Gaashk
11mo ago
- Your standard seems very loose, so probably? I wear perfectly respectable dresses approximately daily, which I would be willing to wear them to weddings and funerals (but just went to a funeral and saw a relative wearing a lobster print Hawaiian shirt, so this is not saying much), or in a court.
I feel like I should probably have some kind of cardigan or blazer and shoes that are not sandals or hiking shoes, but seem somehow unable to figure this out, and mostly just wear a denim jacket or blouse as outerwear. I accidentally ordered a discount tuxedo blazer during lockdowns, which fit very well, but I ended up actually throwing it in the trash because neither I nor anyone I knew had any chance of wearing it, as far as I could tell, and it seemed to much work to mail it to a stranger. Really, I'm unwilling to own something that ought to be dry cleaned and/or ironed, but do not like cardigans. I am unprepared for an event that is both formal and chilly.
- Depending, again, on specific criteria, yes? I wear these dresses to church, work, dinner, and events. I once met the head of state of a small European country in one of these dresses, but I looked sort of frumpy by "meeting a head of state" standards.
Gaashk
11mo ago
I thought the ad was interesting, but do not like lite beers, or hoppy beers, and still do not want to go buy Miller Lite, nor do I condone focusing on hops. Aesthetically, I would be happier if they focused more on grains, but I understand that, logistically, a bunch of paper compost won't go very far in farming grains.
Plausibly there are a decent number of women who like showing off their bodies, bikinis, and so on, but dislike a media environment saturated in even hotter, photoshopped women for them to compare themselves to. There has been a big backlash about that over the past several years. It's "bad sh*t" from a female point of view because it makes average women look unattractive in comparison. If a woman puts on a bikini in a culture that's moving from more conservative mores to more liberal ones, it's great if she can get a lot of attention for how daring she is. She probably can't regularly drink more than one or two beers and still look good, though, so she isn't really the target audience of cheap beer ads. It's frustrating if she is expected to look sexy, in a culture moving from more liberal to more conservative mores -- if she looks great, she'll be a bit less attractive than the advertisement behind her, or if she doesn't, she'll be looked down on as frumpy. Maybe the norm is to only sell bikinis, and she has to buy one or face a steep price hike and inconvenience ordering something from a more niche brand, but she's fat or older, and feels awkward and ugly in it.
The woman in the ad is wearing a rather short, tight skirt -- women can be a bit sexy, nobody wants to go full burqa, but she's not sexier than the viewer. Nor is she more conservative than the viewer. The viewer would be in a fair competition with her. A woman who wants to stand out as unusually attractive would like the media women to be in overalls and sweatshirts, for contrast.
They're also having it both ways -- showing the bikini models to get attention, while decrying them as bad sh*t. Encouraging their male audience members to take a look at their older advertisements in order to send them in.
Gaashk
11mo ago
That was mostly conjecture.
The ad is to some extent an exploration of the question: what if men don't buy cheap beer so much more than women because men in general actually prefer the product more than women, but because they have been marketed to so hard? What if women were pandered to as much as men? Would they be willing to buy cheap beer product, instead of having to make actually different products? This is the main kind of pandering they could come up with, and it's much cheaper than changing the taste or even packaging significantly.
I don't actually know what Miller Lite tastes like, because I'm so certain it isn't for me, I've never actually tried it. If someone poured it in a glass and called it a beer flavored soda, who knows, maybe I would like it? Or at least not dislike it? But I won't try that out, and will continue just buying pre-mixed margarita in the spring and summer, Octoberfest beers in the fall, and mulled wine in the winter. They probably aren't wrong that they have an image problem as much as a taste problem among women and other people who find bikini clad models tasteless. I'm not offended, exactly, it isn't a question of morality, I just know with complete certainty that it isn't the sort of drink people like me choose, and have no reason to choose it, since by all accounts it doesn't taste like much.
Gaashk
11mo ago
In addition to nostalgia, I like that my husband thinks it's disgusting, so it's still there when I want a drink.
I think I have, but a different brand. It seemed drinkable, but not an improvement on soda, or even iced tea.
Gaashk
11mo ago
I've been enjoying the work of Farya Faraji. A lot of Mediterranean and Balkan historical folk pieces, mixed with some other stuff.
Gaashk
11mo ago
How old are you? How old are the women you're interested in? What are they like? What path do you want the relationship to follow? Do you mostly want a girlfriend, or a wife? Would you consider having children in the next 5 years or so?
I mostly know more socially conservative women who want marriage or breakup within maybe a year of dating, and sex is not on the table until some commitment threshold has been crossed, much farther along the relationship than the first or second date. They are not on dating apps -- dating apps have a reputation of leading to pressure for sex sooner than they prefer, and difficulty establishing commitment. They meet potential husbands through hobby or religious in-person activities.
Sample size of 1: I (a woman) personally dislike branded clothing, including t-shirts with shows or hobbies or words of any kind, unless they're about half an inch high. But who knows, maybe you'll bond over your favorite band or something, this is not general advice.
If you have trouble with intense dates where you're just eating and staring at each other, consider some more active dates. I enjoyed walks in nature (interesting nature, with waterfalls), visiting places of historical interest, and moderate effort bar hopping, following happy hours around. It's creepy to be too intense about expressing interest, but it's fun to be invited to do something interesting with the message that the man wants to do it with you, in particular.
Gaashk
10mo ago
I have sometimes tried to interest my children in puzzles like that, but to no avail. They’ll go find a piece of gravel or a stick to play with instead, and ignore it entirely. But based on there being so many puzzles for children, I suppose some children must be willing to use them?
I also do not like puzzles, so maybe there’s something heritable there.
Gaashk
10mo ago
Do women admire one another for their martial achievements?
As others have already mentioned, there are a decent number of examples of female agents from the 90s and early 00s, even up to Rogue One. These tend to be fairly masculine movies, appealing more to men. Women like them about as much as if the protagonist were male. In a certain sense, they might as well be male.
Meanwhile, the prototypical female story by a woman, appealing to women, is Pride and Predjudice. The heroine most uncover the true characters and motivations of the men in the story. It doesn’t matter all that much which men have served in the military and defeated their nations foes. In Persuasion it matters for status, but not who he has killed or under what circumstances. It matters a great deal whether the man will treat his wife well, be faithful, provide a good living, be respectable according to social norms, and so on. She must figure this out, and choose wisely. They are, to some extent, morality plays. Men do read, for instance, Persuasion, and admire it for its subtlety and deep observation.
Female archetypes are different from male, and perhaps should be different, and the current trend of populating action movies with what amount to trans men is silly. The motherly feminine archetypal character is speaking wisdom and weaving cloth, and that is alright. I especially love the great grandmother in The Princess and the Goblins, and would like to see more of that, rather than yet another woman fighter. Civilizations need wisdom and cloth and social norms as much as they need to repel the invaders or solve the mystery or Do Science.
Gaashk
10mo ago
And yet, she’s still the standard, still frequently adapted, still culturally important in a way that Marvel Girl Boss is not.
That isn’t necessarily to say there aren’t any important contemporary female protagonists, just that there’s no reason they are or should be catering to heroic male action expectations.
Gaashk
10mo ago
Highly recommend Fr Alexander Schmemann, excellent writer and especially liturgical scholar.
Gaashk
10mo ago
I think it is more about the dissolution of regional distinctiveness, and lack of tolerance that follows from that, because every place and people is assumed to be the same, or should be.
My (boomer) mother grew up in a Southwestern American city with a lot of hispanics and very few blacks. She speaks Spanish badly, but my grandparents spoke it fluently (none of us are hispanic). When Bussing went into effect, she had to sit for an hour on a bus every day to move from one majority hispanic school to another, and the main change was not being able to invite her classmates over, because they lived too far away. Her opinion on bussing is that it may or may not have made sense in Alabama, but it was stupid and wasteful in her city. I took busses all the time as a teen, though they're hot and not very efficient. "Brown people" is a stupid category, but New Mexico and Arizona hispanics love their automobiles -- low riders, trucks, mechanic jobs, custom details, the whole package.
There was a woman in one of my social groups, born in Africa, went to a college in the Great Plains, living in a former Spanish colonial part of the American Southwest, going on about her experience as a Black American and her Blackness, and her sensitivity toward people curious about her background, and it was so very tiresome. None of her ancestors were American slaves, or suffered from redlining, or were discriminated against in any way. None of our ancestors owned a plantation. Nobody in our state was involved. And yet here we all were, unable to talk about any of our actual histories or the places we were actual from, because of her feelings of Blackness.
For a while, I lived with an Albanian family in rural Kosovo. Everyone was very nice to me, and I especially liked that I didn't have to drive or own a car at the time, and I could drink a 50c macchiato at a cafe over the course of an hour without anyone judging me for it. That was mostly because everyone was poor, though. They were upset over having their village shelled, and that for a while they had to teach their language in basements with only a single book for a room full of children. This may be peripherally related to pensioners, but it seems more related to feeling responsible for people who are deemed backwards. Which is, yes, also a problem in many American cities.
The American West has in some sense always wanted cars, even before they were invented. Horses were adopted with great enthusiasm the instant they arrived on the continent. And so were cars. Phoenix isn't full of cars and expansive, flat suburbs because of "boomers." It's full of cars and boomers and suburbs because it's in the middle of an enormous desert. Arizona spent 20 years building the CAP canal system, not for boomers to spread out (although they do), but because they're in the middle of an enormous desert. Boomers from Arizona and Texas drive RVs around for the same reason. i don't think this is necessarily grounded in unusual narcissism, but simply in unusually high wealth.
Gaashk
10mo ago
No. This is the exact issue under discussion.
However, places with less WASPy norms around extended family homes are also not having children at or above replacement. If you and your siblings are, go ahead and talk about that, it could be a useful perspective.
Gaashk
10mo ago
Thanks for sharing, that's interesting.
My father in law also had (19?) siblings, but had fewer children himself. Would you be giving birth to these children? I've given birth to two children, and it was fine, but I certainly wouldn't want to have 12, even if I were much younger! Maybe if we were a bit younger, four? Some friends are having a third in their mid thirties, and we're wondering if we should too, but not strongly enough to actually go in and remove the birth control. Low hanging fruit for slightly increasing birth rates might be for birth control implants to last two years instead of five. These friends are wondering if they should homeschool, or planning to do that. I was homeschooled, but do not want to, at least for elementary school. My older daughter is much more talkative than me, and I don't want to be either ignoring her or driving her to social events all the time.
It's interesting to hear you're still interested in a large family with a disabled sibling living at home. One motivator for my not wanting a third child is worry over having a baby with health problems as I get older, and not wanting to be in the position of either terminating a pregnancy, or raising a disabled child.
We aren't likely to move to be with extended family. Both sets of grandparents are quite old, and would be willing to help out a moderate amount, but are in places we don't want to live, or would have trouble living, and aren't willing to move. My brother isn't likely to have children, and one brother in law does, but in a place we don't want to move, and we don't get along all that well with his wife.
Neither of us has careers where we feel competent or any kind of career trajectory, and we're wondering what to do about that. I went back to work a month after both births, and it was very stressful for my husband to be at home with an infant for multiple years, so that's also something of a limiting factor. It was also quite stressful to be working full time and breastfeeding as well. We met living in a foreign country, and would like to take the children and live somewhere similar to where we met, but don't really know anything about how to do that as part of a family unit, most opportunities are for single people. The only people I've known who have managed, at least for a while, have been missionaries, or maybe in the State Department (but that didn't seem to be working out so well for their families). Part of our interest is missing life in actual, functional, historical villages, where women watch each other's kids, and they can play on the street with the neighbor kids.
Gaashk
10mo ago
That's an interesting and somewhat surprising observation. As I recall, in mid-America, married women are about as likely to vote conservative as their husbands, but I'm not sure how that translates to willingness to attend formal public political events.
Gaashk
10mo ago
End Times by Peter Turchin. I'm about 30% of the way through, and so far it's just laying out the culture war of the past 50 years or so, with some theorizing and drawing parallels to other times and places. It has less statistics and graphs than his previous books, apparently. Not bad, but nothing much that's new yet, either.
Gaashk
10mo ago
Agree.
I also disliked that the pitch was to privately discuss these topics on Discord voice chat, rather than here on this message board. It would be alright in another thread, but seems out of place and exclusionary in this one.
Gaashk
10mo ago
If it's the sort of place where people are making fun of each other all the time, then no.
If it's your nephew on Facebook or something, then yes.
Anyway, how did it end up? Did they give up and go to eat or something?
Gaashk
10mo ago
I'm not a fan of rdrama, nor do I want its aesthetics and hyperbole imported here.
I am not a huge fan of lawns, and my own yard is some combination of native grass and spindly flowing things.
Still, I find myself confused by your confusion. The lawn people have two children and a dog. If they're older, maybe they have some grandkids and a cat. They do not want to have to supervise them or have them in the same room with themselves all the time, or even all the time when they're home on evenings and weekends. They cannot send them to the park on their own for 13 years, or depending on the neighborhood, ever. Hence, the yard. Why is that the case? Because it's a big American city, and Americans are kind of paranoid and drive around drunk in trucks where they can't see kids.
Why is the yard full of grass instead of potatoes? Partly because potatoes are kind of a stupid thing to be growing in modern industrial society, where they're incredibly cheap and they'd have to dig up their yard to get them, and there are a bunch of utilities under the soil, so you have to map out where you'd even be able to dig safely.
Some of them do in fact grow kale and such in their backyards, but in suburban Chicago there is a bunch of lead in the soil and the paints and the pipes, and it isn't trivially easy to grow vegetables that are worth eating. It's a lot harder to learn how to grow actually useful plants, neatly, than to keep a lawn, and they subscribe to the broken window theory, where a poorly kept, weedy garden is analogous to a broken window in signaling urban decay. In their defense, a lot of neighborhoods are undergoing a process of decay.
Ok, but why aren't they at least growing fruit or nuts? I don't know, it would amuse the children and the cat, and is easy. Maybe they should. The ones who drive around in pickup trucks, drinking beer while they fish in canals do have fruit trees (and also messy vegetable gardens, and are really an entirely different demographic than the suburban middle class lawn owners). It is probably fairly easy to convince a suburban lawn owner to plant a fruit tree, with a neatly mulched barrier between it and the lawn.
Gaashk
10mo ago
Yeah, I probably should have added a caveat to that.
I learned only last week about the American Chestnut blight wiping them all out; previously I had just assumed that "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" weren't available in the Western US because they're annoying to pick or something.
In the West, fruit trees are generally very easy to maintain once established, since there aren't a bunch of endemic fungal diseases trying to take them out. They don't always produce, with late storms and winds and droughts and whatnot, but are a lot less work than a lawn.
Gaashk
10mo ago
I do feel "that's nice, dear" when people talk about teaching their children to read below the age of four or so. What do three year olds even want to read on their own? My three year old just wants to follow me around all day and climb on me all the time, like those nature videos of the mother and baby dolphin or whale swimming under and over and on the side. They can learn to read by themselves when they're willing to be by themselves.
On the other hand, absolute pitch may have a much shorter acquisition window than reading, so perhaps it makes more sense to really work at it. Also, I'm not a good judge, since I'm personally musically illiterate. I'm good at drawing, which I learned in one semester when I was 16, and seems to generally be a very different developmental process to being good at music.
Gaashk
10mo ago
Speaking of fundamental things I'm missing out on... I can't figure out how to click this link? It looks like it's pointing toward "furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com," and when I click on that, it takes me to a Motte page search. When I paste it into my browser, it takes me to a substack that appears empty. This is not the first time this has happened to me. What am I missing?
This seems likely to be more the norm than the exception, historically. Spin offs and retellings of King Arthur, Robin Hood, St George, Coyote, Tarzan, or whomever is probably normal, with an actually new story every decade or so.
At the same time, I agree that whatever's going on now feels like something of a wasteland.
Maybe this has to do with the tendency to mine the same stories too quickly. But I used to binge read King Arthur anthologies, and the entire Wizard of Oz collection, so I'm not sure that's it, either. Maybe something more basic, like that the stories are just not good stories, for various reasons. I'm on board for an Ant Man story, but not the one they have, by report, actually produced. I'm on board for a How Raven Stole the Sun retelling, but not as a three hour CGI fest. If someone with the aesthetics of Miyazaki decided to retell it (that would be odd, but supposing an equivalent folktale), I would absolutely be on board. I don't so much feel inundated with retellings, as that there's a specific "memberberry" version of those retellings that's insufficiently universal, pandering too much to specific target demographics. A war movie about Judith and Holofernes could be fine and interesting, but not the way it would probably be produced in actuality. Companies are recycling too narrowly, from their own slate, rather than from the broader catalogue of world civilizations.
More options
Context Copy link