faceh
2d ago
This hypothetical kinda goes out the window entirely when you account for the fact that one sex is VASTLY more likely to take a bunch of selfies from said event which they will then publish to social media accounts while being quite aware that lots of members of the opposite sex will be viewing those photos.
Because in the very abstract sense, your hypothetical basically describes a nunnery.
faceh
2d ago
They experience it as a kind of endogenous preference for a certain mode of dress or appearance. When you are discussing with women why they prefer dressing certain ways they are not giving you a description of the biological or evolutionary causes that may give rise to this preference, they are giving you their subjective reasons for that preference.
Yes, and if you stick your hand on a hot stove and instantly jerk it away, you aren't going to explain it as "an inborn reflex that is older than the concept of spoken language that evolved to quickly detect and avoid high temperatures to protect against burning off one's extremities."
You're going to say "because it hurts." That's your subjective experience of an entirely instinctual, unconscious act your brain takes without consulting your higher consciousness.
I don't particularly care what their subjective explanation is for it, if they aren't capable of changing their behavior any more than you are capable of holding your hand on a scalding stove until you smell burning flesh.
Yes, for some of them "go out in public without dolling yourself up first" is nearly as unthinkable as letting your fingers burn to a crisp.
And of course I wouldn't talk in these terms towards a woman I was actually trying to attract, b/c I also know that evolutionary pressures probably don't select for being able to make the most logically sound, rhetorically attractive arguments possible either.
faceh
2d ago
There's a pretty direct duty to the spouse to not disclose stuff that would possibly make them upset if it were known by others.
At least in my book.
I get it. Once you're married, you necessarily have to prioritize the spouse. This intensifies when kids arrive.
This is generally good. If people were still getting married at similar rates as before, then the problem of not having a trustworthy confidant would be easier to solve.
faceh
3d ago
I mean, no accounting fully for taste. Lower back tattoos had their moment, those hair hump things, Jeggings. None of which did anything for me, my thing was pleated skirts. I assume there are guys who did get into mom jeans and might enjoy septum piercings.
Hence my point elsewhere that I rarely see women doing fashion trends that are completely repellent to men as a class, outside of direct political statements.
I have some really good male friends too. They know a lot of things about me that could be used to destroy me if they wished. But I trust them to not.
And vice-versa.
But you see, what happened is they all got married and so acquired a partner that could serve that role better than I could.
Which has left me with not many options aside from finding a good therapist if I really want to unload. Although my brothers (as in, actual biological brothers) are still very good for commiseration.
There are a lot of blackpilled guys who feel like sharing secrets and being emotionally vulnerable is one of the things that they explicitly can't do with women, because any perceived display of weakness could cause her to lose attraction, even deep into a committed relationship.
Yep. And that's one hell of a tradeoff to make to achieve reproductive success. I'd want to have a partner who I could occasionally vent to with the understanding that I would always get back to work and make shit happen, but had the basic, I dunno, decency, to get that part of their role was to help take the edge off the stress every now and again so I can be the person they need me to be.
(also, from very direct experience, I have much less need to vent about emotions when I'm getting laid on the regular. Almost no issues feel overwhelming when that primal urge is satisfied)
I'd also gently point out that it was safer to do this when divorce laws weren't as lenient.
I'm just saying. Women have almost universally settled upon their conception of what 'looks good' by way of what makes men pay them greater attention. In the west, at least, nobody holds a gun to their head to make them wear tight clothing that emphasizes curves and shows strategic amounts of skin, even when those outfits are less comfortable to wear. But they do wear such outfits.
Pull up photos of women attending music festivals. And I mean, regardless of genre, from (warning: Semi NSFW) Metal to EDM to Country, and see that while the aesthetics are different, women generally converge on outfits that are revealing and eye-catching and tight and emphasize the secondary sexual characteristics. (yes, admittedly this is prone to selection effects).
I don't think they 'feel' the biological basis, but its the rare woman who can ignore their own impulses and dress in a way that is actively repellent to men and feel truly satisfied and healthy about it.
Yes, there's some large amount of culturally-transmitted information about what is 'attractive' in the other sex as well, but we haven't seen so much divergence between humans as you'd expect if it were solely culturally informed.
Anyhow, humans are just responding to impulses and they don't really think a lot about where those impulses come from. If you're hungry, eat, if you're thirsty, drink. If you're horny, put on the standard mating display and see if you get any takers.
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.
The term 'attractive' itself implies there's at least two entities involved, being compelled to move towards each other by some force or other.
i.e, you can't be 'attractive' unless there's something towards which the attraction is directed, no? So it feels good to be 'attractive,' but you can't judge what is or is not attractive in the vacuum of your own singular mind.
Evolution doesn't provide us the chain of reasoning, we have to infer what logics of fitness and survival brought us here, but the co-evolution of the sexes means almost any behavioral feature of one sex is inherently determined by millennia of interactions with the other, with several feedback loops involved as well.
faceh
3d ago
I think the main feature male friends can't provide is being the confidant of deep secrets and more purely emotional revelations from the inner reaches of your psyche. Intimacy, as you say.
For that, you want a partner that has some buy-in and is committed to sticking around for the long term and thus has a greater familiarity with your personal foibles and hangups and struggles, and has accepted you 'in spite' of those. i.e. they make you comfortable enough to be open.
So in that case yeah, you'd want somebody who is emotionally mature and a decent communicator, which would be rarer to find among 18-20 year olds.
But it also doesn't take too much experience to just let someone put their head in your lap and talk about their inner world while providing the occasional constructive response or affirmation, and remember enough of the details that they can build on it as you go.
I've often heard an opinionoid about the idea of older guys dating 18 year olds that goes something like "there's nothing we can talk about after fucking", and while lately it does look like sour grapes/Havel's groceryism when it comes from older guys, there might be something to it.
The honest but misogynistic-sounding answer is "well that's why I have male friends, after all." Indeed, a guy who bags a stunning 18-22 year old will probably immediately text his best buds "BROOOOOOO!" since, you know, that itself is something worth crowing about for many men.
And hell, with most one-night-stands among people similar in age... what are you going to talk about, if the whole intention is not to see one another again?
Anyhow, not to derail, but it does seem best to model most complaints in this vein as intrasexual competition all the way down.
That's what I'm saying.
Eons of generations have gone into each facet of the female psyche. Their biological imperative is, to a large degree, to appeal to men's sexual desires. Even if its not literally about sex, that's where most of this is coming from.
Their own psychology is innately, inextricably entangled with making themselves appealing to the male brain. "Men like me if I'm pretty, therefore being pretty is good, therefore I feel good when I'm pretty."
So trying to rewrite it to seem like "I just like making my mouth look soft and kissable and pumping up my cleavage for prominent display and wearing painted on leggings that emphasize my rump because I feel good when I dress up this way completely independent of how any man might perceive it" is a tad farcical.
No woman puts in that much effort to make herself feel good and then chooses to just lounge around the house rather than going out in hopes of snagging some actual attention. And rightly so.
(and no, I ain't acting like men's fashion doesn't follow similar principles)
faceh
3d ago
Yeah. Not to get into the weeds of the evolutionary biology of it, but
"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've now seen it countless times, women who abjectly refuse to leave the house without putting together a cute outfit and doing at least minimal makeup. And when pressed (politely) its usually waved off as a matter of self-confidence or personal preference, and I just want to whisper "from whence does the preference come? Self-confident in whose eyes?"
Going to the gym, going to the store, going to grab takeout Chinese food, can't risk you might be seen in a state that might cause a man to overlook you. Especially if other women might put in 10% more effort than you and win the status game.
faceh
3d ago
she should be satisfied with her own personhood without having to surgically alter herself in order to please men. The broader point has been a feminist theme for centuries.
Perhaps.
But I've also been listening to rhetoric along the lines of "My body, my choice," "We look pretty for ourselves, not for men", and "my outfit is not an excuse" which all go towards that idea that women can dress up as sexy as they want and make whatever changes they feel like to themselves and are all but immune from judgment for it, for over a decade now.
Hence they can get trashy (in my eyes) tattoos everywhere, as many piercings as they like, they can go with fake boobs, butt, and lips, and all of this is just a celebration of their femininity or whatever.
Its a bit discordant for feminism to actively police its own side for doing things that incidentally appeal to the men in their lives, when there's no evidence that it was the result of coercion but rather her own desires... even if those desires were executed with the male gaze in mind.
faceh
3d ago
No, I'm agreeing with you.
I'm just realizing that They're trying to create content that can compete in the Tiktok environment.
Haha we had an interesting discussion on this two years back., so before LLMs were ubiquitous.
The fishing tournament example stuck in my mind enough that I still remember it from time to time as an example of something that's just absurd to be dishonest about, but they do it anyway.
I might broaden it to it just being an epidemic of demolished social norms and declining efficacy of shame as a behavioral deterrent. Being utterly unrepentant and impervious to most social shaming is in fact an adaptive trait in the current social environment.
I hesitate to say a rise in sociopathy, but perhaps now there's a default assumption that all the rules are just there to hobble you and if you choose to follow them whilst everyone else is 'defecting' you're just a sucker, where the only thing that's really 'wrong' is getting caught. Or, perhaps, getting caught isn't the problem, if you can avoid punishment it'll all still be worth it.
Zoomers have been raised in an environment where every aspect of their performance and social status is tracked, by default. Using EVERY SINGLE advantage, licit or illicit, that you can possibly find and implement is presumably seen as necessary to remaining competitive.
My generalized prognosis is that we're in the throes of transitioning to a low trust society
Yeah, it isn't lost on me that this is exactly what happens to virtually ANY product that obtains market dominance, and stops having to care about the original, 'hardcore' fans and thus can try to lower the quality of the product to increase profit margins.
There seem to be a confluence of factors going in:
- The mainstream audience can't really tell a 'good' fight apart from one that is, shall we say, merely 'entertaining.' Hence they watch Jake Paul boxing matches.
- Similarly, they'll back a relatively mediocre (for the elite level) fighter over a technically brilliant, masterful one if the mediocre one has charisma and good PR. Hence (some) people root for Jake Paul.
- If you truly stack a division with talent, then you'd expect parity in skill so there'd rarely ever be a 'breakout' star that people can rally behind. Every champion would lose in short order.
- So there's incentive to optimize for giving one charismatic guy with decent skill just enough of an edge that he can run his division for a while and attain some glory, then lose to the next upstart who will occupy his spot.
- But don't give the guy so much of an edge that he is handily crushing fights so it looks rigged.
- And definitely don't let him get so successful and popular that he can start trying to dictate terms to the league itself.
- Keep the pay high enough to incentivize new talent to jump in, but low enough that they're 'stuck' once they're in.
- Also do try to reward guys who do entertaining stuff in the fights. This is what the BMF belt is about, no?
So you're constantly adjusting the equilibrium of each division to make them look competitive but get someone who can stand out on top, and give your guys reasons to be entertaining and go over the top but still maintain the integrity of the skill involved.
If I'm accurate, you can see how they'd be taking pages from the Professional Wrestling playbook, except they can't outright script storylines and hand-pick a fighter's career, and instead you have to try and wrangle things with a series of incentives and nudges and creative publicity and hopes and prayers.
Long story short, UFC is modern day Gladiatorial combat, without the lions and without the executions. Entertain the proles and plebians enough to get their money. Put on a show. But to maintain the reputation as a legitimate fighting league (and to be clear, I'm not saying they're illegitimate) the sport has to be governed by stringent rules and have reliable rankings and keep things to a certain standard, so they can't go all in on spectacle and entertainment.
So Dana has them partnered with WWE, and buys into stuff like Powerslap or more recently UFC BJJ so the casual viewer can get entertained without having to know the ins and outs of a fairly complex sport.
And maybe the goal now is to just have the UFC as the 'flagship' product but use it mainly to attract in the wider viewership who can then be siphoned to a more controlled, profitable product that they can just mindlessly watch without the investment of a hardcore fan.
Holy cow, I just now realized how Powerslap is directly optimized to be fed to viewers in short-form videos so they can be part of your average normies' slop-scrolling experience.
faceh
5d ago
That right there is the time I think the Husbands should be willing to sacrifice their libido on the altar of fertility.
If she carries your kid for 9 months and is now willing to commit to raising it with you, then you can either abstain for a few more months, or do self help for a while.
But yeah, the addition of kids leads to a lot of biological, economic, and just pure scheduling issues, and the guy's desires probably don't reduce at all, so somebody is likely going to compromise.
faceh
5d ago
Yeah, I'm sort of gesturing at the absurdity that comes with these busybodies trying to enforce rules heavily, when the only way they can really make punishments stick is to literally have the cops show up and arrest them.
That is, if the troublemaker doesn't abide by the busybody's authoritah.
And getting arrested because you wouldn't stop running in the pool area or did too much horseplay is just a bit absurd.
faceh
5d ago
Good on ya for doing some math.
I haven't looked to see if there's any reliable research, I'm just kind of going off the general odds that the more kids you have, the higher chances that at least one of 'em will be a screwup.
faceh
5d ago
So what happens if someone shows up at the pool after a ban?
I'm just curious if there's a big burly guy that prevents these people from coming in, or you just call the cops and trespass them like most establishments.
Or maybe I'm envisioning this wrong and even the troublemakers are wiling to abide by punishment decisions, which doesn't explain why they break the rules so much in the first place.
faceh
5d ago
Yeah. Need to be exhibition rounds in UFC events that are just there to be a spectacle, not everything has to be completely serious.
faceh
5d ago
Seconding this.
And if you have a decent amount of training in some of the disciplines on display, you can actually sort of comprehend what's going on in that tangle of appendages, and understand why landing that particular spinning kick-into-right-cross combo took a lot of skill to unleash, even if it didn't land.
faceh
5d ago
So how DO you punish rulebreakers?
And more to the point, if the rulebreakers just ignore the punishment what's the ultimately sanction/enforcement mechanism?
faceh
5d ago
I think my main point is that Trump, for all his weirdness, apparently has pretty decent genes and can't be a particularly bad parent if his kids are all successful in their own right and are still on good terms with him.
Someone else pointed out Elon's kids as a comparison and, yeah.
faceh
6d ago
That'd be interesting. Recently watched a video that shows that Jiu Jitsu loses utility when you're not on soft/forgiving ground.
If it was 2 v. 2 I'd prefer some kind of tag-team format, since actual two v. twos inevitably turn into 1 v. 2s, which always end badly for the one.
They seem to be in a decent spot right now balancing overall safety for competitors while still allowing some bloodsport, and obviously it is in nobody's interest for competitors to get devastatingly hurt on the regular. It runs counter to their strategy of getting mainstream appeal, but I'd say they could afford to do fewer large events per year and focus more on really stacking the big ones up.
Yeah. Seems obvious to me that if you don't have a lot of experiences in common b/c you came from different backgrounds or one is a lot younger and inexperienced.
Then... go out and share some experiences. Then talk about them. This is what I try to make the core mission of ANY relationships I form, but doubly so the romantic ones. Talking about one's background is for the early stages, its something you move past within the first few months.
Really this is just dependent on whether people are good at communicating at all, or not.
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