FtttG
User ID: 1175
I'm very chuffed, but I find myself chagrined by the fact that the number of people I know IRL I can boast about this to round up to zero.
I know the feeling all too well.
- My latest post was restacked by this woman who applies data science principles to online dating. Kind of like a less overtly titillating Aella, and, in my view, far more physically attractive. I was flattered.
- It was also restacked by Sarah Haider, whose name I vaguely recalled seeing previously and who has her own Wikipedia page, which is cool.
- "Contra deBoer on transgender issues" was shared by Helen Joyce, I think it was shared by Eliza Mondegreen in a paid subscriber-only links roundup (she definitely liked it), and also liked by TracingWoodgrains and Freya India.
- Freddie deBoer commenced one of his duh-of-course-I-support-trans-rights articles by quoting a comment I'd posted on one of his previous articles and ostentatiously announcing how "profoundly uncompelling" he found said comment, in a tone which to me strongly suggested he doth protest too much.
The only way I could be more pleased is if it caught Scott's eye
I shared my latest post on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, and Scott showed up in the comments to complain about how I'd characterised him in the article. I dutifully apologised and rephrased the offending passage. In the list of things that made me feel ashamed of myself this year, this was in the top five.
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 realisation 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
18hr 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
20hr 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
1d ago
Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez
Wow, I thought she was like a decade younger. Fair play, I suppose.
FtttG
1d 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.
FtttG
1d 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.
Is there any objective evidence that Leone saw Yojimbo before making A Fistful of Dollars, or for that matter that Kurosawa read Red Harvest before making Yojimbo?
On the topic of plagiarism: myself and the missus were recently listening to a Marvin Gaye compilation album, and I mentioned that it infuriates me that the Gaye family's suit against Robin Thicke for ripping off "Got to Give it Up" to make "Blurred Lines" was successful, whereas their suit against Ed Sheeran for ripping off "Let's Get It On" to make "Thinking Out Loud" wasn't. The latter seems a far more blatant rip than the former.
FtttG
4d ago
not even "we decided to live together in a polycule
My understanding is that Scott is still polyamorous even after getting married.
FtttG
4d 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
4d 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.
FtttG
4d ago
Having now read the article in full, two points:
-
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")
-
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
4d ago
"Sapiosexual" must be the single most self-aggrandising adjective in the English language.
FtttG
4d 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
4d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d ago
So much of this reminds me of Jugaad Ethics.
It was game over as soon as I watched Mulan.
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