rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
9hr ago
Sure, I think the low libido vs high libido terminology isn’t accurate, it’s about having a partner that doesn’t want to have sex with you, and this happens to women too.
If you’re brought up with the idea that men are always willing to have sex at any time, and that the way to satisfy a man and get him to marry you is to be “a whore in the sheets” for him, what do you do when it turns out your man doesn’t want to have sex anymore?
And if a man is turning down sex and instead prefers to watch porn and masturbate, that feels far worse than him just having no libido for medical reasons!
rae
10hr ago
This is demeaning to men, as if all that’s needed to keep a man happy in a relationship is frequent sex. It’s also plain false, if you go on /r/deadbedrooms there’s a huge majority of women posting about how their boyfriends/husbands won’t have sex with them (I’d say maybe 30-40%?).
And before you say it, the common theme doesn’t seem to be the woman becoming unattractive/older. There’s a huge number of men with porn addictions out there, men who settle for a wife that’s not actually their type even if she’s otherwise attractive (what’s a 173cm skinny blonde to do if a man has a Latina fetish?), men who have low T, men who just have completely incompatible kinks, etc.
The stereotype that all men want sex all the time with any mildly attractive woman is harmful for everyone, and especially now with hormonal issues and porn addiction becoming extremely common in men. The prevalence of ED in men under 24 has more than doubled in the last 20 years! You can’t rely on old stereotypes anymore to navigate the modern dating world, whether you’re a man or a woman.
So called "transitioning" is a dumb idea for anyone at any age. A strong argument can be made that nobody should be permitted to do it whatsoever.
It wasn’t a dumb idea for me, I’m very happy with the results and it has been overwhelmingly positive for me in my personal life. What strong argument could you make that I shouldn’t have been permitted to do it?
Dismissing an entire medical/psychiatric treatment out of hand is itself a dumb idea. This is a common attitude beyond transgenderism, I’ve heard similar takes about depression, anxiety, ADHD (another medical issue that involves children!) but if all you have to offer as alternatives are facile suggestions then you don’t really understand the level of distress some psychological conditions cause.
rae
21hr ago
Why does Internet romance discourse often seem to involve these strange stereotypical characters with catchy names? Chad became so generic and escaped into the mainstream, but who are Slutty Sabrina and Nicholas Niceguy?
Is this a consequence of Dunbar’s number that we must invent these imaginary people to gossip about? You could have said “A slutty woman might want a rich handsome man but will settle for an average nice guy” but instead had to create an alliterative cast of archetypes as if this had somehow happened. Occasionally this catches on and Chad becomes a generic term for a hunk and Karen an annoying middle aged woman, but like, why is this a thing in the first place, to want to give names to these weird fake straw people?
You can’t say something is not that hard if it requires you to somehow change the mind of >50% of people. AFAIK the US government tried to make drugs uncool with campaigns like DARE, and it backfired horribly. Public attitudes seem to be going the other way, with more and more countries legalising cannabis, even Germany.
There’s no magic wand to somehow turn the UK into China or Japan.
rae
2d ago
I don’t think the Western public has much appetite for waging the War on Drugs even harder after the billions (trillions?) of tax dollars wasted on enforcement that just lead us to have even more potent, more easily smuggled drugs.
rae
2d ago
Do the two have to be related? Letting university students buying legal marijuana doesn’t prevent you from cracking down on fentanyl and methamphetamine drug traffickers and putting schizophrenic homeless people in mental hospitals.
Personally, I’d rather have college students staying home to smoke weed instead of going to bars, getting blackout drunk, and vomiting on the streets.
rae
5d ago
I’m against treating people based on the aggregate of their various identities, as much as possible, as a moral principle. Otherwise this leads to identity politics, collective guilt, and ideology that’s toxic whether it’s from the left or right. You have to answer for the sins of your fellow white males/kulaks/women/[ethnic group], regardless of whether you, an individual, are guilty or innocent.
If you went all Starship Troopers and said military service guarantees citizenships, and women happened to be 0.1% of soldiers, I could respect that, even if I disagreed with it. But your point is to deny people rights based on what their identity group tends to do, regardless of how they themselves act.
You’d block an individual woman who volunteered in the military and risked her life to save others from voting, but allow a man who bribed a doctor to get a draft exemption, or got a cushy desk position out of danger thanks to his family connections, the ability to vote?
You blame women, yet wealthy, powerful men, from politicians to billionaires, are the ones actually deciding foreign policy while poor men get sent out to die. What personal risk did Donald Trump have when he decided to invade Iran? He evaded the draft, and he’ll carry on living in luxury without giving a damn about gas prices or electricity or skyrocketing cost of living. Meanwhile three American female soldiers died in the war in Iran, two in a plane crash, one in an air strike. They had far more skin in the game than Donald Trump and his cabinet.
rae
6d ago
Do the female soldiers who joined the military get an exemption in your book? The thousands of Soviet, Polish, French, Dutch etc women who died fighting the Nazis in WW2, some executed, some tortured to death, some thrown in concentration camps? Women like Valeriya Gnarovskaya who threw herself under a tank with a bag of grenades to save the wounded soldiers she was treating? The 153 American female soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, many from IEDs?
rae
6d ago
I think you’re way overthinking this, people just find it funny that an internet weirdo who is obsessed with physical appearance and “mogging”, is himself “mogged” by people who don’t share his obsession. Sort of like watching the class know it all proven wrong.
I agree with you, although I do think the male sex drive is qualitatively different along with being stronger. In addition to the spontaneous vs responsive desire aspect, men’s sex preferences tend to be more rigid, novelty-seeking visual, goal oriented (no need to state what goal is), and isolated to specific body parts or acts with no need of a broader context (fetishes being the extreme end of this, and almost entirely found in men as far as I know). The high sex drive isn’t the only thing leading to being less choosy, otherwise gay men would just pick using a dildo instead of Grindr, and they wouldn’t be into open relationships to the same extent.
A man with low libido would still have all those traits, but the desire would be triggered less often and with less overwhelming intensity, from what I understand.
rae
8d ago
It's Saturday afternoon, their adopted kids won't be back home for a couple more hours, all the chores are done, and Fred's looking bored and restless. Steve suggests a quickie to pass the time. Is Fred down for it? I would bet my money on yes.
Now replace Fred with Frida. Suddenly, the odds are completely different.
Someone that’s been promiscuous in the past is not necessarily going to be more open to their spouse proposing sex unprompted in order to pass the time. People who have lots of casual sex could be motivated by thrill-seeking, self-esteem issues, high impulsivity, not just having a high sex drive - you can even be promiscuous by being horny once a month and rack up 100 partners by your mid-twenties. Your partner of X years saying “you look bored, wanna have sex?” is anything except exciting or passionate, and isn’t going to satisfy those impulses.
I do think men are more open to being casually asked for sex in that way while tend to women prefer there being a build up, physical touch leading up to it, their partner making their attraction known, creating desire and anticipation… show don’t tell kind of thing.
Personally my partner suggesting sex unprompted is not going to put me in the mood, but maybe for the average man there is no need to be in the mood, sex is a thing they’d have at any time for no reason? Reactive vs spontaneous desire essentially.
rae
9d ago
How is it inaccurate to call him a corrupt kleptocrat? He didn’t lose the election over culture war issues, he was exposed by a conservative politician. How do you think him and his associates got so rich?
Now if you’re saying that the corruption was worth it, that’s a different argument. I suppose that’s how Americans currently defend the Trump circle’s insider trading, market manipulation and cronyism?
rae
9d ago
He’s a supporter of democracy as is most of his cohort. He’s not a supporter of ‘liberal’ democracy. Annika apparently doesn’t understand that in Hungary and Poland, their political leaders are appointed in general elections.
Orban was a corrupt, out of touch wannabe autocrat who lost the election in a landslide despite having control over all the mainstream media. Don’t let the culture war stuff fool you, it was just a distraction so that he and his cronies could rob the country blind. He didn’t care about Hungary at all and was happy for the country to stagnate, suffer economically and to cause a brain drain due to his policies, so long as he was in power.
rae
9d ago
hell, if most women take it as an active cost to have sex with men [and I'm pretty sure most men understand this to some degree], why would a man want to do it if he's not getting the other stuff women are, traditionally, supposed to get out of sex? At least with women you usually get wine'd and dine'd
Seeing it in those transactional terms is a bit sad. But I’m sure you get that it’s not like wine and dining, or romance in general, is the reward while sex is the cost, it’s more like it sets the scene for sex to actually mean something and be enjoyable.
because of the people that I know that are on HRT, none have changed in this way.
In what sense, they haven’t noticeably changed at all, both physically and mentally? Or just their mannerisms/personality? Because unless they’ve got a terrible endocrinologist (unfortunately quite common though) or are terribly unhealthy, there should be obvious differences like a deeper voice and facial hair for trans men, soft skin and different fat distribution for trans women.
rae
10d ago
That post is a bit funny when you remember that HRT is a thing that already exists, and although it’s not anywhere close to a fantasy trans humanist gender swap, it really does push you a decent % of the way towards the opposite sex in terms of physiology and psychology.
There’s a few studies out there studying the changes in brain structure pre and post-HRT, and there’s also measurable personality differences and differences in traits like verbal and spatial fluency.
I can easily imagine a sophisticated futuristic treatment that drastically increases neuroplasticity in the brain and fully rewires it over a few months. No weird mind uploading necessary.
You’d still be attracted to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; it would make you a normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.
At first yes, but you’ll quickly notice a massive drop in libido from the lack of testosterone. Then over the course of many months, maybe years, your sexual desires will likely start changing, you won’t be attracted to women the same way, you might even start to find men attractive. Going from 100% straight man to 100% straight woman is pretty rare but at least a point or two on the Kinsey scale is expected. And of course you’ll find the way you experience emotions is going to be quite different.
What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you empathize with your past self of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life’s memories distant and alien things?
I think I can answer that one. No, you will most likely not empathise with your past self. Maybe the closest thing would be remembering things you did while drunk that you’d never do sober?
then we’ve got to keep the dual architecture so you don’t throw up every time you remember what you did on your vacation.
Is it really that disgusting for a straight man to think about having sex with a man?
rae
10d ago
From what I looked up, secular Israeli women had a fertility rate of 2.0 in 2020, projected to decreased to 1.7 in 2030.
And the most democrat counties in the US have 1.3 children per woman vs 1.76 for the most republican.
rae
10d ago
I think at this point artificial wombs, genetically engineered babies, AI making human labour obsolete, or even radical life extension and making geriatrics physically 20 year old again, are all vastly more realistic than any social engineering attempt at making the fertility rate go above 2.0 long term.
rae
10d ago
Sure but how is that not in line with what Star Wars is all about? George Lucas wasn’t exactly shy about the leftist political messaging, he admitted being influenced by the Vietnam war with the rebellion being the Viet Cong and the Galactic Empire the US, he compared the Emperor to Nixon. Imagine if he’d made the films while Trump was president.
Like c’mon, the main arc of the prequels is about democracy being willingly handed to an evil strongman dictator over a manufactured threat!
rae
10d ago
"Ok, then transwomen aren't women, Africans with German passports aren't German, and fresh agitprop from Disney released under the Star Wars brand they bought isn't Star Wars."
I was with you until then. Rogue One, the first two seasons of the Mandalorian and Andor were some of the best Star Wars stuff since the 80s. And as much as the sequels were soulless derivative nonsense, you can’t say “only the good shows/films are Star Wars” otherwise you’d have to discard 90% of the franchise including the prequels too.
rae
11d ago
This implies that there’s a linear scale of attractiveness that’s the single only factor that makes having sex with someone enjoyable. Someone that’s physically attractive can be awful in bed, unenthusiastic, or incompatible with you for whatever reason.
rae
11d ago
Fair but if you’re too trad for the 1500s I better see you denounce the printing press and the evils of movable type. Real men write books by hand with a goose feather! And you better own a crossbow for home defence, not a musket.
rae
11d ago
Exactly, you’d probably feel cheated if it turned out the autographs were all done on auto pen by an assistant even if the signature was indistinguishable. The reason art is valuable is generally much closer to the reason memorabilia is valuable.
And actually people try to make the same kind of arguments about the “1st edition” having some special property or unique trait, like saying a Stradivarius has a magical sound modern violins don’t have, even though no one can actually distinguish between them in a blind test. Isn’t it enough to say that a Stradivarius is valuable because it’s a high quality 300 year old instrument made by the most famous luthier in the world, without having to resort to nonsense about no one else being able to reproduce the sound?
rae
11d ago
The Old Testament has the Israelites turning away from God time and time again, despite all the miraculous things they saw.
Isn’t this because originally Judaism was a polytheistic religion that then became based around monolatry, then monotheism? Turning away from Yahweh would have originally been like some Greeks turning away from Zeus to worship Poseidon.
Contrary to what you might think, age gap relationships are more common in working class than middle class people, see this reddit thread for example. And I don’t think I need to show you stats about how single motherhood and having children outside of marriage is more common with lower income.
Upper middle class, high income professionals are the ones most likely to be in monogamous relationships, have children while married, and smaller age gaps.
Although maybe it’s a U shape and the true elites behave more like the working class (happens a lot)? I don’t know, but I don’t think there’s enough celebrities and billionaires to cause “lower tier guys” to “duke it out over the remains”.
I know people in age gap relationships, poly people, and people with kids from outside of marriage, and they’re certainly not elites, or wrecked by those things beyond being the subject of gossip and mockery, which isn’t a death sentence now that people aren’t dependent on living in a tight knit community for survival.
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