problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
Definitely agree that the hoe scaring countries off the beaten path are the nicest ones and tend to contain the most idiosyncratic and interesting things. Also they're not crawling with tourists and souvenir shops trying to sell you tack shit, or if they are it's in a very unique local way that's still of interest to an outside observer.
Overcurated leisure experiences like cruises, resorts, very guided tours and so on are overpriced and negate so much of what I like about travel that I barely view it as an option.
But the people benefiting from that were the men running the show and the TV network, not the girls themselves.
Earning income from bouncing up and down on a trampoline is an obvious and measurable benefit. It's also notable from a cursory search how many of these trampoline girls already had jobs like those before their time on The Man Show; the job histories of many of these girls include Playboy and fetish modelling as well as burlesque dancing. What you’re objecting to is called employment, and they made their free and informed choice on that front. On the topic of the costs of such a job, many other jobs (mostly male dominated ones, I might add) qualify as worse than this one and boast high occupational injury and death rates; unless you argue that all employment is exploitative a la Karl Marx there is no basis for special pleading.
he would be delighted to date her and not think less of her and would still treat her with respect as wife material instead of "woo-hoo, I get to bang the thot".
Even if one doesn't necessarily want to date her (and yes, being in such professions indicates personality traits that don't always correlate well with what most people are looking for in an LTR), that doesn't imply you have to see her as Not A Human or whatever extreme point of view you were imputing onto OP. And nonetheless not thinking of a lingerie model as wife material certainly does not mean you view women in general as "a disparate collection of parts to jerk off to", if anything that contraindicates such a viewpoint since it suggests there is a difference between who you want to jerk off to and who you want to spend your life with.
In any case looking at their lives it appears that many notable “Juggies” (the trampoline girls in question) were capable of bagging a husband and having children, so I'm unconvinced the cost of taking on such a job is anywhere close to how you portray it.
problem_redditor
20d ago
Yes because this is such a massive risk. As we all know, it is extremely commonplace for a brother after heavy porn use to attempt to mount his sister.
The endless kvetching about men perceiving women as sex objects when they choose to present themselves as sex objects is always quite amusing. The idea that one should be taking umbrage on behalf of the women even when objectification was their goal is downright incomprehensible to me. People appear to believe that when a woman dresses skimpily and gives everyone involuntary panty shots it should somehow have no effect on how anyone thinks of her, no matter how shamelessly she is advertising her services, and woe betide the man who dares to notice since it's clearly just a failure on his part to Appreciate Her Personhood enough.
And it is only male attraction that is to be judged in this way, of course. That doesn't apply to a woman rubbing one out to a picture of David Beckham.
but if the guy in question never matures out of that attitude, then yeah: gosh why aren't women getting married to men who think of them as a disparate collection of parts to jerk off to, what a puzzle.
If you have created lewd content of yourself and disseminated it into the commons for money or other gain, you are advertising yourself as being willing and able to fulfil a certain need, and people who stumble upon that will view you in that context. Seriously the quoted statement above is about as intellectually sound as saying that I don't view bus drivers as Fully Realised People because I'm not interested in the minutiae of my bus driver's internal life and see him as a tool whose purpose is primarily to take me from point A to point B. People interact with others differently in different contexts. Yes, in a context where someone is advertising or providing services to me I am seeing them primarily instrumentally through the lens of what they are offering me, that doesn't mean I would not be capable of viewing and approaching them in any other manner with a different goal in mind if I were to encounter them in other contexts (say, in a social setting). That’s normal human psychology, not a pathology, but if women want to opt out of relationships for that reason then that is their choice.
The travelling was a means, not an end in itself. In both instances the origin is a type II or sometimes type III activity that is being repackaged as type I fun while clinging to the cachet of being type II/III.
But leisure travel is old, it has been an end in itself whenever conditions became stable and there was any slightly sizeable middle-to-upper class; ancient Romans travelled all through Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt for fun (and sometimes left reviews of their experiences on the historical sites). Tourists would travel to the pyramids and the ruins of Troy, motivated by the concept of otium, or "self-realisation time". Temples would derive significant portions of revenue from tourism; they charged fees, contained artefacts for sightseeing and often claimed to house some legendary figure's remains. There were tourist resorts in Baia and Naples. This isn't particularly limited to Rome either, Chinese literati engaged in landscape tourism, going to mountains to gather herbs and appreciate scenery.
I'm also not certain the "stolen valour" hypothesis works very well here to explain the cultural cachet travel currently holds. Merchants who would have travelled heavily in the course of their work were not considered particularly high-status people in many historical societies (Greece, Rome, China, early medieval Europe all considered them a disreputable, parasitic nonproducing class). A lot of times travelling becomes vaunted once it becomes a pastime that the wealthy are willing and capable of participating in, when the empire is stable and it can be portrayed as a form of self-cultivation and source of worldly enlightenment instead of a job performed by the lowly for money.
Also I feel like seeking novelty by partaking of foreign people's native mundanity contributes to the starving of novelty in one's own culture. Cultural output requires the boredom and appetite for change that motivates people to organise and take action.
That is quite the opposite of my take. Cultural exchange has shaped societies in many novel ways over the years; it's far more often that novelty via partaking of foreign people's native mundanity results in that novelty being exported back to one's own society and syncretising in interesting and new ways. To continue with the Roman example from before, after the annexation of Egypt and significant travel there Roman Italy gained a large market for Egyptian-looking artworks and syncretic pieces of art that the well-to-do put in their homes. And while not so related to travel, the development of European chinoiserie largely was caused by coming across porcelains and textiles from China, in other words partaking in "foreign people's native mundanity", and it resulted in many new art styles such as Rococo.
My perception was that the flavour profile of Beijing food had a good bit less depth and spice than the other regions of China I visited (such as Shanxi, where I really enjoyed the food), and I crave spice to an absurd level. Admittedly I've not spent too long in Beijing, just four days so I probably haven't had the chance to try too much; I had kaoya, zhajiangmian, Beijing-style shaomai in the Qing dynasty restaurant that spread these dumplings throughout China and a small handful of other regional specialities, I'd say they were fine but not great. I'm sure there's great food there though and am happy to accept recommendations for the next time I go.
Agree with most of your points. There's also lots more traditional practices going on in China than most people tend to think, IMO. People almost seem to believe all culture got supplanted by Communism - I've seen people assert that communist China "destroyed" things that a 5 minute Google search would prove still exist - but honestly it's quite clear visiting Mainland China that a lot of varied regional practices remain extant and have flourished heavily under liberalisation (sometimes you can find some seemingly really improbable things still being practiced, like the hermit lifestyle in the Zhongnan Mountains that stretches back all the way to the Qin dynasty). Aspects of traditional stuff actually seem to be cool among the younger generation in China unlike most other places in Asia I've visited, and as a Malaysian Chinese much of what I saw felt rather familiar to me.
Hoeflation doesn’t necessarily have to be conducted only through revealing the body but can also be achieved through augmentations of the body itself. On the extreme end of this, think of the women who utilise surgeries and fillers and gaudy makeup to accentuate everything to the point that they look terrifying and emotionless and I’m not sure any man finds them even remotely attractive.
Though now that you’ve mentioned it, it would be very funny to see some episode of some adult TV show take this idea and just run with it, where the thotting goes so far that it becomes downright grotesque and your average woman 100 years in the future aspires to being a Cronenbergian body horror.
I think you’ve got a fairly wild interpretation of my remark. Here in the US it’s a common theme among parents, “learned people,” and the elite social classes of society that “traveling” and “experiencing the world,” is something only a healthy or well formed individual does.
This is certainly a thing, and there are people who are extremely pretentious about it sometimes; I don't think there's something particularly wrong with someone if they don't want to travel. Just pushing back against the notion that things are broadly similar wherever you go or that it sucks ass. And the "I find many westerners to be overly scared by countries that have been marketed to them as 'third world'" wasn't exactly specifically directed at you, that was meant to be more of a tangent about other people I know.
I mean yes, there will always be similarities between people and places you come across based on the fact that ultimately everyone is human and will share basic human traits; you're never going to meet the heptapods from Arrival. But the specific differences have actually become incredibly apparent to me as life goes on, especially after having moved. I've come to believe that places in the world are not nearly as interchangeable as I would have initially thought, and that "settling in" culturally to a totally new country is in practice more difficult than it initially seems. "You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy" kind of deal. And all of these differences really matter to your QoL.
But traveling for the sake of traveling because you’re a rootless hobo who loves getting mistaken for some kind of
bumurban nomad is my insult and reversal for the megaphone that always wants to tell me there’s something “wrong” with me because traveling isn’t a basic cornerstone of my life.
Thing is, I don't think this is a good mental conception of the people who really enjoy travelling for its sake. It really is just a difference in novelty preference and openness-to-experience. At least personally speaking, I find life gets extremely, painfully dull day-to-day, and while travelling isn't the only way to shake somebody out of one's routines and established mental patterns that get canalised, it certainly is a very effective one.
Some people don't feel the need to do that, some people enjoy the comfort of the daily routine and their familiar environment, and that's fine! But some people really prefer novelty, and perhaps they're typical-minding when they try to push others out of their comfort zone, but they're almost certainly not doing so out of malice or necessarily even superiority, and that retort is going to come off as needlessly hostile.
I mean it’s more or less “like this” almost anywhere you go (where you don’t want to put your life at risk).
Out of curiosity, where have you actually been? I grew up in Malaysia and now live in Australia, I've travelled all over Europe and Oceania, been to North America and most recently have been exploring Asia, and could not disagree more with it being "like this" almost anywhere you go.
To be blunt, I find many westerners to be overly scared by countries that have been marketed to them as "third world" and as such overwhelmingly travel to a restricted range of relatively culturally similar places, though I actually often find them (particularly the Asian ones) safer and more pro-social than much of the West is today.
I mean yeah, I’ve always wanted to visit the morbid, desolate and forbidden stay away zones your mother would never want you to go to as a sense of adventure, but not as a way to marvel and mull over the fact that they have toilets and take a shit “just like we do!,” all the way in China.
"Morbid, desolate and forbidden" are the last descriptors I would apply to China, and I am going again this year. You're not going to be arbitrarily detained unless you want to sell drugs or something. There's extremely rich history, fantastic infrastructure, some really great food (outside of Beijing at least), it's very safe and cheap, albeit the digital ecosystem there can be a pain and people there smoke like it's 60s America.
Frankly, out of all the places I've been I would use that word to describe urban Canada. In other words, there's a lot of places I would deem as viscerally different while still being very safe.
I read papers a lot in my free time, and pretty reliably notice that a very large proportion of researchers in the STEM fields are ching chongs from Peking and Tsinghua (this is, in fact, the primary thing that started me questioning my initially China doomer beliefs and got me to start looking into what they were actually up to). This analysis suggests that the US share of total global scientific publications has fallen from 40% to 15%, whereas China's has increased to 32% as of 2022; in addition it now contributes 35% of top journal contributions, suggesting that this research is not of low quality. Note this surpasses both the US and EU.
Here is another such analysis, suggesting China has a lead in 37 of the 44 technologies surveyed. For a good number of technologies they apparently on average publish nine times more high impact research than the runner up, most often the US. It's most certainly not the case anymore that Chinese technological progress is a discount Temu version of Western research, albeit public perceptions have struggled to catch up with that reality.
You're correct and if anything you are actually underselling the point. Maoist China itself actually was able to manage a very high rate of economic growth, to the point that it outstripped Germany, the USSR and Japan during their modernisation periods. According to Maurice Meisner, in Germany the rate of economic growth for the period 1880-1914 was 33 percent per decade. In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate of increase per decade was 43 percent. The Soviet Union over the period 1928-1958 achieved a decadal increase of 54 percent. In China over the years 1952-1972 the decadal rate was 64 percent. China’s modernisation was actually wildly successful from the start and unlike the Soviets they didn't end up disintegrating, stagnating and lapsing into kleptocracy, though the whole "millions must die" situation is an obvious and big caveat.
The early PRC under Mao went from an industrial base smaller than Belgium to the sixth largest in the world, and this occurred without much external help, except for stuff like limited Soviet aid in the 1950s paid back in full by the 1960s. It was almost entirely endogenous. People always praise Deng but the capability to take over the world's factories didn't come out overnight in 1979. Deng essentially ended up inheriting an already-industrial China with the potential for huge further growth, so long as the right incentive structures were introduced (and they were).
In general, I'm kind of convinced that quick modernisation requires a dictator with the intent and willingness to move fast and break shit, though that approach is certainly not a sustainable system to run a state with over the long term. It also contextualises to me why Mao is still regarded in China, in spite of public perception of him having soured and even the CCP being willing to openly condemn many of his excesses.
Depends on my mood. For when I want my brain tickled, a lot of electronic stuff works: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Death Grips, Plaid, Oneohtrix Point Never, Clark, Blanck Mass, Iglooghost, The Flashbulb, Venetian Snares, Bogdan Raczynski and Burial's later output are a few that come to mind.
When I want more punky/proggy material, Can, Black Midi, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Joy Division, The Fall, The Clash, Kino, Jagatara, David Bowie, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, The Mars Volta (specifically Frances The Mute), RE-TROS, Angine de Poitrine, Yes' more proggy works, Massive Attack and others are on rotation.
For more traditionally danceable stuff, I tend to gravitate towards The Avalanches' first album, Louis Cole, Justice and Daft Punk, and when I'm in the mood for more pretty/folky music, there's always Animal Collective, Beach House, Sufjan Stevens, Toumani Diabate, Tim Hecker and Radiohead.
"Unconventional Right"; I would say that's pretty spot-on.
Most of the questions appear to lack sufficient detail (expected for a 24-question quiz, but still). For example the question about U.S. foreign policy is a simple dichotomous choice between "The U.S. should take into account the interests of its allies even if it means making compromises with them" and "The U.S. should follow its own national interests even when its allies strongly disagree". Then there's also the question that reads "Thinking about assistance to people in need, do you think the government 1: Should provide more assistance, 2: Should provide less assistance, or 3: Is providing about the right amount of assistance" which is so poorly defined and obviously depends on the group of people in question and what kind of assistance we are talking about here.
The way this test functions it's more like a political thermometer test where you pick the statement you feel the warmest towards in sort of a vibe-based manner, and I treated it that way when I was answering. For all intents and purposes I would still say it would classify people broadly accurately, but my autist brain did not feel good entering a response to some of these.
EDIT: Looking also at the opinions held by each of these typology groups, it is noticeable just how extreme "Leftward Progressives" are as a group. The profile of their answers are far more homogenous and partisan than any other group on most topics of contention, including their counterparts; the "No Apologies Right", which I'm guessing is (charitably) either an artefact of how these typologies have been defined or (less charitably) simply a result of intense purity spiralling.
I intellectually agree with you on the broad strokes and the impossibility of restructuring society around the whims of "creatives" - yet emotionally sympathise with @Corvos, since I find myself in a similar boat and used to create a lot of music in university (as well as when I was laid out flat by chronic illness). Given the musical taste you've demonstrated here I doubt you would like any of what I made, but I honed my skill at it until I would say I was at a professional level, or at least close to it. I have some receipts to prove it, too; I minimally marketed my music and ended up selling over $1,000 worth of it with pretty much close to zero financial investment on my part (this is not much in context, but considering how little I was trying to get eyes on it, I'm surprised it actually gained so much traction). At one point I had a friend show a track of mine to someone who had studied audio engineering in university, and they asked to speak to me so they could understand how I was making what I was making. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I was good at it.
At this point, though, I've been so radically run down by the endless demands of my work, which I have complained about here and here, and I barely find myself making anything at all. I used to be so much more of an interesting person; I used to make more, I used to read more, I used to care more about things, and now I find myself largely blanking out in front of the screen during much of my free time because my work and personal commitments swallows all of my energy. I would be lying if I said it didn't bother me.
To be fair, I constantly see artists who are just bad and whose creative endeavours amount to just dabbling make this claim as well (way too many people in the electronic music sphere are capable of only making drone music), and a lot of times it does in fact boil down to a skill issue and placing a lot of blame on "capitalism" to mask their own lack of motivation and talent. But not every eight-hour shift was made equal, and the amount of time I spend at work almost certainly heavily exceeds eight hours per day when you count the unpaid overtime, I'm not really capable of sparing the time to have lunch many (most?) days. The fact that people use the justification to bolster their own failure to accomplish things is not incompatible with the existence of people who are actually burned out as hell on their jobs, barely keeping their head above water on that front, and who would genuinely make things that are worthwhile if their motivation wasn't constantly being sledgehammered.
Even assuming it is "different", the idea that you can only objectify people if you can see their junk is an idea I reject. Traditional "sexy poses" for men include things like action poses, strength and power poses, work poses, rebellious or defiant poses, etc. And if those men are all the way naked, then you can't see that they can afford that Hugo Boss suit, or what kind of work they do, or whether they're in some kind of uniform, or what kind of social status they have, or whether their sleeves are rolled up as a signal that they are about to get their hands dirty. Men are often sexy because of what they can bring in the way of protection, social status or resources. The way men are objectified reflect that, and just because they are based on what men can do or have or can get or earn doesn't mean they aren't objectifying. Being objectified as a tool as opposed to an ornament is still objectification.
I also very much disagree with the idea that female sexuality is anywhere near as PG as your portrayal. There's many examples of women cheering over and consuming scenes with men in various stages of undress, e.g. those in Twilight, which featured widely popular fanservice scenes of a shirtless underage Taylor Lautner who had to undergo short-term dehydration and consume 5,000 calories per day to maintain his muscle tone; he eventually had to negotiate for fewer shirtless scenes. Or, you know, the very many times Ellen featured shirtless male dancers to titillate her female audience, for example here and here and here - video 1 is a full-scale performance featuring male "entertainers", video 2 was a challenge for male Bachelorette contestants who had to dance sexy for the women in the audience for tips (said tips were stuffed into the pants of the men), video 3 is a strip dance Ellen set up for a specific woman in front of a live audience. Let's also not forget the constant male nudity on display in majority female-viewed dramas like Bridgerton, which features a very nice array of exposed asses, here and here are some examples. Also I'm not unfamiliar with gay porn (as a member of the target audience), a genre that apparently has 50% female viewership, and I can tell you there is a lot of cock.
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