urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
No bio...
User ID: 226
Beans and cornbread are a common staple among the rural working class, as is chili.
Peanuts are also a common snack food, typically salted, although cashews and almonds are more popular outside of baseball games. Rasins have more of an age disparity, older people love rasins and dates, younger people don't. It's also a fact that American rasins and dates contain a lot of sugar, and the idea that eating rasins would prevent obesity is a bit silly.
Avocados have an association with urban liberals because they like to use it as a butter substitute to add fat to a sandwich or toast; outside of this usage, most Americans have had and enjoyed guacamole.
It's true that vegetables and even fruits are less common than they ought to be, but the cause of obesity has far more to do with sugary drinks, high fructose corn syrup in everything from ketchup to Wonder bread, and cheap, sugary snack foods than it does with the servings of fruit and veg Americans eat. It's an engineered problem of the palate.
Nail quality is also seriously affected by dermatitis and other skin conditions, and cases of atopic dermatitis and psoriasis are on the rise along with allergies. When my hand eczema was untreated and severe, one of the key indicators of the severity of the condition to my dermatologist was the pitting of my nails. There are lots of things that affect nail health; not all of them are class signifiers.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
Oof. Unicorn hunting is its own bit of insanity, and it sounds like she's the one who pushed for it.
Do you feel regret when you see what she's up to, or is this an "I'm glad I dodged a bullet there" kind of a thing?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
I had an ex-girlfriend who ultimately had tastes way more hardcore than my own, but we dabbled a bit with the Feelds of the world whilst we were together and I've kept up socially with her since and she's been pretty open about what she's getting up to.
Were you unicorn hunting, or was this a "we're just looking around" kind of a thing?
This kinda thing is generally the best shot of 'single unaccompanied hetero guy getting to dom women he doesn't know'
I will say that the idea of a "BDSM hookup" is pretty ridiculous to me, much moreso even than normal hookups. I'd want to know a person pretty seriously before engaging in anything on this side of the asteroid belt of risky sexual behavior, let alone power exchange.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
Full service submissive exist, but they’re up there with findom subs and consensual cuckolds for rarity, having pretty esoteric hard nos, and for being overwhelmingly (cis) male.
I believe light maledom/femsub dynamics are on a continuum with normal heterosexuality, but extreme BDSM in general, and particularly femdom/malesub dynamics are disruptions that speak to fundamental psychological problems and not kink-as-play.
My crackpot theory is that straight male subs are driven by their actual schemas and beliefs about the world, not by raw sexual desire. Their submission fantasies are actually a means of separating themselves from their sexual desires, which they believe they aren't worthy to fulfill. Submission becomes a sublimation of the sexual into the enjoyment of denial. "I may not be worthy of having sex with a woman, but I can serve her non-sexual needs." "I may not be able to please a woman, but I can watch and faciliate as she is pleased by another man."
The 'upside' is that you're at least acknowledged by a woman, even if you're humiliated by it. But if your schema of the world tells you that you're unlovable and unfuckable, sexually worthless, then being humiliated by a woman is at least something, some kind of involvement with her, and that's better than nothing.
IMO, this is far, far more common as a fantasy or desire than the actual number of people practicing it, almost entirely due to the complete lack of female dominants.
Female dominants have their own problems -- one thing is there's like 5 of them for every 1 trillion men who want to find one. But also I believe that women who sexually dominate men are almost exclusively 1) mentally ill, and dangerous, predatory or 2) doing it because their male partner got them into it, and his enjoyment of it positively reinforced it or 3) into it because they actually want something else and they've sublimated that desire into dominance.
On #1, IMO, this is not the sort of thing you say at a dinner party, but I believe the majority of self-initiated female dominants are psychopaths, extreme narcissists, or in general people with serious mental disorders who see sexual domination as a power trip. They're often surprised at how low male subs are willing to go, and being able to push against boundaries and find nothing pushing back is the sort of thing that predatory people have always done. An uncomfortable number of female dominants are little more than Warren Jeffs in a dress.
Because of the dearth of female dominants, male subs are often desperate and willing to put up with almost anything, and this is a really, really bad posture to have when entering into a power exchange relationship. "Exploring this side of my sexuality is too dangerous given the environment" needs to be the fallback. But if people were able to do that with their sexuality broadly we'd live in a better world.
On #3, I've seen women who really just wanted to be in a mutualistic and affectionate relationship describe it as a "female led relationship", and their conception of this is literally "having a honey-do list" and "being the one who buys the groceries." I've seen women who simply wanted a man who admired them describe it as "femdom" because their husband called them ugly and they wanted a man she could order to call her beautiful. I've seen women who genuinely wanted a relationship in which she could expect an orgasm now and again describe this as "femdom," because her big idea was that she could order a guy to go down on her.
"Maybe if I get leverage over men and form a relationship in which I'm In Charge, then I can get what I want" is the logic there. In that sense I'm not sure that I can say definitively whether or not it's simply the same phenomenon as the redpill discourse, but from another angle. It's power relations as the resigned second-choice after affection and intimacy didn't work out.
And of course, the biggest portion of #3 is dominatrixes/'findom' 🙄 where "the thing they want" is simply money, and because there's far more demand for female domination than supply, money is a... workable selection mechanism and it's one that many men are willing to pay. Often for crumbs -- again, male subs are desperate, and the amounts of money men are willing to pay to be indifferently humiliated by a woman flabbergasts me. I read a story on the internet once about a mildly sexually traditional woman who got into doing paid femdom chats on the internet, was utterly disgusted by it, but kept going because she made wildly good money. The oldest profession in the world is quite remunerative.
Some bondage or dominance subs, the ‘narrative’ is just ‘oh no don’t make me do this thing I want but don’t want make myself admit’.
‘I’ve been a bad girl/boy/whatever’ is a cliche, but it’s a cliche that exists for a reason, and that’s to separate the blame from the responsibility. It literally only feels good if you ‘deserve’ it, or you want the release of anxiety from having fucked up and being ‘free’ of that, or it shreds something core to your identity and self-idealation.
I personally believe a big part of the large numbers of female submissives has to do with women genuinely desiring hot sex, but feeling ashamed of this, for traditional ('sex is sinful'), status ('don't be a slut'), and feminist ('male sexuality objectifies women') reasons.
It's hard to overstate how much of the past 20 years has been a sustained attempt at putting in the water supply a level of cynicism about women's sexuality re: men that competes with the Victorians in terms of how bad it makes people feel about sex. As a teenage boy, I actually believed women got exactly zero pleasure from vaginal intercourse -- not just that they typically couldn't have an orgasm from it, but that they genuinely felt nothing, it had no level of satisfaction either physical or psychological for them and they did it entirely because men made them do it, and then when I actually started having sex and she enjoyed it and said she wanted to do more of it I was utterly shocked. She was too!
It's also not hard to find women whose three extreme kink interests are exactly the same: "free use", breeding, and CNC. In other words, sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and rape. What are women desperately afraid of? What are the complaints we hear from women about their fears of men? They're afraid of being sexually instrumentalized ("objectification"), being stuck with a pregnancy ("deadbeat dad"/"men want to control women's bodies"), and rape, which of course needs no reference because its badness is clear.
IMO, I think this is another form of painful (and not always true) schemas about the world being sublimated into a kind of resigned acceptance, and therefore made in some way pleasurable or sought-out. These young women believe that the state of the world is such that all women can expect is sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and assault, and seeking out explicit BDSM relationships becomes a way of finding a man who will at least admit that's what he's doing, and provide a safe word escape route from the experience of being treated like a warm body by a man's sexual desire that wants nothing else from her.
It's "all sex is rape" being taken to its ultimate conclusion, formalized and made explicit, even to the point where a submissive woman's desire for sex is sublimated into it. If this is the dark and unforgiving world a woman lives in, and every man is in fact a rapist-in-waiting, then the only option available, unconsciously and psychologically, is to find one who will at least be nice about it.
I guess you can say I have ethical and psychological critiques of the kink community. I don't believe they're in general bad people (although predators love to wear the language of kink like sheep's clothing), but I do think there are unexamined psychological problems, pain, and mental illnesses that seriously affect the community and those deserve to be interrogated.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
I have no idea how it comes about, but I can say that as a boy I had conceived of very weird kinks despite not even having reached puberty and never having been involved in sexual activity. Puberty was less of a sexual awakening for me and much more of an "oh shit, I can ejaculate now, what is this crap?" moment.
Wherever kink comes from, my personal experience suggests to me that it has to be deep, deep down.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
If we taboo the word “market value” and just call it “desirability in matchmaking”, would that satisfy you? The second sounds rather like something Jane Austen would propound upon.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
The blue coastal elite men they desire are at the coasts.
Why can't I just find someone with an honest blue collar job that's not MAGA?"
“Coastal elite”
“Honest blue collar”
one of these things is not like the other
Everyone enters dating with various desiderata, and generally those work like Boolean filters at the acquaintance-to-dating stage: the ass man doesn't date any flat-butt girls, the lady who prefers brunets declines the blonds. That way, by the time you start bonding with somebody, you've presumably clarified that you do find them hot and you can focus on also enjoying their personality and connecting with them as unique (and hot!) individuals.
If you'd started out with this, I would not have posted my other reply, and if this is what you've been trying to assert all along, I retract my fangs. This sounds like we're in substantial agreement on the facts on the ground here.
The issue I still have, though, is twofold:
First, it seems to me that what you're objecting to is the word "market", and I worry you're importing connotations into this word that aren't there. Dating obviously isn't a commodities market, it's not about frozen concentrated orange juice, but there are other types of markets. The best version of economic modeling of relationships talks about them in terms of matching markets which line up perfectly with your model of desiderata and selection:
(1) People in the dating market are very different from each other. They have vastly different interests, locations, preferences, histories, cultures, physical attributes, professions, families, etc.
(2) What people look for in a romantic partner can differ dramatically. They might want shared or different interests, cultures, religions, etc. They might prioritize financial security or emotional vulnerability, etc. They might want to live in the suburbs or stay in the city, etc.
(3) People are (generally) looking for a single partner, rather than multiple (at least at a given point in time).
This is clearly a matching market, where the choices of an individual are heavily dependent on the choices of others.
So the idea that stating "dating is a market" means the person making the statement believes that relationships are a competitive optimization game simply doesn't hold water for me.
But in terms of Sexual Market Value -- well, even products that aren't raw commodities like FCOJ often reflect idiosyncratic and unique preferences, yet a price for them can still be set. The 'value' of something under orthodox economic models has to do with the amount people are willing to pay, which reflects, at its heart, how low the supply is, and how high the demand is.
I don't think Sexual Market Value, to steelman it in its best and most useful formulation, is about one person's assignment of a "raw fuckability score." It's not even, necessarily, about the 1-10 ranking system, or whatever. It's about how many people in the population, in the matching market that is dating, would find that an individual meets all their 'various desiderata' such that they pass the initial Boolean filter. The value of someone on the "sexual marketplace" -- or if you don't like that phrasing, let's taboo it and go with "matchmaking environment" -- is determined by how many people would consider that person a greater catch. Lower supply and higher demand -- understood here as being considered uniquely, highly attractive by a greater and greater share of the population -- equals higher value. It's a property of the matching environment, not a metaphysical ranking of human ontological worth.
What's the benefit of this "higher value?" More choice. More attractive partners. Better suitors. Obviously there can be downsides, particularly for women who can be faced with lots of attention they don't really want, but even in your own framing -- "people may have a vague sense that partners should "match" in their attractiveness level" -- being more attractive means you end up with a more attractive partner. The value of this goes beyond the purely puerile: any feature that makes a person of the opposite sex highly desirable to a large number of people, like being really sweet, or very caring, or having a great job or a home owned outright or a kind smile, increases demand, and increased demand means the competition for that person's hand is harder. This isn't even a particularly male thing to comment on -- read Jane Austen.
I'll also note that male attraction, even at this level of abstraction, simply works differently than female attraction -- it's not so much a boolean as it is a gradual scale upwards in terms of excitement and interest, with a floor set somewhere, there is a Boolean at the most basic level. I actually believe there's more to this in many women's psychology than you're letting on here; obviously Orlando Bloom is a more exciting catch for any woman than Frumple McFrumpelstein.
My other point is this: the reason you see men talk about Sexual Market Value much more than women, especially in environments like this, has to do with the fact that, for many men, clearing that first boolean hurdle is really, really hard. There are a lot of men, and I've talked with them on here, as have you I believe, who will state honestly that they want nothing more than to focus on the pair bonding and the faithfully loving and the enjoying of personality elements of dating, but they seriously struggle to get to that point because they can't find a woman who meets their boolean floor and whose boolean floor is met by him. Again -- matching market.
When men talk about "increasing their sexual market value," they mean doing things that will make them cross that boolean threshold for a greater and greater number of women, not because they want to personally have sex with all those women (of course, some do), but because they as individuals have desiderata and more attention means they have more of an ability to pick someone who actually satisfies those desires. This also means they will thereby have more of an ability to select a partner who doesn't present with red flags and can find someone that is a good match in terms of their personality and values. You need optionality to select well.
The default state for men is no attention, or very low attention, where you have only a small ability to actually select a person who's consonant with your personality, values, and yeah, sexual desires. That makes it hard, and the ability even to try and choose a good partner from a set of suitors is a luxury a lot of men are locked out of. Many of those men end up in loving relationships with women they care for a great deal, but some also end up in terrible relationships with women who have problems or don't treat them well, and without the ability to meaningfully choose you end up either taking who makes herself available or you die alone. I get the sense that for a lot of women, dying alone is preferable to shacking up with a bad guy, and I can certainly see why, considering the possibility of "a bad guy" being pretty damn bad, but men actually do love women and they don't want to die alone, which obviously isn't the ideal for anyone.
So of course there's status panic -- dying alone is pretty low-status and sucky, and ending up with someone you don't care for and aren't attracted to, which is the other alternative, is also pretty low-status and sucky. The 'third way out,' is, of course, becoming more attractive to a greater number of women, to wit, increasing your sexual market value.
You're criticizing guys for saying things that aren't consonant with 'stage two', but many are just trying to succeed at 'stage one,' where their raw sexual attractiveness and that of the people they're trying to attract -- in terms of how valuable they are as a potential partner to them -- are highly relevant features of your experience. Some on the motte would of course charge you with despising these men for their pathetic unattractiveness and laundering this disgust through rationalization, but I've seen you extend charity to guys who admit their struggles enough times that I extend you the charity of simply believing you don't realize the gap.
Yes, it's icky to think about relationships this way. Yes, this should very much not be the end-all-and-be-all of someone's approach to dating and intimacy. Certainly no one should be considering marriage based on SMV, but I fail to see who exactly in this conversation said you should!
But the analytical and practical utility of at least sociologically modeling relationships as a matching market outweighs that it feels bad. And I don't advise that people talk about it in mixed company, or make decisions on the important things in their life based on it. Pair bonding is more important.
Stated properly, the model does real work, and it impoverishes our understanding of what's going on in society to taboo the concept.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
I kind of get what you’re saying, but your wording is a bit freeform so I’m having trouble following you.
I think what you’re saying is, “women don’t engage with this framing because it has a bad reputation and will pollute you with it, even if you engage with it, it couldn’t affect your behavior much because you’re already doing what you can to be attractive and your standards aren’t a matter of choice so it doesn’t give you any new information, and the view talks about people’s relative status and that’s painful to talk about.”
Yeah, if that’s what you mean, that’s a solid explanation. I think the truth is that people generally understand the things about SMV on an intuitive level, and discussing it explicitly just feels too painful or too impersonal or too abstract in a way people don’t really ever apply to the things that worry or concern themselves the most.
In private, with trusted friends, of course people discuss harsh things about attractiveness and dating sometimes. But discussing gender issues in mixed-sex company is like discussing feces at the dinner table.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
That’s fair, and pretty obvious. What someone chooses to say on a first date reveals what they think is high-status and interesting about themselves. If that for you is discussion of the dating market in analytical terms, that’s pretty sad and does say something about where your head is at. As I recall, I don’t know that any first date of mine has had much analysis of anything — I’m introspective but that’s not really first date material. I guess I would sometimes be philosophical, but in an upbeat way, about how I like to think about the world and consider the way the world could be improved and how people could treat each other better. That’s the right level of abstraction on my interests for early dating. But the best relationship I’ve ever had started with me in full public speaking about ideas mode, I chalk this up to a rare alignment of the stars. (Astrology on a first date is also a red flag.)
But I don’t think OP was trying to discuss it on dates, as he said, but with friends. But it’s not really light friendship material either. You have to really know someone and they have to either be a high decoupler as someone else said, or you have to have a really good reason to bring it up. Same-gender friendships are more constructive for it than opposite-gender ones.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
I mean, I don't know that this disagrees with the point -- in this framing, "the value of T&A" is a value that is orthogonal to "shorter, weaker, poorer, dumber, more boring," etc.
That said, while the joke is funny and it makes its point, I agree with you that reality doesn't say that T&A is the only thing men care about. "Poorer, weaker, dumber, more boring, more cowardly," isn't "not at all rich, not at all smart, not at all funny, not at all brave." In raw material terms, a woman in a two-income home, even if she takes home less pay, still contributes significantly to the household income.
Women are generally hypergamous, but not wildly so -- "peasant girl marries the prince" is a fantasy trope, but when actual princes marry, they marry members of the nobility, often just a step or two down from themselves. Or in modern times just a hot actress, I guess the joke lands a bit there, Meghan Markle got a damn good deal regardless of how she feels. I guess Kate Middleton wasn't noble either. She is beautiful, but in a refined way no one would hesitate praising in her presence, so I'll give half points on that one. This generation of princes can't be separated from their father's own desire for the commoner over the lady. Perhaps the takeaway here is that men don't care about their partner's status to a greater degree than women do care about theirs.
I don't feel any attraction to status, strength, wealth, but I do for intelligence and humor. I look for alignment on the ability to think about things intellectually and discuss them and a sense of humor that's compatible with mine. If anything, I kind of feel like I don't have the burden of hypergamy: if I meet someone at all attractive and they're kind and smart and funny, even if less so than me, I don't feel like I'm 'dating down' to fall for them. Their presence gets to be a place where I can be the best version of myself.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
Trying to talk to women about the actual mechanics of sexual/romantic relationships is like trying to talk to a restaurant critic about the intricacies of cooking a difficult dish. They can't. They know what they like, they have some idea of the different techniques that produce the food they review, but they aren't in the business of producing meals for others to eat. Women have this same relationship to romance. They're very interested in it, but they never actually produce it.
This hasn't been my experience. Romance has been somewhere between 40-60, 50-50, and 60-40 generated in every adult relationship I've ever been in. The only examples have been bad dates, but that's not really a relationship and I was the one not feeling it for someone who was reaching out with playful teasing and flirting just as much as I've been on the other end.
The problem is that the short-term transactional frame and the long-term bonding frame speak to mutually exclusive sets of personalities and worldviews. You can have qualifying thresholds and dealbreakers in relationships, but I don't think it's even possible for one human being to relate to another human being from a sincerely transactional and a sincerely emotional/ affiliation framework at the same time.
You're again saying that "even discussing the impact these things has on society" means "you are incapable of thinking in terms of affiliation and emotion in your personal relationships." This simply isn't true; would you say that a feminist, who believes that male abuse has a serious impact on dating outcomes for women, is incapable of forming a happy bond with a man?
There are, of course, many, many men who believe that this kind of concern, especially if it's 'elevated' or 'obsessive', makes a woman likely to perceive even normal and non-abusive (even if crappy) relationship troubles as abuse. I think things are more mixed, and it depends on whether an individual woman has examples of men in her life (father, brother, uncles, teachers, friends, etc) who demonstrate good character.
The best partners are those who acknowledge the bad parts of human nature, even their own capacity for it, and then choose, knowingly and according to their character, to pursue the good. Not talking about or acknowledging truths about reality is not a demonstration of good character. "Having the wool over your eyes" does not an empowered partner make, for men or for women.
But if you're making a claim that "negative schemas about the opposite sex predict poor relationship outcomes" then I'll heartily agree. I'm simply not certain that an acknowledgement of the realities of dating constitute that, and I believe you're uncharitably imputing a mindset to people that's not necessarily there. There are men who do have the mindset you're talking about -- and some of them are indeed in the room with us right now -- but simply discussing the issues of dating does not constitute acceptance of the harshest offered framing in the space where they are discussed. As the adage goes, "consent is not the absence of a no but the presence of an enthusiastic yes," even if you seem to disagree.
For my part, I have said no, and I will continue to say no, and to attribute to the women around me the insights they generate on what could be done to better society for women and men, as I did in that post. I will even continue to quote you, when you post something valuable -- which you are very much capable of.
There's a difference between "women have a set of ages in which they're fertile and in which they can have a child and it's important we talk about this and it's justifiable that someone might want to marry a woman who is capable of having children" and "obviously people's sexual attractiveness has an impact on their dating life and outcomes," on the one hand, and "women are only valuable as T&A cum repositories and baby-making machines," on the other. If you don't see a distinction, well, your interpretation of reality is simply wrong, and I can't say anything else to help you.
Some things about reality are harsh. And those harsh things impact real people, and deserve being discussed. I don't talk about people I've dated in a "short-term transactional" way, because they're people and I've had real connections with them, but it's also very clear to me that, in every case, subconscious cues about my and their status, attractiveness, and compatibility were made by the both of us before either of us even spoke. Sexual attractiveness, a sense of ease, the way someone carries themselves, the way their eyes sparkle, how they dress... all of these form a huge amount of initial attraction, which isn't a replacement, much less a substitute, for the pair bonding and affiliation that can, and by all rights ought to, form once these drives motivate two people who are compatible with each other to form a loving relationship. You're describing sexual attraction and emotional affiliation as almost two incompatible views of the world -- that's simply bullshit, and it stinks to the highest heaven.
You can enjoy yours without women being obligated to listen to some elaborate Adam Smith rationalization of why they're objectively true and correct.
I don't know that people are saying that they're "objectively true or correct," although evolution did select for things by prioritizing fitness markers, even physical ones, and in most species, including humans, the female sex does most of this.
Yes, it is not fun. It's certainly not fun to hear people describe how competitive dating really is, especially in a way that can hit insecurities around attractiveness, age, personality, etc. It's not fun for me, of course, when you describe discussion topics I enjoy as predictive of poor relationship outcomes and therefore best to be avoided. But from your point of view, you're just being honest about your feelings. Turns out, so are men. Maybe we all ought to be more honest.
I'm not saying that it's good for people to comment on a specific person's 'sexual market value' when talking with other people. That's just rude -- although certainly quite a few women do it often, when the men aren't around. But a discussion, in theory, of the impact that these things has on society is a proper discussion, in the proper channels and among the proper crowd. Random female friends probably aren't the proper crowd.
But gestures broadly this here is literally designed to be the proper channel where the proper crowd gathers, and yet you seem just as annoyed that it's being discussed here. I would rather we have female voices present, and I certainly would rather than this community as whole speaks with more charity towards women, but the social system, which you seem to support, in which frank discussions of the realities of romance are verboten and icky simply means that social issues go unaddressed, and only the most disagreeable end up speaking out. If the empress has no clothes, I would rather the kindhearted and charitable addressed it rather than leaving the truth-telling to the harsh and cruel.
Yes, #allmen like T&A. Yes, #allmen think about how the dating is a marketplace. We don't have the luxury of turning our brains off and pretending that love falls from the sky as in cishet girl lore, even as a starting point. Our starting point is zero, and our baseline is one hell of nothing. We, too, are lied to by the cultural scripts that surround dating and intimacy, and we, too, turn to alternatives once they fail.
In many species, males have to compete in competitions or mate displays where things are, indeed, a numbers game in a matching marketplace. I believe anyone who looks clear-eyed at the world in which we live would acknowledge that human beings, far from being separate from the animal kingdom, too participate in competitions of mate selection and fitness-demonstration. Evolution did not stop at the neck.
If your view is that even acknowledging these things as elements of human nature, even as elements that should not and must not define our choices, counts as "obsession" or is a sign to you that someone is of poor relational character, then I don't know what to tell you -- except to say that if a concern about partner fitness and clear-eyed discussion of the harsh truths of human partnership are negative to you, you might want to start with the woman in the mirror.
I think the best way to understand modern Catholic atonement theology is by reference to "Paschal mystery theology", which has a lot in common with Christus Victor and Eastern soteriology. This is the overarching way Catholic teaching looks at the Cross since V2, and it has some criticisms among traditionalists, but it does, I believe, tie Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox views of the Cross together in a compelling way, as something mystical which is both transformative on the global level and applicable in an individual way.
Universalism and Theodicy
I am not a universalist, and I in general dislike the way in which Balthasar's "hopeful universalism" often becomes a way to justify not evangelizing. But at the same time I do believe God's dispositional will is for the salvation of all men (not the fallen angels or the devil, who are irretrievably damned), although his permissive will allows people to choose the alternative. It is important in Catholic theology that God permits rather than desires damnation, and I believe this is true to the way Scripture describes the will of God both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. God does judge and send people to Hell or to Heaven, but he does so based on the choices and nature of the person as configured to Christ by grace or not, which is described in Catholicism as infused rather than imputed righteousness. Catholic judgment is "forensic" in the sense of a finding-of-fact, not a finding-of-law.
I'm somewhere between a Thomist and a Molinist on the Predestination question, and Catholicism is famously and officially agnostic on the question. I don't hold as a firm belief that humans have effectively libertarian free-will as regards the universe, and the most motte-brained version of my view is closer to "God ran the simulation and figured out who would freely choose salvation under libertarian free will, and then created the world in such a way that those who would freely choose salvation under libertarian free will would be predestined to salvation even if the world does not possess libertarian free will". I come from a line of Holiness/Wesleyan-influenced preachers, so I think there's a time and a place for fire and brimstone, and I agree with Aquinas, and not Barron, that one of the important elements of the eschaton is the punishment of the unrepentant wicked.
Obviously this leaves open the hole of how and why, precisely, evil and damnation are permitted if God does not desire them, and that's obviously where we open the Pandora's box of theodicy. For my part, I lean towards a narrative theodicy; God is in a sense writing a story, and the story is better if evil exists and good overcomes it, and it's better for the good if villains exist so that the good can be distinguished (very Thomistic of me), and it's better for the just rewards of the good if it's not a consolation prize given to everyone, and it's better if that's based on what they might choose in total freedom than if it's based on a decree. A game of skill is more rewarding than a game of chance.
I don't think any theodicy is philosophically compelling, but I think that's because a story is more compelling to the human person than philosophy. There's a reason the great teachings of Jesus are all stories and parables. Taken from that viewpoint, the stories of the Bible actually have a greater significance than the merely instructive -- the stories of God's triumph and the triumph of the righteous contained therein are actually the project of the existence of the world. Balthasar has a bit of this, in Theo-Drama.
There's also the tendency in more liberal or modernist theology to talk about "maybe suffering is a way to get close to God because God inherently suffers," which I think is really dumb for all the ways classical theists think it's dumb, but I believe orthodox theopaschism -- not patripassionism, where the Father somehow suffers, which is a straight heresy, but theopaschism in which the unity of the natures of Christ in one person is considered vitally important, where we can say things like "God suffered in the flesh," and "God died on the Cross" -- is indispensable in answering the problem of evil. I believe that one of the most important fruits of the Cross is that suffering is transformed by Christ's passion from a separation from God due to sin to a means of Christlikeness, not merely in terms of endurance training (which St. Paul compares it to), but in terms of actually sharing experiences and metaphysical/mystical closeness to Christ himself.
I believe unorthodox theopaschism, especially in modern times, came into existence because orthodoxy neglected orthodox theopaschism, and left open a hole that heterodoxy stepped into.
And that brings us to the Cross.
Substitution
I will also note that substitution theory, taken strictly, is considered heretical by Catholicism, but more metaphorical, spiritual, or allegorical interpretations of substitution are taken seriously in the Church Fathers and in modern Catholic teaching. The idea that the wages of sin is death, yet God in his mercy set aside the curse of death and sent his son, instead, to die voluntarily, has a heroic element to it, and this has never escaped the attention of theology.
I compare it less to the Son being tormented by the Father's justice and more by the Son acting like a POW who offers himself to die in place of others. The key element of penal substitution that I think is heretical is the emphasis on a division in the Trinity, that the Son was "being damned by the father," which is a phrase I've heard Reformed pastors preach, when instead the substitution of the Son is about an act of the Trinity in unity contending against the state that was inherent to man's fallen nature, where sinfulness leads to death and separation from God.
GK Chesterton has his own alarming phrase that "On the Cross, God became an atheist," not as a statement about the actual beliefs of the crucified Christ, but in the sense that Jesus voluntarily took up the cross, which took him to the place of death and as far away from God as man could go, so that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." The point is not "the Father punished the Son by sending him to death," but "the Son, in unity of will with the Father, went unto death to bring grace and truth, chasing down the 1 of the 99 by going to the limit of human experience."
This also means that you can say things like, "Christ's dying on the Cross brought God's goodness to those who are tormented or dying," as an act of solidarity with people who are cast off and rejected, but also a way to bring divinity and grace to people who are far from God. It has a mystical quality to it, that God actually himself, in his flesh, went into the domain of all those things (and even into Sheol), which means that God is no longer absent there. I've compared it before to placing a flag in enemy territory; the Cross is the flag, and one of the ancient Roman Eucharistic prayers describes it as "the boundary post" that sets the limit of death and the devil, claiming the territory for God by erecting a fence.
A Ransom for Many
Ransom theory, on the other hand, puts Satan in a prominent place: he is either the kidnapper of human souls or is the (legitimate, in some sense) owner of human souls. The exchange of Christ for humanity and the subsequent torture and murder of Christ was simultaneously Satan’s crowning achievement and his destruction.
I actually love this angle on the atonement, although I love most of them.
I understand that Reformed theology (also Luther?) often believes that Michael the Archangel is Christ, but Catholics emphatically do not; he's the guardian angel of Israel and now the Church. So when Catholics read in Revelation that Michael defeats the devil, they see that the final defeat of Satan takes place not by the direct involvement of Christ, but by a subordinate, even a great one. Even the final banishment of Satan to the lake of fire in Rev. 20 is often seen as something Michael does, leading to the long history of Catholic art depicting Michael stamping on the head of Satan.
I often think of this as the great humiliation of Satan. His only encounters with Christ are when he had taken flesh, was weak, fasting, in the desert, and when he is nailed to the Cross with his hands nailed behind his back, and he wins both times. The pride of the devil is he believes he could rival God, and is greater than human beings, but God defeats him in human flesh and restrained in human torment, and he allows a created angel to apprehend and damn him. In other words -- "you are not my equal, and even at my lowest I am incomparably greater than you. Know your place." The foolishness of God is greater than men's wisdom.
There's also the "two screens" effect of this: Satan believes the crucifixion of Christ is his great moment that reveals how grand his ability to contend against God is, and presumably he revels in it. But the view of everyone else is stunned horror, a person being tortured until death. His great moment is not just his destruction, but it's the revelation of the vacuity of his moral authority. He tempted man in the garden with the knowledge of good and evil, but he reveals in this moment that his knowledge of good and evil was catastrophically insufficient, and in fact he believes that evil is good. Any argument to be made that his goal is to free man must contend with the fact that his "crowning achievement," as you put it, was the torture and death of a man.
This also connects to the larger vision in the Church Fathers that Gethsemane and the Cross are the garden and the tree that undo what occurred in the original garden and with the original tree; instead of Satan tempting man with the knowledge of good and evil that properly belongs to the divinity, but which ultimately separates them from God, God instead tempts Satan with the weakness of man's flesh, which ultimately undoes him with the divinity of the God-man. Gregory of Nyssa has a great passage on this, which connects to my larger theme:
[I]t was not in the nature of the opposing power [suffering, death, and the devil] to come in contact with the undiluted presence of God, and to undergo His unclouded manifestation, therefore, in order to secure that the ransom in our behalf might be easily accepted by him who required it, the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish, the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh, and thus, life being introduced into the house of death, and light shining in darkness, that which is diametrically opposed to light and life might vanish; for it is not in the nature of darkness to remain when light is present, or of death to exist when life is active.
To be clear, these are my own views, not necessarily the official Catholic position on things. But they're informed by the Catholic and to an extent Orthodox approach, with my own characteristic views interlaced.
EDIT: Edited significantly to add content, and section markers because of how long it got.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
I'd happily pick yes. My parents care for each other and have been married for four decades.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
My mom's social media is like this with lots of office setups, planners, and forms of paper-based organization, in addition to street food vendors and "OMG life in Japan/Korea is like the 22nd century." Organization and orderliness appeal to the professional woman.
My girlfriend's new obsession is mechanical keyboards, which girlyTok has discovered and is now a part of the "complete the ultimate feminine office setup" social media trend rotation. Linear switches are now being called "creamy."
I have no problem with this -- women deserve good keyboards too -- but yeah, women love stationarycore and office setups. I think it's just part of the larger trend of women beautifying any space they enter into.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
13d ago
Sometimes I watch true crime documentaries with my girlfriend, and what always stands out in the rape or rape+murder situations is that many of them, even among stranger assaults, don't consist of a random guy grabbing a woman off the street and dragging her into a street corner. They often consist of date rape, or something like a group of guys and girls are hanging out after a party with some booze and one of the guys stays with one of the girls and then drags her into the figurative alley.
I think there's a feminist point to be made there that there is a group of men that believes such a situation entitles them to some sex afterward. But where I disagree with the feminist point is that I think this often goes along with innate personality traits or psychopathy, and there's no amount of education or re-education that can be done to fully eliminate their existence. Louis CK has a joke where he goes:
We're so afraid of pedophilia because it's and it's not going anywhere. That's a fact, it's not like there's a finite amount of pedophiles, and we got the last one. Now it keeps happening. Every generation there's more. Some of you have kids, and some of those kids are gonna grow up to fuck kids... So any real solution has to start with the basic reality that there will always be pedophiles.
I'd say the same is true of people who are psychopathic, and genuinely do see women (and men, and children, and animals, and everything) as inanimate objects to be used as they wish. There's another one born every minute. I think the reason some of the incel stuff sets of warning alarms is that there is some "women have instrumental value to me, redistribute the pussy-objects" language in there, especially in the extreme spaces. But the interesting difference is that these are often "someone else should give me a woman"-type complaints, which is... a pretty pathetic point of view, and not the worldview inhabited by most rapists, who are proud of their ability to coerce and overpower women on their own and often don't even see what they're doing as rape.
But the typical incel is a lonely, sad, and yeah often times angry and frustrated guy, but the very elements that cause his inceldom like shyness and seclusion are also traits that 'protect' him from attacking people. In an 'honor among thieves' sense, in the original meaning where Plato indicates that you have to have some level of real skill and mastery to pull off a heist (i.e. the Oceans films), there are often skills and traits possessed by many rapists, but not by the average incel, that would enable them to date and have consensual sex with a woman, though they choose not to. This is actually borne out by research on repeat offenders, who make up the vast majority of sexual assaults, and who are often skilled, socially competent, strategic, and careful. To me, this makes the crimes of rapists more evil -- they have the capacities built into them to do good, but choose evil.
And obviously when we talk about domestic violence, you have to be in a domicile with a woman to commit domestic violence against her. That's pretty non-incel.
I think society can do a lot to give resources and aid to victims, to prevent what crime can be prevented, and to try and catch these kinds of men early and get them the hell away from society and from women. My girlfriend's point, by the way, is that it's a horrific injustice for men who commit crimes like this to then be sentenced to something like 10 years in prison, of which he might serve 3 because of parole, and then he's out on the street again and rapes someone else. And it's often liberal and progressive groups who argue in favor of systems like parole, and in general for viewing the criminal justice system as a greater threat to safety and liberty than violent criminals.
But also alcohol is awful, and we should be screaming at young people not to go get drunk at parties, because alcohol impairs judgment for everyone who partakes and people can make decisions they never would sober, which can place even relatively normal people in a position to become involved in violence. In more ways than just sexual violence; see the persistence of the barfight as a concept, or the drunk uncles who always seem to get on the Florida news for doing something awful at EPCOT, or, say, the women's movement against alcohol because of the long, long history of daddy coming home drunk as a skunk and beating his wife and his children.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
Wow, that's a fascinating graph. I was very confused and started writing a comment about how I'd want more recent data than 1980 before forming conclusions, but looking at the paper itself I see that's by birth year.
I guess the issues would be -- does this take account of divorce and remarriage? It's possible there are some serial monogamists here, and some situations that don't necesarrily demonstrate a continuous commitment between one couple over the course of time in which a couple would normally have children. Since we're talking about the effects on childrearing, it also doesn't necessarily take into account whether many of the college-educated women got married, but too late to have children, or more than one child. The way this data is sampled smells kind of fishy to me, because it genuinely just asks whether a woman is married at a certain point, not what the marital history looks like. I would want to see massively more data before we conclude what marriage is like.
But there are some fascinating takeaways there -- in particular, that there is a higher rate of college-educated women being married to non-college men than the rate of college-educated men being married to non-college women. Simple models of hypergamy would predict the opposite. But there does, like you said, seem to be a thing where earning potential (which itself is correlated with a LOT of other social variables) is more important than college degree in attaining marriage for men.
Perhaps I was onto something when I said:
The mental health/loneliness/decoupling of academic success from life success crisis seems to be hitting young men most of all, though I don't doubt it has victims among young women as well. Being able to survive through this period of time with a sense of optimism and drive for the future, as well as romantic achievement, is probably the strongest correlate (not necessarily causal factor) of success among men, in a way I'm not sure is precisely true of women in the same way.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
“I could care less” annoys the crap out of me, literally. Literal human waste is being excreted due to my annoyance.
I do find it pretty funny though. “I could care less about your feelings!” almost feels triumphant, like “I could care less, but I don’t care enough to care less!” It’s a joke a competent comedian could probably spin into something hilarious. I don’t love the expression though, both because it confuses so many people and because it’s just a strange way to say “I don’t care.” Just say that.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
I don't know that autism was ever firmly suspected in my childhood, but my mom did have several books on her bookshelf whose titles rounded off to "What To Do If Your Child Is A Weirdo" -- I believe some were about "Sensory Processing Disorder," which I understand was never in the DSM and the symptoms that were purportedly in the syndrome are understood to be more diagnostic of autism, and my social development was somewhat stunted. I was definitely a 'little professor', then and now, but my father is a professor, so perhaps that's not unexpected.
I didn't have friends as a kid, I had two friends in primary school and junior high, both of which were not great people who didn't care about me as a person. The neighbor kids tried to steal from my house. I didn't have a good friend until junior high, then only for a brief time -- a Latino guy who joked about Herman Cain with me. A nice guy, god bless him. In high school I made more friends, but it was hard, I came off as awkward and sheltered. I hung out with the math geeks but I was bad at math and I didn't like the kind of video games they enjoyed. I can't disambiguate my experiences between "neurodevelopmental problem that led to peer rejection that led to social anxiety" or "peer rejection that led to social developmental delays that led to social anxiety."
As far as I know, I don't have any relatives with either suspected or diagnosed autism. I do have first cousins with OCD, which would probably explain my excessive concern for contamination and orderliness. And I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and GAD as a teenager, and by no means are these fad diagnoses, and my answer to the miracle question would be "these things would be gone." If you actually have a mental disorder that interferes with your life and functioning, it's a source of shame and dysfunction rather than an identity marker.
My girlfriend asked me once whether I thought she was autistic, which came out of the blue and didn't seem likely to me -- she's more socially fluent than she thinks, and often notices nuances in people's communication that others don't notice. I think we're at a point where the "weird is good" millennial worldview has run its course, and social atomization has eliminated many of the ways that 'weird' people were integrated into and sustained by society, and so 'weird' people are desperate to find some kind of an explanation for why they don't fit in, when it may be partly biological, partly psychological, and partly civilizational. The fact that normies are starting to look like me scares me, a lot.
I think the autism rights people have actually won, in a lot of ways -- we're at a point where people with basic social anxiety disorder like to speculate about whether or not they're autistic, because autism feels like a good diagnosis, like unlocking a secret way of being human rather than an incapacity to engage in normal activities because of fear. It also means that the outcome is "baked in" rather than conquerable with effort: if you struggle socially because you have anxiety, it means you have all the right hardware to function normally but are afraid to use it and are behind on your software updates.
If you struggle because you're autistic, it means you're special and neurodivergent and you get to ask for accommodations instead of taking responsibility for your social development into your own hands. Unfortunately, I think there are many neurotypical people who wish to gain the compassion that the informed often feel for autistic people, without the struggle that autistic people often have to go through to function.
The "autistic people often end up with a cluster B wife" thing is funny, but more precisely I do wonder whether a lot of people who suspect they may have autism are actually people who may be closer to cluster A and C themselves. I do wonder if there are a lot of Avoidant and Schizoid folks who feel 'weird' in a way that overlaps somewhat with autism but are clinically and psychologically distinct.
If I had to say, I suspect I line up with the broader autism phenotype, and I do have concern that any children I may have may struggle neurodevelopmentally. I share your dislike of fad diagnoses, and I suppose my suspicion and dislike of people who do this is why I've written thousands of words across posts, comments, and journal entries trying to talk myself out of any conception that I might be autistic. If it's true, there are few to no adult accommodations, and autism evaluation in adults isn't a thing, and regardless of where I'd land I'd still be the same guy with the same problems; nothing would be fixed or improved by it.
I’ve found Opus 4.7 to generate better and more human-like text vs Opus 4.6 for my purposes, but I can’t indicate whether it’s any better at coding. I use a mix of LLMs for various things, and my feeling is that ChatGPT is more bland and LLM-y in its output, but much more generous with usage limits. In the limited coding I’ve done, I haven’t seen much of a difference between them. ChatGPT’s image generation model is also nice, as far as my amateur impression can tell.
But it’s a constant fight with the usage limits on Claude, whereas ChatGPT feels like it flows freely. My current pattern is to default to Chat for most informational and coding purposes and bring out Claude Opus for when I want a more thoughtful analysis of something. I don’t know how Sonnet compares to ChatGPT.
Gemini feels massively behind in both usability and tooling, and its integrations with third parties are only good for Google products.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
21d ago
Yeah, that doesn’t represent happiness, that measures how you feel you measure, literally, on the social ladder. Is there research that asks something more like, “How happy are you, 1-10?”
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
22d ago
I had a... friend, I guess, in high school, who I felt was narcissistic and far, far too full of herself, and I started mildly insulting her and putting her down, because I felt like she needed to be taken down a peg and realize not everyone worshipped the ground she walked on. I rarely put people down like this, but something about her just annoyed me.
My impression was that she took this as an attempt at flirting, and started doing weird things like comparing me to her boyfriend. I just rolled my eyes at this and continued putting her down. She was cute, I suppose, but her personality was radioactive and it shocked me how much people liked her.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
23d ago
I was a trainer in a large group for a while (mostly women) and the one woman who was demonstratively affectionate toward me and the other male trainers was almost unanimously turned on by the rest of the female trainees. This was always done subtly except behind closed doors.
OH I had to re-read this a couple of times, because I was trying to figure out if you were really saying "she was turned on by the female trainees" i.e. was somehow a very loose bisexual girl who personally liked both you and the female trainees, or if you meant "she almost unanimously turned on the rest of the female trainees" i.e. they were all sapphic for her. Wow, does the sentence make more sense when I read it right.
I don't know how you could have phrased it better, but this perhaps is my punishment for skimming motte posts while sleepy.
A woman who communicates interest with a stranger even subtly is rare, outside an alcohol-drenched setting.
I've had it happen, but typically with extreme plausible deniability, in the sense that their interest could be understood platonically and their invitations to date could be understood as an invitation for a nice time with a friend. This could be an attempt not to look too eager/excessive/expoitable, unfamiliarity with how you clearly show interest to someone (women are often pretty bad at it, because they aren't forced to practice), a kind of hedging of bets in case someone isn't all that compatible, or plain simple insecurity and rejection sensitivity of the same kind that causes men to orbit sometimes instead of stating their interest clearly. Probably a mixture.
I'm a little interested that you two still talk, but I guess you transitioned into friends towards the end.
Normally unicorn hunting describes a couple looking to date together/trying to put together an MFF threesome. If you were essentially in an open relationship and dating/hooking up separately... yeah, that's a relationship that was about to end.
Glad to know you embraced monogamy and cisheteronormativity. It exists for a reason.
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