GreenEggsAndJam
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User ID: 2256
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Divorces being initiated by women would support the claim that it's not men who need to be convinced to be married. The benefits I was referring to was married men living longer, reporting higher life satisfaction, etc, than single men (the opposite direction was true of married women)
Being screwed over by family courts is only relevant if you're having kids with someone, and in that case being married/not married is irrelevant, as not being married to the mother of the child you are claiming paternity for doesn't release you from child support payments or grant you more visitation rights.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
women are not the people you need to convince to get married — men are
Is that true? The research is that men benefit more from marriage and are much, much more likely to remarry if a marriage ends (in death or divorce). I can't find polls for first marriages/singles but I'd be curious how they relate.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I simply don't feel that "interesting ways to solve energy output problems from solar cells" can be described as "in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing".
If you think that any contemplation of a complex problem is "in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing", then sure, a total lack of desire to interact with complex problems is not well correlated with intelligence.
But if people are inclined to "live life and vibe" outside their professional fields + areas of special interest, that doesn't intrinsically reflect on their intelligence.
(I think this whole comment thread kicked off with someone dropping in to say prioritizing a smart mate is important, which I interpreted as a response to my claim that constant in-depth quality discussion turned out to not be nearly as meaningful to me as I'd imagined when I started dating. Hence my initial response resisting conflating the two. I really believe it has much more to do with personality than intelligence)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Even though you claim you didn't mean to reply to this comment, you quoted the question I asked in this comment, not in my original comment.
And it felt like a very obvious attempt at a derail, hence my lack of patience with it. I have, nonetheless, deleted my comment, and we can continue the discussion where you say you intended it to be.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Continuing my theme in the previous comment of springboarding off the QC thread for discussion topics...
War of the sexes, but specifically regarding long term relationships and marriage.
What, in your opinion, should/does a desirable male partner bring to the table? What should/does a desirable female partner bring to the table?
The goal here is not specifically symmetry, if the desirableness is asymmetrical. For example, if you think a woman should desire a man with a stable job, but a man would be neutral or negative towards a woman with a stable job, then there's no need to include that on both lists.
To make the discussion more specific, less hypothetical: excluding amorphous concepts of "chemistry", what is the concrete package of measurable traits the opposite sex needs to offer for you to want to commit to a relationship with them? What is the package you are offering them in exchange? Do you feel this is a "good deal"?
(I'll answer for myself in a reply rather than answering within the question.)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I mean, I assume the men and women I know who never, ever cry — my grandfather was noted as having cried a total of three times in his entire adult life, my aunts/uncles do not cry at funerals or weddings— have plenty of emotions. It's nonetheless also obvious they are uncomfortable with expressing said emotions in a lot of contexts, not just crying. The ability and willingness to cry is a symptom of being more emotionally open, not more emotionally feeling.
It's fine for you if you don't cry, it's not like it even would have been a deal breaker for me, given how used to it I already am. But that doesn't change that it's a relief to me that my husband does cry, and that I appreciate that about him.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Standard caveat re replication crisis, bad science reporting, etc.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
But we see that, eg, religious women who are highly educated still have more kids. So there are clearly some things that can at least ameliorate the trend.
(I'm also not entirely convinced the problem is education qua education and not the incredibly delayed entry into adulthood. What I see a lot of is women feeling like they are finally "ready"/at a socially acceptable stage to have kids, and then starting to have kids - ie, wanting to reproduce - and continuing to want to have kids, but running out of time to have more of them. This is entirely anecdotal, of course, but I see this pattern incredibly frequently, where women describe badly wanting N+1 kids where N is the current number they have, and they'll iterate on this until eventually they have to give up on it because they're too old, their husband is opposed, etc. That's not "women don't want kids", its "women make decisions, especially when young, that aren't conducive to having more kids, and end up bearing the consequence via having fewer kids than they would have otherwise chosen to have")
Anyway. It's not as if we need to get back to fifties level reproduction, nudging things upwards a bit would already help.
(Actually, in that vein, what are the differences between low fertility and extremely low fertility countries? Are there any trends there?)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I should have specified further that not only do men remarry more, they also express a desire to remarry more. This could of course be a sour grapes type situation where women claim to not want to remarry because they're aware they'd have difficulty doing so if they wanted it.
In any case, if anyone has statistics about desire for a first marriage among men vs women it would be interesting to see numbers.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
The feminist solution is obvious.
Women having one night stands and/or affairs are self-harming. The article you quoted acknowledges as much. Statistics on female orgasm in one night stands are consistent on this point, one night stands suck for women.
They are also harming women as a class. Even if you are a rare extreme outlier who regularly has satisfying ONS sex, you are normalizing the cultural pressure on other women to do the same.
As feminism is about improving the condition of women as a class, promiscuity is anti-feminist. Having an affair with a married man is anti-feminist (this should be obvious with even two seconds of thought - it is by definition betraying class solidarity)
Promiscuity is bad for the woman engaging in it, and bad for women as a whole.
But third wave feminism is all about empowering women to make whatever stupid self harming choices they want! Well, that's a very specific sub brand of "feminism" that frankly is not convincingly feminism at all, given it's other attempts to make obvious disempowerment of women "empowering". No, you can't have eyeliner sharp enough to kill the patriarchy, permanently deforming your feet with high heels isn't liberation, and having meaningless, orgasmless sex with men who have no respect for you will never be feminist.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I'm making the (ludicrous*) assumption that all relevant information for the decision is included in the descriptions, so anyone not specified female is male, and if the gay athlete isn't mentioned to have AIDS he doesn't.
Whereas the cop being armed and with an existing history of excessive force is explicitly mentioned. I still think he probably will be okay, but having someone with a gun and already established violence and low agreeableness is definitely a big gamble. The odds of his losing his temper and killing someone may not be high, but the the degree to which we'd be fucked if he does it is high. Now I can't remember if risk is the word I'm looking for or if risk includes probability, but what I meant was the word for "how bad the bad thing is", not "probability of the bad thing happening".
*Ludicrous because this question sucks, but without the assumption there's just no point playing at all.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Getting rid of a dress my husband doesn't like seems obvious to me.
But wearing a dress he got me that I don't like seems a bit much. Why not just... Tell him what style you like instead? Especially because I'd assume that, for example, the concept is "you'd look hot in red lace" and then I could be like "great, gonna get myself something in red lace but {a different shade of red that doesn't clash with my skin tone/a different cut/whatever}". I mean presumably he's buying the dress to make both of us happy so why would I hide not liking it? Anything he wants I can probably find a way of accommodating that I also like.
If he wants something incredibly specific and irredeemable (I don't know, ten inch leopard print diamond studded stilettos?) Then it would need to be an inside the house only deal, I'm not wearing clothing I feel ugly and uncomfortable in outside the house, he can come up with a counteroffer.
As for the rest, he does all the same for me, I'd be a huge hypocrite to not reciprocate.
(And I do buy him clothing I think he'd look hot in, and he does either wear it or tell me it's not his taste, so I guess not being a hypocrite applies there as well. I also 100% expect him to get rid of clothing I find ugly, unless it's something with sentimental value or whatever. But basically we're obviously getting dressed with our number one target audience being each other...)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
So in short: you find the premise of the question inherently flawed, and if given the option to implement a policy but with the requirement that it be even-handed, would have absolutely none to suggest?
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
To repeat what others have already said.
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If this friends of yours is transing their kid, this letter is the worst, most insane way to go about convincing him otherwise and will permanently burn your chances of finding a more sane way
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This was way too long even before I hit the "continued in a reply".
You're clearly so culturally different from him you don't even have perspective on how what you're saying would be perceived by someone outside your bubble, like a very poorly trained missionary who didn't get the basic missionary 101 memo about how to do effective missionary work and is instead standing raving on the street corner.
Focus on there being no rush to decide, that it's kind of sexist to assume feeling like a girl is something only girls can do, that a boy can have girly interests. Stick in some testimonies from detransitioners, point out that transitioning to a girl creates much more pressure on him to not detransition than transitioning to "nonbinary" does, that there's no rush for him to commit to anything. If your goal is to save this kid, your goal is anything that keeps them off puberty blockers, off hormones, and away from surgery, and anything that leaves them as much space as possible to safely grow out of the phase without crushing their parents.
I do also think you have a completely delusional view of how women experience the world, but that's not the point here so I'm not even going to bother arguing it, except to say that it's part of the general pattern of this letter being way too long, way too distant from the actual point, and way too online-incel speak to be effective. The point here is helping this kid away from a life path that ends in being Jazz Jennings with all the horror that entails. You exclusively need to focus on the dangers of medicalizing a totally normal appropriate exploratory developmental stage, and how the parents, by rushing to be too supportive, can in fact smother the kid, making it harder for them explore without it being a huge dramatic life-upturning event, thereby trapping them. Tell the dad that labeling Skylar a she is myopic and limiting, not that Skylar is defined by his lack of a pussy pass.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Population bottleneck is not necessarily killer, depends on what bad genes the bottleneck has. There are many cases of bottlenecks ending up fine, it greatly increases but does not 100% guarantee the chance of bad genetic outcomes, and we're already starting with what looks like a very diverse gene pool in the sample. Nonetheless, I agree that basic due diligence would require a genetic screening of anyone being sent to at least avoid the obvious known pitfalls.
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Male accountant. No idea if the substance abuse problem will be specifically relevant once on a different planet. Substance abuse negative sign of self control, holding it together enough to hold down job and family potentially promising if he doesn't keep the problem. Known to not be impotent.
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I agree that the medical student is an obvious choice. Young, decent odds of intelligence and relevant knowledge.
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No relevant skills, short fertility horizon, communication problems, a very middle tier pick, basically just if we need to fill out a spot.
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It's an entire extra person as long as the pregnancy survives! As obvious as the doctor. (also, if we're going for "demonic" it seems fairly obvious we should be asking the remaining women on this trip to also get pregnant, ASAP, from some of the four billion men not being taken who have also passed genefic screening problems)
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Nothing in this entry suggests any advantage of this person of unknown age and gender over our standard for "filler", number 3. Cut.
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Agree that this is a great pick. International, so again more genetic diversity, and young and female.
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Nothing in this entry suggests any advantage for this person of unknown Abe and gender over our standard for "filler", number 3. cut.
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Unlike you, I don't see any reason to believe she's probably older. Female movie stars skew young, only a handful stay famous once older. She presumably speaks English, has decent odds of being younger than 33 (our standard for filler), almost certainly has good soft skills if she's made it to star level in a cutthroat industry. Keep.
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Racist cop. I am concerned about the low agreeability and the part where he's armed. High risk, if he ends up killing anyone on the trip. On the other hand, if he's not killing anyone else would be a good choice. Personally I suspect a survival situation with only 8 people depending on each other should be enough to trigger a "my tribe" attitude towards them, but I don't know. Tentative keep.
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Professional athlete excellent, rest only helps if he'll compromise as needed (gay is easily solved if he'll donate sperm, he doesn't need to actually have sex with the women and could be a stabilizing factor). Keep.
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Orphaned 12yo boy - I like this for the tiny bit of age diversity (otherwise it's all 20+ and the fetus, this gives us a bit of a bridge). 11 is already old enough to be able to be given responsibility quickly. Inclined to keep.
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If this was a university professor I'd say it could maybe be salvaged depending on the field of knowledge, but it's a university administrator and that's not even close to valuable enough a skillset to justify choosing a 60 year old. Obvious cut.
That gives us 3 people to obviously cut, with our remaining choice of who to cut the accountant, the manager, the cop. We've only got three women so the manager is an obvious keep. Need to figure out odds of cop killing his team members and on that basis make the final cut, but overall, it probably needs to be the accountant unless the cop is judged too high risk.
Final cull: accountant, disabled novelist, homephobic clergyman, 60yo.
The actual question is how the fuck we ended up with such a terrible roster for final 12 humans to begin with. Ending up with 50/50 on gender is bad but there were only 4 likely to be fertile women in the original set! An 8:4 man to woman ratio is insane for this scenario! And the men in question aren't even all physically fit, let alone passing basic screenings for mental health! If these were the last humans left alive and viable after some catastrophe that's one thing, but the question says they're "selected". In which case the person selecting is so incompetent I'm now left to assume my chosen 8 all have something terribly wrong with them because someone is deadset on sabotaging our last chance.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
The quality contributions roundup has a lot of discussion of fertility. I found it pretty disconcerting to read, since it all seemed to assume that the only way to get women to have kids is to enforce a top down dystopia. This is not my personal experience in my social surroundings★, but of course I live in Israel so I don't count‡.
Anyway, here is my follow-up question:
If you had the ability to set policies that will encourage increased fertility, what policies would you be implement across the board for both men and women simultaneously?
In other words, not "women can't be allowed access to higher education until they've had at least two children", but "people of child-bearing age can't be allowed access to higher education until they've had at least two children". Or "new parents of children are given twenty additional paid vacation days", or whatever. Are there any such policies you think could actually be effective?
★ if anything what I see is women regretting not being able to have more kids
‡ In Israel, fwiw, having kids is simply by default assumed to be a shared responsibility of men, women, and society. It is expected that men take (government paid) sick days to stay home with sick kids. It is not blinked at for the manager to show up to a meeting remotely with a sick kid in his lap. It is expected that men will leave work early several times a week to pick up kids from school — at least in all the places in Israel I have lived I have seen reasonably close sex splits of the parents at pickup/dropoff. I am not clear on whether or not this is equally the case in America — I don't get that impression, but as my knowledge of America is limited to TV and internet discussions, I could be wrong. But I see fathers at the park supervising their kids all the time, and the internet discourse re America is about men getting assumed to be pedophiles for being around kids... So I assume there must be some difference...
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
...So, does she pick her nose in front of you?
(Fwiw my husband's ability to cry from sheer emotion is something I cherish about him, coming from a family that has all the emotional range of a shriveled peanut. He cries whenever he's feeling really deeply and just thinking about it makes my heart go all melty. He's just so emotionally well adjusted and not fucked up and repressed! I thought that kind of thing was a myth!)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Smart ≠ highly analytical and inclined to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
This website (that I found via Google and don't know anything else about, so no clue re reliability) claims childless rate in Israeli Jewish women is only 6.4% (in a sample of women aged 45-60)
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptional-fertility/
That only gets us from 3 to 2.8 or so
But for example if 44% of women have 3 kids, 30% have 2, and the remaining non-childless have 1, we'd get reasonably close to 2.1, while still having 3 kids be the plurality most common number. (in practice I'm cheating since I'm excluding 3+, which obviously also exists although IME is pretty rare in secular circles. Whatever, it's just a general example.)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I agree with all of this comment and hence don't have anything useful to add, except idly wondering if pushing strongly for people to think of dating as barter, not sales, would have any positive effect on the discourse.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Any theories as to what would be causing this? Was this just a temporary decline? What I see around me socially is still a strong expectation of a 3 kid family (especially if you're more rural*), perhaps 2 if you're urban and too poor to afford the third (or a single mother by choice, where 2 also seemed to be the default number they all wanted).
*(The same rural/urban split seems to appear - again, by anecdotal observation only - among religious non-haredi families, where 4 or 5 is an acceptable urban amount but sad and small in a rural context. However, there's too much noise coming from
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If you want to have a larger family and "quality family life" you are more likely to move out of the city (ads for rural areas explicitly target this)
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Zionist religious families strongly tend to be more religious the more rural they are)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Good to know, thanks. It sounded pretty horrifying to me, but I never can gauge what internet stuff about far off places is real or not...
Since I have you here anyway — Is there general expectation of/support for high levels of paternal involvement like I described?
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Part two: what I actually meant to ask, even though that's not where the discussion went
What I can offer:
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I will cheerlead your goals, brainstorm with you how to pursue them, make time and space in the relationship for them to be a priority.
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I will communicate my desires directly, including occasionally saying "I don't know, I just want something I can't articulate" or "I just want you to magically read my mind" if that's what I want. I am pretty in touch with my desires, of which I have many, and I don't like beating around the bush. (if you prefer more indirect, coy communication I am not for you. I don't do indirect flirting, I do "let's have sex")
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I value regular and high quality sex, and will actively pursue it as a goal.
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assuming you are admirable (otherwise why I am in a relationship with you), I will express my admiration frequently, including to our kids. Similarly I will both provide and demand physical affection frequently. (once again, if this isn't for you, it's no longer something being offered but a warning.)
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I am shit at housework and will be hiring cleaning help.
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I will do extensive research on big life decisions and provide summaries as needed for why I think the correct choice is X and what case could be made for alternative Y. I'll handle the load of researching correct child rearing, correct mortgage borrowing, etc.
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I will handle necessary social coordination of who is doing what with whom and why this matters and where we need to respond how.
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I will be a highly involved parent
Etc.
In exchange, what I expect from a partner:
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someone who will make space for me to nurture my social network, i.e. willing to enable me to host social events, carve out time and money to support my friends, etc
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regular orgasms
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large quantities of physical affection
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an intelligent and thoughtful sounding board for thinking out major life decisions
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highly involved parent
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whatever our disagreements, always backs me up in public and does not undermine me in front of other people.
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equal partner around the house (but this can simply be paying for more cleaning help)
There's some asymmetries here, I don't care if my partner is good at communicating their needs, even though that's something I offer on my end.
Also this isn't even close to a complete list, it's just a sample, which makes me realize that the scope of the question was too ambitious. Oh well. I'm too tired to continue writing, but felt like I had promised this second part of the response, so here it is, even if incomplete.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
As promised, my own answers:
I actually didn't mean the focus to be on traits, so much as on what you're offering in the relationship. So less "smart", more "interesting conversation partner", less "hot", more " regular access to sex with someone hot", if that makes sense as a distinction. Nonetheless I'll answer in both ways.
So, part one:
Traits I found sexually attractive:
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Attractive face, healthy lifestyle, not fat. I didn't care about height unless the guy was not just shorter than me but extremely shorter than me. I didn't care about six-packs beyond "not fat" (tangent: I genuinely do not understand why this is the shorthand for attractive muscle. I am pretty sure I am a typical woman in my attraction to nice biceps and pectorals, based on both accurate internet stereotypes about women's obsession with nice arms and basic sexual dimorphism logic where clearly sexed traits like upper body strength are more attractive. Very defined six packs just look vaguely insectoid, whereas very defined arm muscle ... Drool...). Ugly faces were a total deal breaker, though. For my standards of "not fat", I'd roughly say fat visibly spilling over waistline of pants would be my cutoff for "ew, no".
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Ambition and clear life goals. I actually didn't care about money, I had vaguely assumed I was going to be the primary breadwinner because of my chosen career‡, but I could feel my sexual interest shrivel up and die when guys didn't at all know what they wanted from life, or when all they wanted was to "kind of exist, I guess". I had empathy for them, sure, but it was also a super obvious kill switch for my libido.
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Emotional stability. I am the stereotypical neurotic, anxious, over-reacting woman attracted to calm, grounded, under-reacting men. Neurotic men just fed into my own anxiety, thereby killing my libido, therefore, not hot.
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Very affectionate, especially physically.
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Signaling caretaking and responsibility — this was actually very distinctly separate from caretaking and responsibility towards myself. It was things like someone being an older sibling and talking about ways they cared for their younger siblings, or someone being involved in community service, or someone helping old ladies carry their groceries. All of these things were very hot, and then guys without it just... Were less hot.
There were other traits that weren't really about hotness but about basic compatibility, like I needed a guy smart enough I could respect him, and obviously for marriage I wanted us to be on the same page re values and life goals. The above is just the list of things that made guys more/less hot to me, and then things like "don't hate his family" was just necessary qualification checking before the big leap.
Traits I offer, the package, as limited by my own self awareness:
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Physically hot - obviously there's a limit to how accurately I can gauge my own attractiveness, but still... *
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Playful, sense of humor
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Smart, curious
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Money and good social connections
The rest is harder to identify — from an outside perspective I can say a guy is involved in community giving, from an inside perspective I don't consider myself that way or think of it as a trait I offer even though I do, stepping back to look at myself objectively, get involved in community initiatives, regularly get turned to for help by my friends, etc. I also think some of the things I "offer" are technically more "negative" traits, ie I am relatively happy to be "needy" followed by being abundantly grateful and admiring to the person meeting my needs, which sounds vaguely bad while still being pretty clearly something men I was with enjoyed. I guess the more positive psychology term for this would be "vulnerability" perhaps?
‡ I was right
*(subtract points for being the kind of person who occasionally browses the motte, an unbelievably unhot trait. In total seriousness I think my level of being online is easily the least sexy thing about me and not something I'd ever tolerate in a partner, yet still I return, like a dog to its own vomit ... Sigh)
Right, and viewing crying as a lack of self control and a lack of emotional maturity would be something I'd want to run away from. Someone who lets himself cry is strongly signalling that he does not believe crying is a lack of control and a lack of emotional maturity.
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