Rosencrantz2
4d ago
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.
I think this is overstated. 'Dressing for yourself' can surely include feeling good when dressed up in public. You are participating in status games, you are expressing yourself, and you are turning heads because you enjoy the feeling of power that it gives you or because you are free of the anxiety of being judged or shamed when you know you're looking your best and your flaws have been minimised. That's markedly different than enjoying turning heads specifically because you want to make men horny. This is the difference between someone who dresses skimpily and whose primary satisfaction from that is attention from men, and someone who is interested in fashion and experiments with things that are orthogonal to basic male attraction (and the latter is a large amount of what people talk about on, say, your average style podcast – they are not always discussing how to be sexier in veiled terms, though they sometimes are, a lot of the time they are discussing trends, novelty and details of a kind that I daresay most men are pretty oblivious to and that are more to do with status, social impression, coolness and craft than sexiness).
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.
I think the analogy for this would be a woman dressing with effort even though she doesn't want sexual attention and might actually be annoyed by it. That's pretty easy to imagine isn't it?
I also think you need to tease out many gradations of possible meaning in the spectrum of dressing for yourself vs dressing for others. I would think the primary meaning is that your objective is to feel good in such contexts that others think you look good or have matched the occasion (a form of female success). This inner feeling is going to be distinct from dressing up instrumentally just because you want e.g. male attention. Now sure there is an extreme interpretation of doing something for yourself that means you would get the pleasant feeling even if no one else can notice. But I don't think that is particularly central natural language usage. If you do carpentry for yourself as a hobby, you might be disillusioned if you were never allowed to give your wooden creations to anyone or show them to anyone. Part of their value lies in the pride you're able to take in showing them. But a lot of it is also in the feeling of mastery you have when working with wood and being able to create the 'kind of thing' that others would value. I think it would still be fair in such a scenario to say you were pursuing carpentry for yourself.
I also think it would be okay for a man to say they were pursuing orgasm for its own sake even though they actually could just get that via porn. (There are different flavours of orgasm only achievable with others.)
As an aside, I think women actually do often dress up by themselves. This is experimentation and practice I guess, but I think they enjoy it loads, from girlhood on.
Rosencrantz2
4d ago
Okay so compare: 'Evolution gave us a brain that enjoys different flavours because it gives us the nutrients to survive." With: 'Anyone who claims they eat food 'just for the taste' is full of shit. They are really doing it to get a proper range of nutrients.'
Or: 'Evolution gave us a brain that feels good during orgasm because it leads to reproduction." With: 'Anyone who claims they seek orgasm just for its own sake is full of shit.'
We find ourselves with the brains and reward systems we have. The good thing about human autonomy is that (in theory) we can often co-opt these systems for other motivations. Is it a neat capability we are in full control of? Absolutely not. But we can still distinguish why we do x from the historical reasons and general reasons for our proclivity to x.
Rosencrantz2
4d ago
That's not the crux though, one would expect evolution to give people a brain that feels good when a person looks attractive in public, rather than in private.
Rosencrantz2
4d ago
But humans also have brains big enough to create elaborate, usually post-hoc justifications for actions they take, and so they can pretend that dressing and acting in a way that effectively short-circuits the other sex's thought processes (b/c horny) and claim its all solely motivated by self-empowerment.
Is that really hypocritical though? Suppose evolution makes it enjoyable to dress in a way that's sexy to men. Why can't women now take that system of enjoyment nature has given them, and use it to intentionally get enjoyment for themselves with attracting men becoming a side effect? It seems kinda similar to evolution making us like certain flavours to help us get the right range of nutrients. Modern foodies taking that capacity for enjoyment given to us by evolution, and employing it for their own non-survival ends. At least in theory, the original evolutionary cause of the impulse can be acknowledged, but then co-opted.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Gonna disagree, why wouldn't evolution just make it feel good to be attractive, without providing us with its chain of reasoning?
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
"The way I dress/makeup is solely to feel good about myself! That it happens to 90% coincide with what makes men lust after me is completely irrelevant, its not about men's desires!" is the purest cope imaginable.
I don't think it has to be cope. Evolution isn't transparent to us: it is totally plausible that women naturally want to look good without actually 'feeling' the evolutionary reason why it benefits their genes to do so.
Rosencrantz2
18d ago
You could be arguing that, yes. I personally don't agree. My point in the above though is just that defending them against charges of being destroyers of society is very different to celebrating them as role models.
Rosencrantz2
18d ago
The dynamic is that someone (like JD Vance) attacks the childless cat women as destroyers of society, then others defend them, and that defence appears to some as if the childless cat women are being elevated into heroes. I think this is maybe sometimes a genuine mistake but probably more often a wilful misunderstanding done in order to deliver the minor vindication of being able to say, 'See how unfair it is? 40 year old women are portrayed as valuable empowered role models but us 40 year old men are once again seen as worthless.'
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I just suspect they need to be gladiatorial in Trump's image to win Trump's approval, and then when they're the candidate and perhaps need him a bit less, they will pivot a bit.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I think it will be 'full bore' taken to its conclusion: the candidates will go warlord and start assembling personal armies and killing each other, with the candidacy going to the survivor, who once nominated will fall into line with democratic norms, participate politely in the debates with a centrist economic platform, and lose narrowly to Gavin Newsom.
BTW sorry for mentioning it but you're using the idiosyncratic typo 'propably' throughout this post.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
This seems basically symmetrical. Why did Republicans care about Clinton's bad behaviour if they don't care about Trump's?
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Also anecdotal but I see men who are not gymrats or muscly with extremely hot women absolutely all the time. They are reasonably fit, tall and athletic though. I'd say if you take the very most beautiful women of all, it's actually uncommon to see them with men who are on the meathead side of the athletic/strong spectrum.
Rosencrantz2
2mo ago
I assume musk has more influence than just through doge cuts.
Rosencrantz2
2mo ago
Okay but that goes both ways. If you weren't silent about unnamed white house staff being in charge, you ought to also be loudly exercised about a billionaire who's bought his influence.
Rosencrantz2
2mo ago
I don't follow this line of thinking – are you implying that Trump wanted to continue the tariffs on phones regardless of the impact but was prevented from doing so?
Rosencrantz2
2mo ago
a blathering idiot with the critical reasoning and planning skills of a 3rd grader.
These things massively aid him in being able to lie and make unachievable promises without doubting himself. If he was smarter there's no way he'd say the things he says or he would be plagued with doubts and counterarguments. There's no way he'd have got to where he's got.
Rosencrantz2
2mo ago
The UK already had multiple medium sized political parties though, I don't know the odds of that situation coming to be in the US (though it would be good).
Rosencrantz2
2mo ago
There need not be any clue that it's unofficial either. You could just release sequels to novels before the original author has a chance, under the author's own name, why not.
Rosencrantz2
2mo ago
If you want the democratically elected president to be overruled by unelected elite interests, then aren't you admitting that you don't think democracy is actually a good thing?
I guess if 'democracy = one elected man can do anything he likes', then no, very few people believe in democracy, and rightly so. Democracy requires the all branches of government, media, public discourse and checks and balances to be operating as a healthy whole. Or at least a lot better than they are now. Hoping that unelected elites will intervene is just knowing that democracy is no longer working properly and, given that, it's all that might save us.
Rosencrantz2
3mo ago
Sometimes you can even buy essentially the same thing but made in the US, with a big 'made in the US label' and it costs more, as with New Balance trainers. There's a 'Made in the UK' version as well. Both the US/UK versions are actually better quality than the made in Vietnam ones, I would say – but also twice the cost (in the UK, £199 vs £99).
Rosencrantz2
3mo ago
But neither of these deals actually change the trade deficit, which is about goods flow not investment. My point is that the new tariffs should be based on something countries can correct rather than something orthogonal to what the US's problem with them is.
Rosencrantz2
3mo ago
But what is it countries are supposed to do? It doesn't seem to be about tariffs themselves but trade deficits. Simply buying large amounts of American goods could be an option for them to get these numbers down but it's not in the power of most of the worst affected countries.
Rosencrantz2
3mo ago
It's because they're liars trying to poison the well of public discourse and make as many people as possible think that the chart showed other countries' tariffs.
Rosencrantz2
3mo ago
That's quite interesting, but this line of thinking feels close to Cartesianism. If we can't appeal to authority at all, we have to discount almost all information about the wider world – we don't know what any countries' GDP is, what the tax rate is, whether there's really a war in Ukraine etc, unless we trust in certain authorities whose information we have no reason to strongly doubt. We wouldn't be able to discuss the world economy at all.
I would have thought a more pragmatic version of this philosophy would have us interrogate and challenge the data and views of experts, and hold them lightly, always seeking to check that the experts are abiding by similar evidentiary standards as we would aspire to ourselves, but realising that it is impractical to check everything and therefore being good Bayesians about what we can't be sure of.
I would care if they were doing it even on a small scale, unless there was a good reason, but I don't think that particularly implies that bees' suffering matters. I think I'd be aggrieved by anyone buying any cool thing in order to pointlessly destroy it, living or not. And bees are cool.
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