Are you under the impression that historical modesty and sexiness exists on a simple linear scale from burqas to tank tops? Probably there's a universal thrill with full view of certain parts of the anatomy, but past that, modesty norms and male perceptions of "sexiness" are very much in the eye of the beholder. Plenty of extremely "conservative, old-fashioned societies" in equatorial regions have far less covered-up norms of dress than we do. Public breastfeeding used to be far more common in the West, while there's a huge amount of historical hand-wringing about the immodesty of women showing their sexy, sexy free-flowing hair, which today men view in their co-workers without experiencing unmanageable erections.
My point is that there is underlying instinct, but then there's a huge amount of situational conditioning on top of that. If a man complains that he feels uncontrollably, painfully aroused and frustrated by the tops of a woman's breasts at work, then goes home every night and deliberately stimulates himself while looking at images of the tops of women's breasts, then all I'm saying is that he's clearly the dog AND Pavlov in that situation.
Terracotta
8mo ago
If you accept that fashion is signaling, then the overall move might be less toward "informality" than toward subtler and harder-to-fake signals of wealth and status.
Formal clothing controls and covers your body, allowing most people to look presentable if they can buy approximately correct garments and keep them in good repair. By contrast, sweatpants look good almost exclusively on women who can afford to spend a lot of time at the gym and yoga studio (or later, the plastic surgeon's), and who know how to do understated high-quality makeup with expensively well-maintained skin and hair; everybody else just looks schlubby and run-down, like the poors they are.
I've heard a similar argument made about the transition from corsets to the "freedom" of bras and elastic waistbands: every body fits neatly into an hourglass-figure dress when wearing a corset, but now we have to stress and starve ourselves to manufacture de facto corsets out of our own abdominal muscles, yay. And I suspect stockings, bras and other undergarments probably work the same way. Lissome twenty-somethings, and the class of older ladies who drop $$$ on sclerotherapy and implants, look fine in bare legs and bralettes; not so much the rest of us.
Terracotta
8mo ago
A Bacon allusion in a bra debate is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to the Motte. Well played.
Terracotta
8mo ago
I hadn't considered the role of anxiety before, but there is a match with the kind of edgy, restless, compulsive feeling that comes after eating a bunch of shitty nutrition-free junk-food.
Terracotta
8mo ago
Serious question: I know nothing about you and the guy posting above you, but if y'all are (like seemingly every other male around here) going home and jacking off to images of breasts for hours every night, aren't you somewhat responsible for greatly strengthening the existing circuitry that links that visual cue to a state of arousal and sexual reward?
Sure, it's natural for men to find bodies sexy, just as it's natural for that lady to find chocolate delicious. But if I knew that your coworker went home every night and deliberately spent hours burning chocolate-scented candles while watching candy-tasting shows, baking brownies and licking them then throwing them away while fantasizing resentfully about what it'd be like to eat them... I'd have a lot less sympathy with her complaints that thoughts of forbidden chocolate were ruining her focus at work the next day.
Terracotta
8mo ago
and men do best in somewhat more risky environments where they might sire children with many women.
This is not your main point, but it's always seemed like a particularly BS part of the whole redpill evopsych narrative to me. Men may have evolved instincts to take advantage of conditions where promiscuity is possible, sure. But that's not the same as them "doing better" under those conditions.
I recall a discussion here pointing out that the modal historical outcome for superfluous weak males is not frustrated inceldom, but early violent death. Given that a monogamous pairbonding system vs. a lothario/harem system necessarily offer identical expected value in terms of offspring, and that the harem almost certainly offers lower expected value in terms of personal pleasure owing to the lothario's diminishing marginal returns from screwing multiple partners, I don't understand how men in these spaces seem to regard promiscuity as some kind of inherently manly value that's unfairly gatekept in our women's world.
Terracotta
8mo ago
I think I was arguing that rapists and predators are by definition Bad. Also that even rich elite clans usually have a couple of members and hangers-on whose individual genetics would not be a valuable addition to anyone's family tree.
I'm not aware of any helpful published surveys supporting this, but to my mind the counter-narrative where Southern patriarchs eagerly guard the honor of their random enslaved field hands is making the more extraordinary claim. Who would even dare to come forward with a rape accusation in that context? Given the overall attitude to women of that class, why would they be believed and avenged rather than punished for causing trouble and/or assumed to have themselves been the seducers?
I thought at least some of the minor Southern aristocracy was descended from transported and otherwise indigent emigres, and that there were overall more situations of modest households owning 1-2 slaves than of big aristocratic plantations? In any case, whatever their strengths in bravado or disease resistance or whatever it took to succeed economically in the Old South, by definition the failsons who will rape the most servant girls are not the ones carrying the best genes for impulse control and orderly prosociality.
It also seems plausible that even the enslaved women on big estates would be highly vulnerable to opportunistic sexual assault from random employees and other poor whites in the vicinity.
Terracotta
8mo ago
Through generations of sexual assault and limited-opportunity marriage, that sub-population was also forced to incorporate substantial genetic contributions from the most brutal and impulse-driven individuals among the white Borderers in their vicinity, a group that had overall been actively pre-selected for violence and low conscientiousness. Given the way white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore, I haven't heard anyone rule out the possibility that the whole thing is just those Borderer genes, full stop.
Terracotta
9mo ago
Actual woman here (although not the woman in question), and my read is that although you had the best of intentions, this one was kinda on you. Why did you kiss her the second time in the same evening without any positive feedback from her, and the third time after substantial negative feedback from her (saying she'd like to call an Uber, mentioning too many people buying her drinks, telegraphing tiredness)?
First kiss definitively declared your sexual interest and established you as a confident guy who's comfortable taking the initiative. At that point, initiating more kissing, unless she's first initiated some reciprocal physical move toward you entirely of her own accord, adds no new information and risks tilting it over to "dude is overly aggressive and may or may not think he's bought himself a BJ with some figurines." You seem to be interpreting her passive compliance with handholding/ getting in the car/ being kissed/ etc. as encouragement, but plenty of women and especially preacher's-daughters-turned-leftist-activists were intensively socialized to be polite and go along when people demand interaction in social situations, particularly after somebody gave them a present. Then, at least in the normal social argot of the girls I know, "God I'm tired/ I've had too many drinks" is an expression of vulnerability, cue to visibly set aside your own goals and switch into gallant caretaking mode, "Cool, and you have a busy day tomorrow, so let's get you home safe, can I call an Uber? Is your friend around?" and then chastely load her in the cab with a squeeze of the hand and text the next day to say you enjoyed the evening, like Tom Hanks would do in a 90s romcom.
Note, this is a perfectly honest misunderstanding and I'm not trying to be harsh, more to address your fatalistic "why am I not allowed to do things regular people do??" This doesn't seem like anything wrong with you or her, just colliding sets of instincts, like you might see any day with a toddler feeding squirrels.
Terracotta
10mo ago
There are some Catholics on the Motte, right? What do you do for guidance/ clarification on finer points of doctrine as they relate to everyday moral behavior? I'd imagine the first-line recourse is just "ask your parish priest," but for questions that are a little more theologically complex, or where you've gotten conflicting information already?
Terracotta
10mo ago
I've never watched Bridgerton, dislike the premise and the genre overall, and now, after Googling the actress, have a serious beef with her for breaking out that dumb old canard, "people in The Past had no hygiene," in a public interview.
But if I'm reading your comment right, you're saying that you watched an episode of a comedy TV show that:
- featured a female protagonist played by an actress whom you found facially and physically unattractive
- implied that in its fantasy historical setting, with many other social factors at play, several high-status men were interested in marrying this character
- showed this person having sex
- also had many very short scenes, in an episode specifically stylized and labelled as a riff on TikTok videos
and that on those grounds, you were filled with rage and "hated it more than anything [you'd] watched in your life"?
Physical performance of aggression works exactly the same for men as tears do for women, though. A man of 30+ years raises his voice in that sudden deep "dad intensity" mode, makes a sudden threatening physical move in an argument, then walks off, and people will conclude he's really passionate about this topic and he, on the whole, wins the day. A woman raises her voice and clenches her fists, people will titter to themselves about that shrill bitch who is literally crazy, and she's presumed to have lost.
I guess it's possible the male mode doesn't work as well on the internet, given its reliance on nonverbal intimidation rather than words, but it's absolutely a thing and I've seen it work for men on many occasions.
Where do women get this idea?
Woman here, and I started out not believing that "men need to feel intellectually superior to women" but absolutely agree with it now. The experiences that tilted me that way:
-
As a woman, I have had many conversations with men where I curiously asked them many questions about their intellectual areas of expertise. I'm a pretty knowledgeable person and in many of those cases also had credentialed expertise to bring to the table, comparable to what the man was bringing. Following their own monologues about intellectual topics, not one of those men, literally nobody, ever asked me a curious question that indicated their parallel interest in eliciting information from me. Indeed, no non-related man has ever asked me a curious information-eliciting question about anything in my whole life.
-
In those intellectual conversations where I did chime in with information or ideas of my own unasked, male conversation partners would consistently nod dismissively, then redirect the conversation back to some topic where they could educate me.
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As somebody who loves to learn about stuff in conversations, I try really hard to make sure I'm facilitating a real exchange of high-quality information where I know my stuff and the other party is genuinely interested. I have encountered so many men bloviating on and on, with obvious pleasure, about topics where they actually knew very little, to visibly indifferent conversation partners, that it's hard not to conclude that this is actually a dominance behavior intended to make them feel high-status by capturing someone's polite attention, rather than a genuine enjoyment of intellectual contact. Men seem to do this substantially more with female conversation partners.
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I have had several disturbing conversations where the principle "most men dislike argumentative women" played out as the man getting visibly angry and breaking off the conversation as soon as I indicated my interest in offering (polite, calm, well-evidenced) counterarguments to whatever they were contending. I have known maybe 3 men who could handle a sustained good-natured debate with me, a very polite lady, without getting angry and insecure and needing to stop, and I loved those dudes so much and desperately miss the ones no longer in my life. Overall, if in an intellectual debate space like this one somebody can unapologetically assert that he dislikes women when they argue with him, I'd say that's pretty suggestive that many men are uncomfortable facing the possibility of being intellectually bested by a girl.
Terracotta
10mo ago
In all fairness, if I look around at elderly heterosexual couples I know personally, it genuinely does seem like a much worse bargain for the women:
-Everyone loses some ability to process social cues as well as they get older, but in 95% of those cis/het older couples the women seem to hold onto social function for much longer than the men, resulting in a classic dynamic where the woman manages and humors the guy 24/7 like an autistic child while he narcissistically monologues, complains, rants and repeats himself and never asks a single question about her. My assumption is that women are so strongly socially (and possibly biologically) conditioned to pay attention to how everyone's doing in the conversation that everyday social skills hold out for longer.
-Many women enjoy the greater physical strength of a male partner, and on both a practical and a visceral monkey level this can be a constant low-key benefit of cis/het relationships for women. Older men are often frail and can't really offer that anymore.
-Related, because traditional household roles apportion mostly the strength-based tasks to men, the older women I know seem to do a lot more work around the house, and a ton more active work in general. Virtually every male retiree I know takes long afternoon naps and falls asleep in front of the TV in the early evening. I have literally never met a female retiree who does this.
-Some cursed dynamic with testosterone, poor emotional self-awareness and dementia-linked anxiety seems to result in many old men getting unpleasantly rage-y as they age. "Grumpy old men"/"old man shakes fist at cloud" are both memes for a reason, and that doesn't look fun to live around. Old women complain too, but I have met a vanishingly small number who fly off the handle and shout loudly on the regular, the way their husbands do.
These are women who've chosen to be in heterosexual relationships, so clearly they find this preferable to being all alone. I expect I will too, at that age. But I wouldn't say it looks like a perfectly fair exchange of value.
Terracotta
11mo ago
Female here, with one point that's missing from the previous thread: you don't mention how old your wife is, but if she's anywhere in the mid 30s- mid 40s range, then normal perimenopausal hormone shifts will absolutely cause a natural change in body composition and fat distribution, particularly increasing visceral fat in a way that gives that "pregnant" look, without any changes in diet or exercise. Stress and sleeplessness make this fat-deposition pattern worse (so if you see things that could reduce her stress levels, that might be a good approach), but I'm not aware of anything that can fully reverse it. Just go to the mall and glance around and see how many 50-year-old women you can find who still have a 25-year-old's waist shape, regardless of overall fitness or weight: it's a vanishingly small proportion.
Terracotta
11mo ago
I think your mistake here is conflating straight women's goal of "trying to attract men" with "trying to maximally arouse men."
While I have various issues with that Aella Good At Sex/what-women-want blog series, one useful concept she established was the idea of "werewolfing" as a state of goal-driven, uncontrolled male arousal that many women find a little scary and unpleasant. A woman would have to live under a rock not to realize that men want big tits in the sense that they'll werewolf and pant and slaver over them; this is a literal cartoon meme. But most women are not sure how to channel that kind of raw animal attention to produce the social and romantic benefits they themselves might actually want, like having the guy attend to their needs, listen to their ideas, praise and admire them, stay intimate even after orgasm, etc. In some cases arousal actually seems to work against romance, in that men seem disproportionately likely to demean the intellectual capacity of extremely voluptuous women, something I'd love to see properly explained from the male end.
I suspect that when young women try to appear sexy in ways that seem puzzlingly suboptimal to straight dudes, a big part of this may be trying to refine or control the type and level of sexual attention they receive, trying to keep men interested enough to be solicitous and respectful, but not fully pushing them over into werewolf mode. If what you did was helpfully point out that they could evoke a bigger boner if they just [X], my guess is it was interpreted as "Since respectful and moderate male attention isn't a thing and women are only good for werewolfing over, here's what my inner werewolf would want." Frankly, I'd respond with a hate-filled glare too.
Terracotta
11mo ago
So to go with OP's scenario, a woman in her 20s has the option of rendering value through: (a) having babies and raising them, or (b) focusing on her career and developing her ability to offer economic value, maybe while trying to fit in a baby or two for personal gratification along the way.
In option (a), she's maybe got 15-20 years of being valuable to others (since people value mothering mostly through the end of the cute phase); that value is mostly rendered privately, since community members don't much care who breeds or not; and the past value she's rendered is extremely perishable, expiring pretty immediately when her fertility ends and the kids leave elementary school.
In option (b), she can continue to produce value for others, and thus be regarded as valuable in turn, through age 60-65+; her value is rendered publicly and comes with the benefits of stronger community relationships and public respect; and even if something happens so that she gets fired at 55, her compensation thus far has been in investment-friendly cash plus professional connections, which will hold their value well in tough times.
I think this is why old-fashioned gender roles did very much emphasize women's economic productivity, focusing on diligent spinning, weaving, prudent financial management, etc. (Also, creation of children used to be another form of economic productivity/retirement savings, but is definitely less so now that they don't contribute to the household and feel no obligation to look after aged parents.) For better or worse, our grinding middle-management girlbosses are more truly aligned with old-fashioned notions of women's value than the modern sentimental tradwife who stays hot for hubby, bakes cute cupcakes and cuddles the babies all day.
Terracotta
1yr ago
I was responding to the earlier poster's comment:
The truth is that men do value women greatly for certain things that are unique to their womanhood and less for other things that are not unique to women.
made specifically in defense of the proposition that women should abandon professional careers to pursue instead early stay-at-home motherhood. So the question of whether the average dude would beat up some other guy for insulting his mother isn't really germane to the question.
Do these mother-loving men love motherhood enough to listen to older women's perspectives, defend their rights, respect their ideas, hire them in preference to hot young recent grads, offer them salaries commensurate with the years they spent in this ostensibly ultra-high-value experience? Do they go out of their way to live near their own moms and spend time with them?
Do they deeply admire a CEO's wife who raised his four kids, just as much as they do the CEO for whatever email/boardroom/golf wankery he did during that same timeframe? Would they go to hear her TEDX talk and buy her vanity book afterwards? Because men find motherhood so high-value and so darn important?
Terracotta
1yr ago
Oh, I agree that it's a curse of middle-aged womanhood in general. Underneath that, likely just the bitter animal truth that humans only seek the favor of other humans when they (a) have something to gain from them or (b) have something to fear from them. Men are more physically intimidating into midlife, thus retain the power to command respect and amity for longer.
However, given the choice to be a widely-reviled middle-aged woman with a fat bank account, a nice apartment, some social clout and active power over one or two resentful underlings... or a widely-reviled middle-aged woman with a menial job, no money or future prospects, and the wistful memory of long-ago baby cuddles with grown adults who are now far away living their own lives, calling maybe once or twice a year? It doesn't seem obviously rational to choose the latter.
Terracotta
1yr ago
Why the non-related requirement? The point of honoring your mother is honoring the sacrifice she and her body made giving you life and then sustaining and raising you
The original discussion was specifically about young women giving up a career in order to focus on having kids right out of college. The compensation for 5 years of paid professional work in the mid-20s is not just $X salary, but greatly expanded skillset and prospects for future earning, a solid professional network, plus a certain amount of prestige/ social capital that can be traded in for increased power in community interactions, etc. If you're saying the only compensation needed for an equivalent amount of time spent in stay-at-home childrearing should be the freely-rendered love of your own hypothetical someday babies (assuming you don't do anything to piss them off), well, it's a sweet sentiment, but it sounds like a terrible deal for the woman.
Terracotta
1yr ago
Jeff and Mackenzie started out in their early 20s in roughly the same position, collaborating on a business, both presumably thinking they had talent and some good ideas. So they make a great test case for the options facing young women who choose between (A) early marriage/kids and (B) pursuing their career.
Mackenzie chose A, stayed home with the children and after two decades got to be the unilaterally discarded middle-aged wife with no future, no vocation, no social or professional power, no marketable skills to build on, and zero credit or respect for the 25 years of work she put into the supposedly-so-valuable work of motherhood and family-building (just "literally marrying a dude," in your words). She gets to keep some of the accumulated assets of their joint family project-- much less than half-- and the male public is in broad agreement that she should be damn grateful to emerge with even that.
Jeff chose B, cultivated his career, and gets not just riches but power, public respect, a robust personal and professional network, and a vocation/identity that will stick with him well into his '70s, where his value will increase, not decrease, over time.
Explain to me again why you think young women should follow Mackenzie's path, not Jeff's?
Terracotta
1yr ago
What other blogs offer ACX-style lit reviews, "Much More Than You Wanted to Know" effortposts, or adversarial collaborations on controversial questions? Any favorites?
Terracotta
1yr ago
What, as opposed to "she's a witch, burn her" and the associated other super-compassionate pre-therapy approaches to a society's superfluous old women? Can you cite a single historical or modern context where men as a group eagerly step up to show respect and deference for (non-related) moms in their 40s, 50s, 60s, on account of the erstwhile life-giving properties of their bodies? (And no, abstract Marian devotion doesn't count unless you can show it translating to heightened value for real flesh-and-blood older moms).
Even on this forum, would the folks lavishly praising young motherhood also endorse really serious social consequences for wealthy men who ditch their aging wives to pursue younger, hotter options once the kids have become teens? Consequences on the order of the philandering dude's losing his career or identity, since those are the effective results of family breakup for a wife who's made stay-at-home momhood her professional vocation? If not, then it's definitely safer to be Jeff Bezos than Mackenzie Bezos, and you can't blame young women for trying.
I agree with fribble that this is a statement about the viewer's sexuality, not about women's bodies. Women are not pleasing, others are pleased to imagine the things they could do to them. Women are not sexual, they are sexualized. (We also need more gay dudes in the conversation, I guess.)
Re: social consequences, here's a weak parallel case. One reasonably common hardwired female response to a man's body is fear. Men are on some level intimidating to be around, with their height, thick muscles and wide shoulders. To a much smaller person, male bodies telegraph, accurately, the potential to inflict violent physical harm and domination, regardless of how nice the guy actually is. This is why many little kids are instinctively afraid of strange men, before they're socialized to suppress that feeling. Some women find it attractive, particularly in a context where it could be aligned with their own interests. But the physicality of an unaligned male is generally at least a little viscerally scary.
Male fashion is also designed to emphasize and aestheticize those same traits of physical dominance. It accentuates shoulders, chest and neck, making the body look squarer and more muscular. Much male fashion even mimics the working clothes of violent occupations, like military uniforms and gangster clothing! If you're a guy and have an outfit that you think looks really sharp, odds are good that some part of the design, deliberately or not, is making you look more intimidating.
Now, suppose you're wearing your favorite perfectly normal mall-purchased outfit to work, and a woman in the office objects. It's anxiety-causing for her, your big scary body in these strength-emphasizing clothing makes her feel on edge all the time and limits her ability to act freely around you. Why should you be allowed to dress to frighten other people? If you were really considerate, you'd wear something softer, frillier, maybe with a cute animal print or something to signal your harmlessness.
That woman's biological fear response to your body is just as real and unpleasant as your biological arousal response to a sexy coworker. But you didn't dress to be "scary" to her! Probably you didn't think of her reaction at all. You just wanted to look presentable within the normal idiom that gendered fashion currently provides for you.
Does it seem more reasonable that you should go home and put on something frillier? Or that she should get therapy to gain more control over these maladaptive biological responses?
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