Andro- and gyno-philia don't have this problem. I like the terms for this reason, but I can't imagine them catching on in casual conversation.
FtttG
17d ago
So much of this reminds me of Jugaad Ethics.
FtttG
17d ago
Gazan civilians are being killed at close to a 30:1 ratio
Do you mean that for every Hamas combatant killed in the current conflict, the IDF also kills thirty civilians? No estimate of the death toll I've seen has been that pessimistic, not even those literally published by the Gaza Ministry of Health.
it sounds like that other '-philia' that means you're into kids
It's curious that sex-positivity means that you can openly declare yourself kink-friendly, and yet in common parlance the suffix "-philia" is only ever used to refer to creepy things which even proudly kinky people would not want getting out about them if they had them (paedophilia, necrophilia, coprophilia, ephebophilia, zoophilia). Maybe it's just because Greek words sound clinical, like you're a specimen being studied under a microscope? Maybe AGPs would be less resistant to the diagnosis if it was framed not as "I have autogynephilia", but rather "I have an 'imagining myself as a woman' kink".
FtttG
17d 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
17d 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.
I think you're projecting Bulverism onto your interlocutor where none was implied. "Aella writes Substack articles (in part) to promote her OnlyFans page" and "Aella's Substack articles contain no valuable insights" are not synonymous.
If you want to attract men to your OnlyFans, the obvious thing would be to do is to put a hot but SFW picture of yourself into substack and mention that you are on OF. She does none of that.
Her Substack profile picture is literally her lying on a bed, wearing a négligée, with her cleavage on full display.
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
19d 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.
FtttG
19d ago
Ukraine's leadership has a vested interest in protecting its citizenry, while Hamas has an official policy of intentionally putting Palestinian citizens in harm's way. Hamas and the Arab world have continually refused to allow Palestinian refugees safe passage into neighbouring countries.
I'm not saying the manner in which Israel is prosecuting this war has nothing to do with the rate at which Palestinian civilians are being killed, but suggesting that they are solely responsible for the level of civilian collateral damage is literally falling for Hamas propaganda hook, line and sinker.
FtttG
19d ago
Has Gaza been ethnically cleansed, or is this ethnic cleansing ongoing? If so, that's news to me.
FtttG
20d ago
In your estimation, how many Palestinians have died of malnutrition and preventable illness since this war began?
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.
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
20d 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.
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.
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