SkookumTree
2yr ago
What was her personality like? My burned friend was blunt, cynical, bitter, and funny. I'm trying to reconnect with her. At the time - in high school - I'd had (or at least thought I had) a lot of interest from girls. And I was openly disinterested in sex and relationships then, believing I wasn't ready at the time. I would've found her very attractive had she been confident and not cared about the shit she took for being burned. Now, I'd be interested in her as she is...a dozen years have made me more cynical, like she was. I could've gotten past her face then, and could get past her face now - it was the sadness that was a turn-off for me.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Dr. Powers has a plausible theory. That is all I can say about it. 50 years later it might turn out to just be bullshit; I wouldn't be surprised either way. "Hypermobile/autistic/ADHD/trans/queer/mentally ill" is definitely a cluster, though.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Yeah - Sharon Megalethery's MCCX theory definitely seems extremely plausible.
If it's agricultural chemicals: are more trans people found near farm runoff or something?
SkookumTree
2yr ago
hysteria
What we called "hysteria" in the 1800s is what we would now call a mixture between straight up mental illness, psychosomatic conditions, poorly-understood bona fide autoimmune diseases, and weird neurological bullshit like complex regional pain syndrome. There's probably other shit in there that is genuine that modern medicine doesn't understand yet.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
A noble goal indeed, albeit they're rarer than hens teeth.
I have known several. They are rather unusual, disagreeable people.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Yeah. Reminds me of a friend I'll call Ninetyone. She was born in 1991 in a purple area in the Northeast. Was always into both men and women, but never acted on her attraction to women because she feared societal pressure. Her sister, seven years younger, is openly bi and has been with both men and women...what would have happened had Ninetyone and her sister been fraternal twins?
SkookumTree
2yr ago
being an unfuckable mess is a lifestyle choice
Being a mess is definitely part lifestyle choice. So too: some people really are ugly, and know it.
About your female friend: what ultimately happened to her? She reminds me some of my burned friend, to be honest. Did the burns take her sight or cause her any other health issues?
SkookumTree
2yr ago
while also when genuine being one of the toughest to carry.
Can you expand more on that? That is interesting. I've known a few openly bi (and practicing) women; there are some mental health issues there but a lot of them have their stuff together...most are either thin or overweight, some obese but none morbidly obese.
Roughly what region do you live in/are drawing your conclusions from?
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Yeah. Scott Alexander's post about the four American tribes is pretty insightful here. The Borderer-Cavalier coalition fighting against a Puritan-Quaker coalition. Quakers seem very much like the OG hippies...
SkookumTree
2yr ago
I don't know how my burned friend is doing. She has had a partner, now. She still seems rather bitter and cynical - and also nerdy and blunt.
As for McCain: certainly an interesting guy. You can't knock his strength of will in Vietnam; he refused early release and chose to keep getting tortured by the Vietnamese. Whatever else he did in life, that has to be admired. He was a strong-willed, wealthy man and very much a skilled politician. He was also an asshole in his personal life.
I wonder if this is some sort of implication: you can be an asshole, as long as you are extremely determined and also very socially skilled? I mean...almost everyone reading this will not even come close to McCain's level of political skill or power. Sure, he was born on third base, but the guy had to run home. And run he did.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
That isn't what's happening when a 'disgusting' person gets love. When you see someone who's 'biologically disgusting' who has a partner, the partner just ... doesn't find them to be disgusting (potentially in a relative sense).
I'll agree here. Habituation is a powerful thing. You see it every year with first-year medical students dissecting cadavers. This being said, I am not sure just how far habituation goes; I know that there are a lot of...unfortunate-looking people that choose not to have partners because they find most or all of the people available to them disgusting. You see this more often with middle-class and up people that aren't accustomed to choosing the least-bad option and accepting that they're going to get hosed. There is probably more social isolation there...toothless druggies are one thing, but there is a fairly large and fairly invisible segment of the population that is in and out of institutions of one kind or another. Hospitals, mental institutions, jails and prisons. Fussell's "bottom-out-of-sight" class.
On to our hero Henry.
I've googled "arrested for domestic violence mugshot". Most are more attractive than I am, physically: they're probably taller than my 5'6" and most have full heads of hair. This aside, I believe he is also a liar and con man. A good one. He sells bullshit and promises the world, and seems to deliver at first. He fills his victims' heads with extravagant promises, and may well have an idea of just what kind of vulnerable women will fall for his shit. He's also not averse to committing felony crimes: for a middle-class person like you and I, a felony conviction is a crippling blow. For Henry...well, I've heard that while blue-collar workers (especially minorities) get badly hurt by felony records, the construction industry is pretty open to hiring people with records and often doesn't do background checks.
I don't think that Henry is some kind of badass charismatic mid-level drug lord or gang leader, the kind profiled in Sudhir Venkatesh's book Gang Leader for a Day. Instead, he is a huckster who is able to lie his way into women's pants and prey on the isolated and vulnerable.
As for what Henry has that I do not: a willingness to outright lie and bullshit, being OK committing misdemeanors and maybe felonies that land him in jail multiple times. He is probably taller and better-looking. As for the social aspect: sure, autistic people may learn social skills almost as a second language. And some may become very...proficient, at least by certain metrics. However: in some ways, Henry the high-school dropout with a GED has better command of the English language than a foreigner that moved to the United States as an adult, learned English, and became a tenured professor of English. Sure, the university professor can dissect Jane Austen and Shakespeare and Dickens with the best of them...but is he able to create - not just understand - the same informal grammatical constructions as Henry? Social interactions are - at least in my experience - far more informal and fluid than writing or public speaking. And even so: my writing may be good, but it isn't that good. It is not good enough to inspire someone to overcome a visceral and difficult-to-articulate ick, an uncanny-valley sensation, a "creepiness" that exists in the absence of any kind of wrongdoing that can be put into words. I will concede that it may be possible for people to habituate or to become used to this sensation, either from having autistic friends and relatives; there are also people who lack the sensation I am talking about because of variations in psychological and biological makeup. I've known people that were completely lacking in empathy (but were decent human beings); I've read of people that didn't feel fear and others that barely felt pain.
I also don't think that moral virtue comes into it a whole hell of a lot. It would be rather absurd to ask "What kind of moral virtue does it take to convince someone to buy a dogshit car from a salesman simply to make him happy", although if that salesman or anyone had that kind of saintly character, determination, willpower, and virtue it would probably be enough to make him a good salesman. Attractiveness is about as correlated to moral virtue as something like basketball skill, in my opinion...the 6'6" asshole is probably beating the 5'6" saint in a game of one-on-one.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
If this is at all a representative sample, they're all more physically attractive than I am. They're probably taller (I'm 5'6; average US male height is 5'9 or 5'10) and three have full heads of hair.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Our crutch using hero wasn't ordinary, and even then, his frat brothers at Harvard told him more or less that finding someone that would be loyal to him would be extremely difficult if not impossible. The guy was a hell of a man, character wise, and it was a huge uphill battle. His own words: "I have a lot to offer. Admittedly, fat cripple is a tough sell."
McCain is...an interesting person. Perhaps an asshole for how he left his wife. I'll grant him a bit of latitude for having endured hell in a PoW camp though. I wouldn't leave my wife if something like that happened to her, though.
Another thing: In high school, I found myself attracted to a girl who liked to swim and hike. She was big into swimming, had a nice body and was fit, very blunt...and very bitter and cynical. She had been burned in a house fire as a baby. While the surgeons did amazing work, she was left missing an ear and with a third of her face looking like Freddy Krueger. It was her sadness that was more a turnoff than her face.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Flat feet. Unusual physical flexibility, although this is slightly harmful all things considered. Male pattern baldness. High cold tolerance; I sweat easily.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Interesting. It's long been the case that short guys have to be remarkable if they want decent partners. This being said. I've observed two clusters of promiscuous women. The first isn't satisfied with herself or her life, and seeks casual encounters to numb an inner pain. The second is an adrenaline junkie and generally plans things well. The second type frequently does pretty well in life: loving, put together husbands, kids if they want them...The first type doesn't do as well.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
And what about if the women WERE physically deformed?
Hell. I'd find a way to clean out my buddy's septic tank or haul idk rotting livestock carcasses if he really needed someone and 'untrained semi competent DIY dude' was the best he could do. Sure, it would be literally shitty as hell and there's a good chance I'd puke my guts out. It's gross, but I will say there's something about being in healthcare in any capacity for any length of time that (at least for me) allowed me to just not give a fuck about any disgust that I felt. I was just a guy that had to watch a C section or lug pieces of still warm resected colon to the pathology lab or whatever...we (med students, residents, even attendings) were warming our hands on patients' intestines in the OR.
I don't know. Would most guys fuck a deformed female friend if she asked nicely and they really thought it would help? If they would, under what circumstances?
SkookumTree
2yr ago
A question for all of you:
What does it take - what qualities of character - does it take for someone to willingly and freely choose to sacrifice to be with someone? To freely endure visceral, biological disgust just to make someone happy? More importantly: what kind of person, if anyone, is worthy of this kind of sacrifice - whether for a night or a few years or a lifetime?
Have any of you personally known anyone that you believed was worthy of that kind of sacrifice? Do any of you have anyone in your lives that you would sleep with despite being disgusted by simply because they asked it of you as a favor, or because you felt they might benefit from it? If you do: why? I have...hmm. I knew a couple of people like this who I might sleep with, disgust be damned, because I admired their character that much. Honestly, I'd see it as kind of like a combination of acting and a gross, intimate medical procedure that needed to be performed well. Although I'm not any good at the first, I am no stranger to (limited) participation in the second. One of the guys...he's a fat dude who got hit by a drunk driver at 19, wound up crippled and on crutches for life, but is a hell of a dude: a West Virginia redneck son of a union construction foreman and a nurse that made good, went to Harvard, and then returned a decade later to own real estate in his hometown and live off the profits.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Yeah. That sounds like "full professor at MIT or Harvard". As I understand it, MIT also pretty much hands out those free admissions to anyone that's published significant math research in high school or won national or international math contests.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
I think that most people are capable of showing restraint; strong emphasis on "most". You also have shit like burkas and Victorians being aroused by women's ankles...and on the other hand, you've got hippies at Burning Man running around buckass naked and calling it good.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
And if you're a decent looking young man with a job, settle for nothing less.
I would add "neurotypical" to that. If you are unattractive or suck a bunch at something, but still want to do something, you're more focused on the least bad outcome than the best.
Would you rather be celibate for life? Have had a few passionate relationships that didn't pan out, and be single from age 34 to your death at 82? Be in a relationship with someone you find physically attractive, and who feels the same way about you...but who is also either kind of a shitbag or a stone cold shitbag?
SkookumTree
2yr ago
that type of man (or woman) is precisely what you get after you submit even smart and hardworking med students to the insane standards that AIIMS demands. I really don't think you can go through that and come out a person who cares about anything other than their work and career, or at least that's true for the majority.
Yeah. I've heard that in the US, only the service academies, MIT, and Caltech basically irrevocably change those who attend for life. I know a man who, over thirty years after graduating from the US Naval Academy, will occasionally clean a counter and then say "Hooyah. This part of our mission is now accomplished."
SkookumTree
2yr ago
I don’t think there’s much evidence that women find it easier to find a quality man than that men have for finding a quality woman.
Six hundred pound women find men to be their nurse and caretaker.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Yes, the idea that women are loved for simply existing or that women have access to male provisioning whenever they feel like it is just… not in touch with reality. It’s the result of observing the kind of women a man notices and failing to account for the rest.
Hmm. I've seen lots of morbidly obese women in relationships with or married to thin or average looking guys that earn average or better incomes. Also, parents of unattractive children (from what I've seen) usually determinedly stick their heads in the sand when they see their children aren't dating anyone.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
I think the majority of men in the first world today would probably drop dead if they had to do the work their grandfathers did, let alone those grandfathers' grandfathers.
They'd suffer a lot; I can't tell if it's hyperbolic, but most of them would be alive at the end of a year. The US military (at least in Vietnam) was able to round up a bunch of conscripts and get them doing a physically demanding, dangerous job.
That is interesting indeed. Bi men are assumed gay and women aren't all that attracted to them...while bi women get treated like experience dispensers. I suppose that might be why bi people have worse outcomes than gay and straight ones. I suppose that being openly bi might be an honest, expensive signal that you're able to withstand the slings and arrows.
Based on my personal experience - a lot of bi friends - I've seen a lot of attractive openly bi women. However, more than a few have significant mental-health issues, or had had them in the past but had overcome them. There's a disproportionate number of queer young people in local psych wards.
That, too, is interesting. There's more than a few fat, awkward, nerdy men in BDSM circles, although I would suspect that most of them have the sense to not openly talk about their involvement in BDSM. If you're unattractive enough, the fact that you're interested in sex or relationships at all is fundamentally transgressive, outside of perhaps certain niche communities. I guess that if you're just barely attractive enough to be allowed to be openly interested in sex and relationships, you might join a BDSM community or talk about being openly bi as an attention-grabbing strategy.
Isn't this sometimes seen as creepy, transgressive, or just bullshit? I suppose that women can get away with this a lot easier than men can...but even then, why isn't this kind of behavior just seen as sanctimonious and puritanical? Also more than a little bit gross: the 5'3" guy in the BDSM circle, or the 300lb woman, should damn well know that they are being allowed to both participate and express interest in people by their community. Generally speaking, I see publicly representing oneself as anything other than a celibate monk or nun who's dedicated their life to something prosocial as a privilege, not a right, granted by the community. Something like the flirting/sexual version of a driver's license...most people can get them, but a small percentage can't or shouldn't, and nobody's pitching a fit that blind or epileptic people can't drive.
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