stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
You’re right, this was unbecoming of me. Next time I’ll think twice before drunkposting on a Saturday night
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
millions of people died as a result.
Tens of millions!
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
I agree with everything you’ve said here, but I still feel like you’re not answering OP’s question in the spirit it was intended: could we have all those nice things without ~everyone spending needlessly excessive hours in the office?
In theory, I think the answer is yes. But as the great Yogi Berra once (apocryphally) said, in theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice—in practice, there is.
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
I think your peer group in childhood and adolescence plays a greater role in who you are attracted to than your own or your parent's race
Absolutely true of me. I do think it’s a weighted average of (a) parents, (b) peer group and (c) whatever factors drive the OKC data (slight bonus for white men and East Asian women, malus for black women)
The specific weights probably depend on how close one is to one’s parents (I have a fairly terrible relationship with mine) and how open (in the Big 5 sense) one is. In my specific case, if I’m being totally honest, a big part of it is also a thirst to prove myself, to prove that I am special and can attract a beautiful, high-status woman on my own terms without settling for an arranged marriage like a typical brown beta chump. Incidentally, my favorite Shakespearean drama is Othello
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
I’m not white, nor does my mother look at all East Asian, but indeed I have a fairly bad relationship with my mother. Bravo, Holmes, very astute deduction!
I came close to broaching this topic last Wellness Wednesday, when I asked for dating advice, but I decided against derailing that particular thread. For context, I’m an American man of South Asian descent who is near-exclusively attracted to women of East Asian descent.
I’ve long struggled with the question of whether or not I “have” the “fetish” of “yellow fever”. Friends have occasionally asked me about this point blank but for the most part they keep quiet about my (probably fairly obvious to them) dating preferences, at least to my face.
In the first place, the term “yellow fever” is ill-defined. Does any strong preference for East Asian women count as ipso facto yellow fever? IMO such a definition would prove too capacious; it would include, for instance, the romantic preferences of a born-and-raised Chinese man who has only been exposed to East Asian women his whole life and thus is exclusively attracted to them. Most people would say that this is a very normal preference given the circumstances. Some might argue that this man uncritically accepts the cultural milieu of his upbringing, or has failed to Do The Work of deconstructing the factors which led to his romantic preferences, and as a result his preferences are Problematic—that’s as may be, but even those who advance this argument would, I think, not call his a case of “yellow fever”.
So I think a definition of “yellow fever” that matches colloquial usage has to be a bit more nuanced. It must be something like “an abnormal attraction to East Asian women”. Unfortunately this just pushes the thorny definitional question from “yellow fever” to “abnormal”.
What are “normal” reasons for being attracted to East Asian women? As we saw above, one generally-recognized-as-normal reason is having grown up being exposed primarily to East Asian women. Others might argue that it’s only “normal” to be attracted to those of the same race, and any cross-racial preference is abnormal. Still others might argue that the cause of the attraction is irrelevant, and what makes a racial preference abnormal is how essentializing/totalizing/fetishizing it is; for example, if someone can’t achieve an erection from nudes of non-Asian women, or would turn down dates with attractive non-Asians, he is abnormal.
Now, is my preference for East Asian women “normal”?
I grew up in heavily East Asian immigrant communities. Indeed, in almost every school year, I was one of maybe 3 South Asian kids in my class, with a slight majority of my peers being East Asian (primarily Chinese and Taiwanese, some Koreans) and the remainder being white. So, to the extent that having grown up around East Asians is a valid reason for my dating preferences to be “normal” and not “yellow fever”, I’m in the clear.
What about the claim that the only “normal” racial preference is for one’s own race? To this, I ask: how is “one’s own race” determined? Or in other words, how does a “normal” mind/body deduce what race is “one’s own” for the purpose of determining romantic or sexual attraction? One possible answer is that it comes down to biology: different races have different phenotypes—skin color and texture, amount and distribution of muscle and body fat, shape of the eyes and other body parts, perhaps pheromones—and a “normal” person is genetically hardwired to find the traits of his own biological race attractive. If this is the case, then I am guilty as charged of being “abnormal”. Curiously, though, I’ve never heard an accusation of “yellow fever” leveled at me or anyone else by someone who believes that race is a biological fact. Invariably, the charge is made by “social constructionists”.
So what is their argument for what “normally” constitutes “one’s own race”? On some level, it must boil down to nurture/socialization as opposed to biological nature. But as I said above, my upbringing was in heavily East Asian communities, so by “nurture” standards, it’s not clear my preferences are abnormal. Yes, yes, it’s true that my parents and relatives are all South Asian; perhaps that’s the only sort of “nurture” that counts for “normal” determination of “one’s own race”, but I’ve never heard it spelled out in those terms.
Is my preference for East Asians essentializing, totalizing, or fetishistic? Again, we run up against yet another inane definitional shell game. Some facts which may assist us in teasing out the truth of the matter:
- I am capable—perhaps too capable, in some unfortunate circumstances—of achieving erections from photos or videos of naked women of any race, so at least I’m not that far gone; though in fairness, when it comes to porn, my eyes are inexorably drawn to the genitals, which look mostly the same regardless of race.
- Moreover, I wouldn’t be attracted to an obese, severely disfigured, or even just ugly East Asian woman; indeed, purely going off of looks, I’d say only ~50% of dating app profiles of East Asian women in their 20s appeal to me.
- Of the women I do find attractive, am I attracted to them “only” for their race? Put differently, if the traits I like about Asians were present in someone of non-Asian descent, would I find that person attractive? It’s hard to say definitively. It’s true that there are a few (e.g.) white women whom I find attractive; invariably, they are gracile, endearingly cutesy, and have dark hair coupled with fair skin and neotenous facial features. What makes it hard for me to answer with an unqualified “yes” is that one of the biggest turn-ons for me is East Asian eyes (either monolid or double) … and I struggle even to imagine a non-East Asian with that particular trait.
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
A dyed-in-the-wool ethnonationalist (which I assuredly am not) would argue that a nation is, literally, an extended family, i.e., the biological descendants of a specific group of human beings. There are many problems with this argument, but being abstract is not one of them—except, I suppose, insofar as any super-Dunbar group of people is an abstraction.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Absolutely no desires or aspirations
…
Yeah, they make fat stacks of cash writing CRUD apps for big tech
Surely this proves the existence of at least one desire/aspiration?
depravity
IME there is a fairly hard upper bound on the depravity of sons and (especially) daughters of Asian immigrant PMC strivers, who of course constitute a solid majority of Bay Area high schoolers. The occasional use of molly at raves notwithstanding, I’ve never known any of them to go seriously off the rails (pun very much intended) with hard drugs, alcohol, partying, casual sex, etc. But perhaps you have a different definition of “depravity”; indeed I think it’s safe to say that many of them show a depraved lack of empathy for their fellow man.
(I actually agree with the broader sentiment, though: Bay Arianism does tend to produce an unhealthy amount of soulless money/status optimizers)
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
My understanding is that if you get reported by more that a certain number of users in a certain timeframe (I think I read somewhere that it’s 2 users within 3 months, but that may be incorrect or may have changed over time), your Hinge account gets banned.
At the time I wrote the previous post, there was no appeals process; it seems like now there is, but I only found out about it after the appeal deadline passed. So I’m out of luck: my account is permanently banned, and I can’t make a new account using the same device/phone number/photos or it’ll get banned as well.
I have no idea who reported me or why.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Agreed; if anything, what’s abnormal about modern life is the paucity of different adults with whom we interact during early childhood. These days, it’s pretty much just parents and perhaps daycare staff, rather than all manner of extended family plus usually members of a religious community.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
But he mowed down women and children! But they were probably a bunch of racists!
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
I feel like the clubs really use it to take advantage of guys like you.
Yeah that was my guess as well. I suppose there’s no way to insta-convert money into dating/sexual success, short of soliciting sex workers and/or sugar daddy-ing (but I repeat myself)
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
lol I didn’t mean sex with anyone, I meant sex with a woman who’s my type. If I can get to sex, converting to an LTR shouldn’t be too hard, in my experience.
I’ve actually had decent success dating “my type”: I’ve had 4 long-term (6 months+) partners and roughly 20 short-term partners, nearly all of whom were intelligent, well-educated native English speakers of East Asian descent. But now I’m off Hinge, IRL dating seems to have largely gone the way of the dodo, and frankly I just want to outsource this whole damn process and not have to worry about it. Hence the price I quoted.
(Also, I wouldn’t be willing to pay this much every single night; maybe a couple of times a year, depending on the experience)
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
I’m not banned from CMB and fully intend to use it if/when I get back to dating apps.
I’ve used CMB in the past, and in fact met my first serious girlfriend on it back in the mid-2010s, but was having significantly greater success with Hinge prior to the ban.
In my experience, CMB is more popular among fobs (of whom there are lots, especially Chinese and Indians) but I’m more interested in women who were born and raised in the West, or at least moved here at a young-ish age (high school, perhaps college at the latest)
If you have good insight- figure out why you aren't successful. If you are moderately attractive you should be drowning in women at that wealth level. Are you fatter than you want to admit? Fashion style not making it obvious you are bringing in money? No rizz?
Not fat, but not especially good looking either. Like I said, pretty average bespectacled brown dude.
I don’t have that many opportunities to meet single women IRL: my hobbies and social circles are pretty male-dominated and the attractive women in them are already taken; plus work keeps me pretty busy.
I don’t have flashy, expensive tastes, nor does my fashion sense immediately indicate that I have lots of money, although I definitely don’t dress like a slob.
I do think my day game/night game “rizz” has taken a hit over the past few years, as dating has increasingly moved online; it’s honestly quite rare now to find a girl by herself, without AirPods, in a public place where it would be appropriate to cold-approach. But my rizz is definitely not terrible: I really was having decent success on Hinge (multiple dates per week, getting to sex with a new girl about once every 1-2 months) before I got banned. And that was before I started lifting!
In short, my lack of success is due to being banned from Hinge (the best dating app I have ever used), plus online dating having largely taken over all of dating, to the exclusion of meeting women IRL through activities or mutual friends. This, I think, is especially true when it comes to women who are my type (well-educated Asian-Americans), as they tend not to just hang out in bars or whatever waiting for guys to approach them; if they’re in the dating scene at all, it’s through apps.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
I’m…if not estranged from my family, definitely not close enough that I would trust them to find me a life partner. In any case, they wouldn’t know any women who are my type (see parent comment)
Re: plastic surgery, I’ll start with LASIK/PRK and see how much that improves things. If it goes really well, I’ll consider further measures.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Relocation in maybe 2-3 years time is an option, so what’s your other advice?
Also, doesn’t NYC famously have a very favorable sex ratio for men, as well as plenty of Asian women?
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Accountability, plus critiquing my form/suggesting ways to get past a stubborn plateau. I’ve always had terrible “body sense” so it’s hard for me to tell by myself if I’m, say, not bringing all my leg muscles to bear during squats because my stance is slightly off.
Now that I’ve got the basics and the routine down, I see my trainer once a month at most.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Ohh, it just occurred to me that “trainer” was referring to “physical trainer”; I understood it to mean “dating/social interaction trainer”.
Yes, I already have a personal trainer who has, in the past 6 months, helped me put on a decent amount of muscle, reduce body fat percentage, improve my posture, and appear to have somewhat less belly fat (not that I had a whole lot to begin with; I’ve always been at a normal BMI, 22-24 depending on how much I’m working out and whether I’m keto-ing. Sadly, if I didn’t have any discipline about my diet and exercise habits, my body type would be the typical South Asian male skinnyfat. Even at the same BMI, I struggle with more belly fat than my white and, especially, East Asian male friends)
Definitely agreed that gimmicky exercises, supplements, etc. are to be avoided at all costs. I specifically chose this trainer because of his zero-bullshit, laser focus on the basics: a lightly modified version of the Greyskull LP, 1g protein per lb. of lean body weight, creatine, and sufficient rest.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
I find it sad because it means some demographics are going to have to shoulder blame. It would be much easier if the blame was diffused and we could blame and address society wide problems, but ones that are targeted are harder to solve because they elicit a defensive attitude.
I am torn on this.
On the one hand, the fact that offenders are disproportionately members of a certain demographic group makes it harder to gather the political support needed to crack down on fare evasion; this is, indeed, sad, sad because it is a reflection of how thoroughly the mind-virus of wokeism and its opportunistic infection of “disparate impact”-ism has infected the body politic.
On the other hand, what’s not sad is the fact that much-needed and even-handed punishment of fare evaders would affect certain demographics disproportionately. As I see it, the reputation or good name of one’s visible demographic group—race, sex, certain religions, perhaps class insofar as indicated through clothing and mannerisms—is a commons in the economic sense. However, unlike the economist’s favorite example of grazing land, the reputation of one’s demographic group cannot possibly be privatized to avoid the tragedy of the commons: liberals and wokeists (when tactically convenient) tend to argue for a form of “privatization”, viz. “treating people as individuals” and not stereotyping. But the fact remains that humans are too good at pattern matching and stereotypes remain stubbornly accurate in their predictions. And the brute fact also remains that some demographic groups do a good job of maintaining a positive reputation for the group, even at some individual cost, while others overgraze the commons and then complain about unfair treatment.
To be maximally fair, it truly does suck to be judged negatively by the color of your skin, or some other attribute you didn’t choose, when in fact you’re an upstanding pro-social citizen who bucks the stereotypes. The solution here is twofold:
-
As the unjustly-judged individual, you should put pressure on your group—even if you didn’t choose to be a member of that group!—to do a better job of maintaining the commons, since it’s never going away.
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The system as a whole must punish all individuals swiftly, surely, and harshly enough that the calculus of “Well, I’m already going to be seen as $NEGATIVE_STEREOTYPE anyway; might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb” does not make sense.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
… right up until roving gangs vibrant urban youth groups start smashing the CCTV cameras for laughs. Or even just start loitering around the station until someone with luggage or a stroller comes, and then they swoop in and prop open the gate so subsequent thugs delinquents persons of alternative socialization can stroll right through
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Alternatively, seek out hobbies where you will meet eligible young women. I highly recommend auditing graduate classes at local schools, lord knows you have them around you, it'll make you interesting and insinuate you into those age ranges. Will people think you're weird/creepy/old? Yes. But you are rich, and people will value you paying for things more than they will resent you for those other things. Or at least one girl hopefully will fall for your bit.
Fantastic idea. I had the best dating success of my life while I was in graduate school in NYC
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Great ideas; I just went skiing with a group of friends last weekend in fact!
I'll look up some charity galas or similar events, perhaps relating to the Asian arts scene in the NYC area.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
- Sounds like some form of surgery (LASIK or PRK) is universally acknowledged as being a (nearly) free lunch 'round these parts; will definitely get on that next year
- Explained here
- Re: dating assistant/coach/fashionista, I'm absolutely willing to hire a full-time staff member to handle this stuff, provided they can prove they would be positive expected utility for me. Any recommendations along those lines?
- Are explicit sugar baby websites/apps even legal? I imagine these would run afoul of anti-prostitution laws but IANAL (which reminds me, I'm actually extraordinarily vanilla in bed-I do not, in fact, enjoy anal)
- Absolutely willing to shell out for a trainer but I'd need some track record of success/reason to believe it would be positive EV for me; again, do you have any recommendations?
- Sorry, not hiring remote employees at the moment
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Don't mind at all! I explained the ban in my previous comment here
Sadly contacts are not an option; I am constitutionally incapable of touching the surface of my own eye, though I weirdly don't have a problem with the eye pressure detector thing at the ophthalmologists, so I assume surgery would be equally doable for me.
I feel like the better analogy here is not social class but rather the military: ICs correspond to enlisted men, managers-of-ICs to NCOs, and managers-of-managers to commissioned officers. Competence across all three strata is vital to the ability of the armed forces to fight and win wars.
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