rae
1d ago
There’s also big differences outside of the Hajnal line in Europe itself. Slovenia is a prosperous country with well functioning infrastructure on track to surpass the UK in terms of GDP per capita while Serbia is a poor corrupt autocracy, even if both were part of Yugoslavia and are ethnically south Slavs.
I don’t know any circumstances where HBD is a better explanation than culture and history.
rae
16d ago
Maybe it’s down to my social bubbles, but the way men are described in these kinds of posts just doesn’t mesh with the men I know.
Like the supposed truth that men aren’t big spenders and would happily sleep on a mattress in a cardboard box that had wifi. Sure men don’t tend to own as many knick-knacks and care less about interior decorating, but men loooove to spend big time on things they care about, like “gear” for their hobbies. Who’s buying $2,000 GPUs, 4k ultra wide monitors and pricy mechanical keyboards? Expensive guitars when they can barely string together a few chords? Ridiculously pricy sports gear? Who tends to spend extra on high performance sport version of cars even though they look basically the same as the base model? I don’t know any women who are impressed by a $1500 espresso machine, but I know guys who have them.
I’ve never seen an “average” man have issues with dating (casual sex, sure, but not dating). The guys I know who can’t seem to find a single woman to date… you can tell why from like a 5 min conversation. It doesn’t take the average guy an inordinate amount of effort to find an average woman and get married. Even awkward nerdy guys I know are getting married as long as they’re not actively unpleasant to be around.
I feel like that kind of malaise and blackpilling mostly happens to neurotic, terminally online people. If you touch grass in a first world country, those issues aren’t really there.
rae
14d ago
Trans people are already used to travelling for surgeries not because of legal issues but because there’s so few skilled surgeons out there. For instance the best MtF sexual reassignment surgeons are all in Thailand, and you generally book a hotel for a full month there in case of complications.
rae
16d ago
I’m a trans woman but before that I was a man and dated women and men. My experience isn’t typical but I know a decent number of straight men and I have trouble believing an actual average guy can avoid having a single date for years, unless they’re avoiding all social situations with the opposite sex.
If you’re a regular straight person, everything is basically designed for you. You can ask out basically any single member of the opposite sex. People try to set you up with their friends/co-workers/whatnot. You can hook-up with random strangers at a party if the chemistry’s right without having to worry if they’re in the <5% that’s attracted to you, if you’re sexually compatible, or if you’re trans and passing, that they won’t react violently.
You don’t have to deal with people hiding your relationship, you can just follow a preset script, introduce your partner to your friends, meet their parents without fear, etc. And as a man the bar is honestly pretty low and it’s ridiculously easy to set yourself apart in terms of fashion/being a decent partner/a decent father, and your attractiveness is dictated by a multiple of things rather than just your rapidly declining physical appearance.
Plus most straight men seem to be attracted to most women? I don’t understand it but it should make your life easier to not be picky.
rae
14d ago
I don’t think many 14 year olds can afford a $15k+ surgery without their parents anyway.
rae
15d ago
What is the objective of this male general strike? What’s in it for the men, just teaching some women who making annoying videos a lesson? Why would any man who’s a productive member of society rally behind this?
Society is set up so no woman need to be entirely reliant upon a particular man.
That benefits men too! The time when the average man needed to farm the land, build a house and fix most things he owned himself is over. Men are just as reliant on the collective labour of society as women. Any blue or white collar male worker needs the police, firefighters, agricultural workers etc just as much as any woman, and can count on disability and unemployment benefits if things go poorly (maybe less so in the US, but that’s another issue).
And it’s not like women don’t do any “essential” work. The healthcare system would fall apart without the majority female nurses and staff. Childcare? Education? Who does the majority of the work when it comes to household and raising kids? Fighting over which is more “essential” is pointless.
You’re just doing the same old identity politics as the feminists you’re complaining about, just flipped.
Obviously the average man is much stronger than the average woman, and elite female athletes cannot compete at all against elite male athletes, but I think you and a few posters here are exaggerating the disparity because there’s no way the “slow boys” can compete with actual athletic women.
When I was forced to play basketball in high school PE class, there were some girls who played with the boys, and I can tell you from first hand experience, a clumsy autistic nerd who’s just getting into shape absolutely cannot just move a 5’10 elite female athlete with broader shoulders than him.
Like, I was in OK-ish shape and could do a 5k in 21min, and there were girls who did it in 17mim. Sure, there were boys who could do it in 15min, and most girls did it in 25min or more, but I didn’t stop to think about the statistical distributions, I just saw that there were both boys and girls way ahead of me.
Just look at female athlete records in any sport, compared to the mean or even advanced male performance.
rae
14d ago
It costs double in the US compared to most other countries, but it’s still a complicated and expensive surgery that requires a decent amount of post-op care, and I wouldn’t trust a random Tennessee plastic surgeon with it.
The number of top surgeries on underage patients is in the hundreds per year for the whole US anyway, might as well have the minimum age be 18 and avoid the moral panic altogether.
I know two trans women.
One transitioned in her late twenties, and gets stared at wherever she goes. Anyone can instantly tell that she’s trans from her voice and appearance, she’ll need to spend a lot of money on surgery to look remotely female, and she’s at the risk of being hate-crimed just from walking in the wrong area. She doesn’t behave very femininely, perhaps from nearly 30 years of growing up as male.
The other went on puberty blockers as a teenager, she has a normal female voice, and wherever she goes, the average person just sees a normal woman. She didn’t have to spend a single dime on facial feminisation surgery, and also seems to have fairly standard straight female sexuality (no complaints about anorgasmia) as opposed to the weird fetishistic oversexualised behaviour some later transitioners have.
Without going into any studies or the difficulty of distinguishing persistence vs desistance rates, it’s unarguable that early transitioners just fit in better in society and have less chance of being perceived as “freaks” in public based on their appearance. I don’t know if that quality of life upgrade is taken into account in any studies, but that’s enough for me to support them in a broad strokes fashion, even if I don’t necessarily agree with all the details of the modern clinical practices.
I don’t watch porn but masturbation alone can definitely be better than sex. When you’re by yourself you don’t have to worry about having the right chemistry, about your partner being selfish or getting tired, and if something doesn’t feel good you can just stop, slow down or try something else without being afraid of ruining the mood.
Now, good sex doesn’t compare of course and is a divine experience, but not everyone is so lucky as to be with their ideal sexual partner.
rae
20d ago
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
That kind of transactional relationship sounds like the opposite of normal and healthy. A healthy relationship should be based around mutual love and desire; what you described sounds like being a sugar daddy, not a partner.
Plus it’s not like women need a man’s resources to have a successful life nowadays.
rae
14d ago
Do you just feel like you suck at programming, or do you actively dislike it? You’ll get very different advice depending on your answer.
I don’t disagree that it’s appalling that physical fitness being neglected for the majority (although calling men “weak” and “feeble” as opposed to just unhealthy is an odd choice of language). It doesn’t really matter for the main point that there’s elite female athletes, but it’s still important to know that the delta is not that big at the extremes. The top female athletes are about ~10% worse than the top male ones, and if you look at something like a 5k run, the top females today are better than the top males from the 1930s. That’s way closer than most posters here would suggest, and to compete with female Olympians in most sports you’d still have to be in like the top 0.1% fittest men. The average Joe, even with a decent amount of training, doesn’t stand a chance.
But that’s getting aside from the main point. How exactly is knowing that he can easily surpass most women at sports with relatively little training supposed to dissuade the hypothetical autistic teenage boy from transitioning? If anything it might backfire and make him stop exercising altogether to match more female levels of performance/muscularity (and on estrogen, male performance is drastically reduced anyway).
rae
14d ago
I was talking about my own Lived Experienced™ though! Maybe I should have cleared that up more. Oh well.
I think blackpill/manosphere/battle-of-the-sex discussions benefit from queer viewpoints as they can bridge the gaps between the sides so to speak, so I’m happy to give my two cents regardless.
rae
15d ago
If society isn't offering any net benefits in exchange for the money paid into it, then it is quite morally defensible to stop paying in.
You’re American I believe, so fair enough your social services are inefficient and terrible (although you pay less taxes and earn a lot more than us Europeans), but that’s completely unrelated to gender.
Why would any man want to continue to support a productive society that treats him like an expendable worker bee and doesn't even guarantee that he'll at least have the CHANCE to pass on his genes?
This is clearly a personal grievance. All I can say is, you’re sitting inside watching content designed to make you angry, with the goal of hooking you on a corporation’s algorithmic content feed and selling your attention to the highest bidder. It’s not real.
It’s absolutely true that being plugged into the globalised online rat race is hopeless and depressing, so switch it off. Focus on your local community, your niche interests, and you’ll find people that value you for who you are. Join a commune or go pick fruits if you have to.
rae
14d ago
I have to ask what you're basing your statements off of because none of these statements are true for the "average" man, and they haven't been for at least the last 10 years. Full disclosure, I'm a late millennial/early zoomer (late 90s to early aughts) straight male.
This is my own lived experience as a bisexual man (at that time), and this was in the last 10 years as well. I’m not American though, so perhaps it’s different and more cut-throat in the US?
I was no “chad”, just a short skinny effeminate guy. I had an awful personality, little interest in women and still a few hook-ups and flings just happened from going with the flow. Getting set-up at work was a real thing that happened to me.
rae
1mo ago
Yeah, the actual “average” guys I know are doing just fine when it comes to finding a steady long term relationship, even if they might have issues with casual sex. It’s the high IQ, terminally online, borderline autistic guys that tend to struggle with both, and they often tend to get stuck in cognitive black holes.
rae
15d ago
Everyone wants gibs. Cushy government jobs, questionable grants, corporate welfare and industry nepotism are not a gendered phenomenon.
rae
23d ago
I don’t want to discount the psychological and physical benefits of but come on, it won’t stop anyone from being autistic, or even trans. I wish it did! I went to the gym and I just became an autist with a six pack. And it didn’t stop me from being trans either, unfortunately.
Plenty of athletic people I know are various flavours of neurodivergent or queer. Some trans guys I know are particularly into bodybuilding and powerlifting and it uh… has the opposite effect of making them conform to the social expectations of birth sex.
rae
13d ago
You are basing your worldview on random ragebait TikTok videos, a platform where the #peeyourpantschallenge had over four million views. Please, I implore you, talk to real people instead of doomscrolling dumb online discourse.
MEN are the ones not putting in enough effort into their appearance and there's just not enough hot men out there.
It’s absolutely true that most men put way less effort into their appearance than women. Like, c’mon. If you don’t believe this, tell me your skincare routine, how many hair products you own, and how long it takes you to get ready in the morning.
But anyway, that should be an advantage for you. Getting a nice haircut, moisturising regularly and buying a few well fitting fashionable outfits will already set you apart from the crowd.
rae
14d ago
Yes! I had an old-fashioned school curriculum and there was a huge emphasis on verbatim memorisation of all sorts of things including poems. From what I can tell, that’s no longer in fashion though.
Perhaps it’s useful as a generic way to exercise your memory, but I’m not sure the cramming and forgetting learning style that was encouraged was very useful for anything. I remember basically nothing of the vast amounts of information I had to regurgitate. Maybe a line or two, out of dozens of poems? I think it’s mostly a cool party trick, like memorising digits of pi.
rae
1mo ago
I meant that she doesn’t have anorgasmia (having started puberty blockers at 14 or 15 IIRC). But in any case you can delay the puberty blockers until tanner stage 3 or 4, or use local testosterone gel on specific areas.
I know adult cis women who never had an orgasm and that are quite unhappy about it. From a cursory search it’s around 10% of women? It’s pretty easy to talk and read about it and feel like you’re missing out.
rae
1mo ago
Here’s a LessWrong article that goes in depth about this slightly bizarre topic. It’s pretty much certain that castration makes you less likely to die from infectious diseases, cardiovascular disease, and (obviously) testicular and prostate cancer, and the benefits decrease the later it’s done.
rae
1mo ago
Historical eunuchs who were castrated pre-puberty had remarkably increased lifespans (and that’s with no sex hormones, having estrogen in your system would decrease the odds of osteoporosis), so if there’s major health issues arising from puberty blockers, it would be a side effect of the particular medications, not of blocking puberty itself.
There’s also a difference between the compromise protocol of “go on puberty blockers until age 16, then start estrogen/testosterone”, and “start HRT ASAP to go through cross-sex puberty at a normal age”. The whole point of the former was to let the minor have time to decide if they want to transition or not, but that seems to have been lost in the debate.
The American conflation of race with class is bizarre. Upper-middle class urban white Americans share few cultural values with unemployed drug-addicted Appalachians and grouping them together as a homogenous “white” block makes little sense.
Wasn’t there a link a while back to one of those Woke Rightists who moved to a majority white town and realised he had nothing in common with the people there, and ended up missing the diverse big city?
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