SirJohnFalstaff
I'm one of the best from the West, my name still tatted on my ex wife's chest
Nay, you shall hear, Master Brook, what I have suffered to bring this woman to evil for your good.
User ID: 3165
SirJohnFalstaff
I'm one of the best from the West, my name still tatted on my ex wife's chest
3mo ago
Secondarily, I think also just that we excessively-online degens are projecting too much onto others. I think that the majority still don't actually post much or at all online (social media stats are largely around messaging services like WhatsApp) and so genuinely aren't afraid of having their standards turned against them.
Most people aren't afraid of standards being turned against them only if they haven't thought about it all that hard, or they already exist at such a tenuous level of socioeconomic acceptance that they can't get much lower on the scale anyway. But we're no longer in August, it's the Eternal September baby, and at this point everyone has done something bad online. It might be a group chat where they tell nigger or jew or Arab jokes, or one where they fantasize about killing their boss or joke about filing a fake lawsuit against him for sexual harassment. But it exists, for the vast majority of people.
So part of this is that I 100% can't see dick pics and posting on the Motte as being equivalently bad, even if they receive the same social opprobrium on net.
Understand that there are millions of people whose feelings on that are reversed. When baseball players are caught making offensive jokes they apologize, then their nudes leak they demand an apology from the world.
I apologize if you're the one guy who never says anything widely considered offensive here, but that would make you to theMotte what a guy whose "dick pic" is in an anatomy textbook would be to dick pics.
SirJohnFalstaff
I'm one of the best from the West, my name still tatted on my ex wife's chest
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
But most people haven't done it, and they think that the people sending dick pics are animals.
I guess this goes to your next point, but participating on theMotte is so much worse than showing hole, so everyone here is well into metaphorical dick pic territory.
We all have something embarrassing we've said online, yet we persist in being shocked when people have done embarrassing things online. The vast majority of men use porn at least monthly, I doubt that more than a small percentage of them would be happy to have that search history spread abroad.
SirJohnFalstaff
I'm one of the best from the West, my name still tatted on my ex wife's chest
3mo ago
This kind of thing makes me realize that I lived through the best part of the internet. Or at least the best part of one version of the internet. We're living in a dark age or a transitional age, but clearly the worst of times.
There was a time when a teenager could post on Facebook under your real name with no consequences, because there were no adults there. My high school debate team legitimately had a question as to whether posts on Facebook could, not should but could, be considered by colleges when making admissions decisions. You posted under your real government name, dirty jokes and bitching about teachers and gossip, and no one ever did a thing to you. There was a time when girls on Snapchat would just send out pictures of their tits to everyone they knew, with a quippy caption like "Merry Christmas ya filthy animals;" a tradition whose origin I never understood but the action of which I enjoyed. /r/GoneWild used to be understood to be entirely amateurs doing it purely for attention, just like the Girls Gone Wild series was understood to provide nothing but a T Shirt to the girls. And of course none of this would ever really come back to bite those girls in real life, no one was putting in any effort to connect the act to real life.
There was a time when you could just hit on girls on Facebook. If you had a few mutual friends, she'd accept your friend request and chat with you on the assumption you were cool. Just being on Facebook made you cool for a while, I was in high school the years you needed to be invited by a friend, who must at that time have been in college. It was like those stories about whaling ships landing on islands where giant sea turtles could be plucked off the beach and cooked, with no natural defenses from a lack of experience of predators.
And there was a time when it was super easy to lie on the internet. Most dating apps didn't connect to "real name" social media as a default until Tinder, and reverse image search was in its infancy, if you were in a different geographic location than where you lived or just in a sufficiently dense market there was no practical way to connect a profile under a fake name to your real life identity. Hell, for a few years girlfriends routinely fell for the "someone made a fake profile of me" line!
Now everything you do is on a tightrope. One mistake and you're doomed. Everything is public and everything is connected. You can't assume that anything you say is private unless it's encrypted, on a false name with elaborate efforts to obscure your identity behind false details, and even then you might get got if you aren't careful.
It used to be that the internet could never hurt you. Now it seems that it can only hurt you
Dan Savage used to predict that we would reach a point where such a critical mass of people had engaged in sexting that the scandal would no longer attach, because everyone had done it, so we couldn't disqualify politicians for dick pics because everyone had one. We seem to have reached that critical mass for everyone having some internet controversy, but rather than lightening the consequences we've harshened them. I would say that such a system would have no future, that it must change, but then we see things like the drinking age, where the vast majority of people drink before 21 but we just keep punishing kids for no reason. Our society is capable of punishing people at random for a long, long time.
SirJohnFalstaff
I'm one of the best from the West, my name still tatted on my ex wife's chest
5mo ago
divorce rates
I'd suggest that divorce (and adultery) rates are high for doctors because one of the perks of the job is that hospitals are full of young female nurses. Of all the divorced men I know, the doctors are the most likely to leave their first wife for some kind of floozy from work. This alone probably encourages staying trim!
SirJohnFalstaff
I'm one of the best from the West, my name still tatted on my ex wife's chest
5mo ago
I just kind of reject ephebophile as a category.
I can imagine someone who will only have sex with those under 10. I can't really imagine someone who will only have sex with those under 18 or 21 or whatever. I don't think those people exist. I don't think really think any man exists who will sooner have sex with a morbidly obese 16 year old than modern day Jennifer Lopez (leaving aside people with fat fetishes, who in turn I don't think would pick a skinny 16 year old over a properly-plump 35 year old).
SirJohnFalstaff
I'm one of the best from the West, my name still tatted on my ex wife's chest
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
There's something different with their attitude to sex. And this is exactly the option that I want to explore further in this post.
the journey of a woman is about taking down these barriers: she has a lot of ideas with whom it is appropriate to have sex, when, where and what kind of. A girl in a woman's body has no such qualms.
Huh? The majority of teenagers come with much more programming of anti-slut defenses, parental controls installed, innocence which keeps them away from sexuality. I'm surprised that anyone thinks that human sexuality is primarily innate, rather than cultural, as regards the kinds of things that typically occur in pornographic media.
From personal experience: dating teenagers-to-twenty-year-olds (when I was that age) was mostly a process of breaking down barriers around sexuality, while dating older women they know what they want and they know what they are going to get. Things are much more direct and simple. I can't imagine anyone dating a teenager for the purpose of "simplicity." We can go all the way back to Big Ben Franklin and his advice on why it is better to have an affair with older women than with younger ones, among them:
Because thro' more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin'd to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.
Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.
Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend making an old Woman happy.
All of which amount to a core logic that dating older women is simpler and more convenient than dating younger ones.
So beyond the obvious "They're hot" and "16 or 18 or 21 is just a number with no inherent relation to human development in particular cases" I propose another reasoning for teenagers being the protagonists of your pornographic novels:
#4 For Older Fantasists, when placing a teenager in the leading role of a sexual fantasy, are placing themselves within the fantasy at the appropriate age to fuck such a girl. The fantasy of the younger girl is one of nostalgia for one's own lost youth, the freedom and opportunity inherent therein.
Let's discuss a particular example of this: Billy Joel's Only the Good Die Young. Listen to it, it's a classic and I don't want to hear shit about anyone here loving America if they don't like Billy Joel, but here's some lyrics for close reading:
Come out, Virginia, don't let me wait
You Catholic girls start much too late
Aw, but sooner or later it comes down to fate
I might as well will be the one
Well, they showed you a statue, told you to pray
They built you a temple and locked you away
Aw, but they never told you the price that you pay
For things that you might have done
Well, only the good die young
You mighta heard I run with a dangerous crowd
We ain't too pretty, we ain't too proud
We might be laughing a bit too loud
Aw, but that never hurt no one
I'm pretty sure everyone, ever, who has listened to the song pictured Virginia as a Catholic schoolgirl, around seventeen or eighteen years old; sixteen at the youngest nineteen at the oldest. Now, Billy Joel was twenty seven years old when he wrote this. My parents, who loved this song, were in their twenties when it came out. Does anyone who listens to this song imagine the narrator as twenty-seven talking to his Catholic schoolgirl girlfriend? I mean, I guess somebody might, but if they did we can all agree the song would be deeply creepy and awful, closer to horror than to pop. Even the most determined TRPer can't possibly argue that it's normal or good for a twenty-seven year old to be trying to talk his way into his teenage girlfriend's panties.
No, the normal listener to Only the Good Die Young is picturing a teenage boy talking to his teenage girlfriend. Which is normal, if not necessarily normative. Particularly given the later verse about running with a "dangerous crowd;" we're picturing a charming juvenile delinquent who will straighten himself out later. If we're instead picturing a twenty seven year old criminal, once again, creepy fucking lyrics.
You can tell the song is primarily nostalgic for Billy, and his audience's, younger days in that Only the Good Die Young is the start of Joel's nostalgia-retro-oldies period. You have a series of songs that mime the doo-wop of Billy's youth: Uptown Girl, Tell Her About it, The Longest Time. Then you have a series of songs that explicitly reference and call out Billy's boomer memories: It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, Keepin' the Faith, We Didn't Start the Fire.
Joel is picturing himself at sixteen, talking to his sixteen year old girlfriend, and remembering the joys of being a teenager. The freedom of dating at that age, one's own strength and virility, with no stakes for either of you beyond mom's disapproval.
And I think a lot of ephebophilic fantasy is of this nature: the fat out-of-shape 38 year old porn consumer doesn't picture himself as a creepy 38 year old porn consumer when he watches "barely legal" porn, or reads it, rather he pictures himself at his prime at 22, when he at least had potential. Even moreso in a novel.
Moreso yet in real life. So often the balding but rich middle aged man who marries a young floozy second wife is trying to recapture his own rapidly-fleeing youth, when he had hair and freedom.
I'll also add in as a freebie throw-in:
#5 Male attraction is recursive and social in nature, and younger women provide higher status because they provide higher status
Men want to pretend that our attractions are purely simple and biological, but they aren't, they're deeply social and status seeking in nature. One can see this in the way "trends" in attractive women in pornography occur over time. What men want is what other men want, because when other men see that you have it, they will think that you must be pretty fuckin' bitchin' to attract such a girl. Marty's loser dad gets the hot girl in Back to the Future, and instantly everyone wants to make him class president and hang out with him. This applies to age as well: only rich and high status men can get the twenty year old girlfriend, so men seek out the twenty year old girlfriend as a status symbol. So much more the status symbol to have an illegal girlfriend, and be so powerful that no one can stop you!
As for me, hot women are hot, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The rest is just a question of what price you are willing to pay.
SirJohnFalstaff
I'm one of the best from the West, my name still tatted on my ex wife's chest
8mo ago
Yes. It's shockingly functional.
The biggest problem wasn't apps, though they are an inevitable result probably.
The biggest problem was the migration of most romantic and flirtatious interaction to text based typed formats, which are inherently scalable.
I can only take one girl for a drink on a date Friday night, or rock climbing Saturday afternoon, or wake up in bed with her on Sunday.
I can text seven girls "us" under a picture of two cats snuggling, a thirst trap of me rock climbing, a quirky story about the coffee shop I found, a picture of a funny passage from the book I'm reading, a joke I heard, and a picture of me laying artfully nude in bed Sunday morning. And they'll all be reasonably satisfied, or at least too satisfied with that level of intimacy to feel a real need to settle for lower quality elsewhere.
Digital affection scales in ways that physical affection cannot. I can only have sex with one woman with one erection, I can sext seven women with the same erection.
Most women would prefer real sex with a real man who is really theirs, but they're never going to feel needy enough to go get it.
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