urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
24d ago
I'm sorry to hear that you're struggling. Dating is genuinely hard these days, and I'm not denying that -- I just think that the imputation of active malice to women is factually incorrect. Women, particularly the ones you'd most want to date, aren't really implementing a strategy, just flailing around, being lonely or platonically satisfied by friendships, inconsistently trying to date in a world that provides them little guidance for how to do it right, and not succeeding in their own ways. The manosphere, for all it says about women, persistently overestimates female competence at dating-as-a-strategy in ways that are, mildly speaking, kind of funny.
This is particularly true when we're talking about women in their mid-twenties and above -- most women who are serious about dating, driven towards marriage, and don't have baggage pair up sometime in college, and so it gets harder and harder to find people who are both serious and driven the older you get.
And that's why its so odd, if women don't want to be on dating apps like you say, that they also don't like to behave in the ways that would actually lock down a partner, but instead make the process painful for both themselves and the men they encounter, for no apparent gain.
Well, the thing is the women I'm talking about actually just flat out aren't on dating apps, for the most part -- they're single, often don't know why, often are addicted to their phones or to TikTok, often feel like they're missing love in their lives but may never have experienced real love that is transformative in the way love is transformative. They're not implementing a strategy because, to a lot of women, implementing a dating strategy is itself a form of humiliation -- not because they hate men, but because thinking about love strategically is exhausting, and adversarial, and women by and large actually don't want dating to be exhausting or adversarial. What they want is often a deep and individualized kind of passion where they feel like they're finally seen and acknowledged as a person worth knowing deeply and intimately, and dating is as much a minefield of navigating people who claim to offer this but have a knife behind their backs for women as it is for men.
They don't want to end up in a place where they feel adversarial about dating in the way you feel adversarial about dating, and they have plenty of examples of how women can go that direction and they don't like it. They'd rather hold on to their feelings that love is real and beautiful and transformative while not having it, than face the brutal world of dating as an adult and have those hopes dashed or violated or taken advantage of. This doesn't work out for them, and it works out even less for men, but it's what they're doing and because the world is more socially atomized than ever, it's easier than ever to end up alone, only dragged out of your house occasionally by a group of friends, and without any tools or frameworks to understand what adult intimacy is and how you pursue it.
Sometimes women will create a dating app profile for a couple weeks, the process feels painful and the sorting through many options -- rather than feeling validating or empowering, as men often imagine -- puts a woman who really doesn't want to instrumentalize and reject en masse human beings, in a position where she has to do that. She is not having a good time. She is having a specifically bad time. And the women who experience this as a good time -- and such women do indeed exist -- are the very women you don't want to touch with a barge pole.
Moreover, because the men are hungry, she feels like one cute face among many, not like a person who is ever actually seen or acknowledged as an individual person in her own right, which is the basis for women's intimacy with men. They would rather remain alone, hoping for the unmediated connection of twue wove, than become the kind of person who pursues love strategically and thereby (in their understanding of the world) makes themselves unable to receive it authentically.
So, you're right. A lot of single women act very strangely, without a strategy, often in ways that make life harder for her and for the men she sees. But there really isn't much of a voice for giving women real and useful dating advice in our culture. "Just be yourself," is bad advice often given to men, but women often receive their own kind of bad advice, like "Know your worth," or "don't settle," which equally mean nothing. Being specific and useful to either men or to women requires a kind of honesty about dating and romance that is painful for both sexes, and nobody really wants to go down that road unless they have to.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
24d ago
What's interesting is I think women know (or ought to know) that this is a male desire/fantasy, you can find certain genres of softcore porn that emphasize the woman being pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a guy with sexual desire as an undertone. The blackpill is that you can easily get a woman to act this way if you pay for it directly in hour-long increments. Which tells you both that many women don't want to act this way for a man, naturally, and perhaps worse many are able to convincingly fake it anyway.
You’ve just described a long-term relationship. The relevant porn term is “girlfriend experience,” because this is what a loving girlfriend is like.
Women certainly don’t want to act this way for any man, just for a man they’re in love with. It’s true that women who are ‘playing the field’ and aren’t ready to settle into an LTR are noncommittal and ready to swap out — but so are men who are trying to play the field.
The saving grace for men is that most women aren’t actually looking to play the field. It looks like it, especially when you look at the population of women on dating apps, and particularly hookup-oriented dating apps. Those women, of course, are looking for hot men who are good at sex and make the on-ramp to a sexual encounter thrilling and socially permissible.
But the same statistics that show that also show that their absolute number is low, especially compared to the men looking for the same thing. Most women don’t want to be on dating apps, and most would consider joining one to be an admission of failure, an unacceptable stranger danger risk, or at the very least massively overwhelming with low-quality attention in a way that’s uncomfortable and hopelessness-inducing, not validating. These are the actual feelings the average woman feels about dating apps, not something they’ve made up to mess with guys.
I guess sometimes I read discussions from guys on what women are like in dating and I wonder if anyone’s actually been in a reasonably-healthy LTR. Most women want to be what you’re describing, but only with a man who she feels gives the same to her.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
24d ago
I think that’s exactly right. The canon wasn’t a huge deal, people had arguments over it, various books were read liturgically and some weren’t, Jerome had opinions but translated most books to latin when he was asked. Ultimately figuring out a solid canon wasn’t a priority in antiquity, they were far more concerned with Christological debates. They were interested in what the Word of God was, not what the Word of God was.
The last point of appeal for doctrine was a church council, local or ecumenical, and so having a definitive selection of canonical texts in an exact, harmonized critical version was more of a hobby of Jerome than a church-wide project. He was influential, of course, and it would be fair to say that the entire history of Western theology of the canon is a debate over how to read Jerome in much the same way the entire history of Western soteriology is a debate over how to read Augustine.
But putting an exact number on the canonical texts didn’t become a major issue until the Latin church and Orthodoxy drifted apart and tried to hammer out differences, finding that the Vulgate and the Septuagint had different OT texts. But this was in the background, massively, compared to the question of the authority question, particularly about the Papacy. The Orthodox counter position to the Papacy was “we have the Sacred Tradition” not “we have the Holy Bible.”
When Protestantism came about and placed the highest of premiums on Scripture as the place of final appeal, it became urgent to have a solid OT canon — the authority question moved in one sense from “which councils are ecumenical and which bishops are ecumenical” to “which texts are authoritative and which readings are divinely inspired.” The only texts accepted absolutely universally and available in original languages were the Hebrew edition books, and of course the fact that Judaism had a harmonized edition in the Masoretic text made it widely available. So this became Protestantism’s alternative to the Papacy as a source of authority.
There are some things in the books of the Maccabees that could look like the intercession of saints if you squint, and there’s some level of arguments about that.
But also, the main difference in the OT canon is that Protestantism ended up holding as canonical only the books that were known to the 16th century in Hebrew. At that time, Tobit, Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom, etc were known from ancient sources only from the Septuagint, which is of course the Greek Hebrew Bible known and used by Hellenistic Jews in the first century, including many Christians. It's important to note that the Septuagint (the 70, for its 70 translators) was the book referenced by New Testament authors, and the quotations from the OT in the NT demonstrate its textual differences from the Masoretic texts.
It’s also relevant to note that these books known in Hebrew were the precise ones that made up the Masoretic Text of Judaism, as rabbinical Judaism had gone through its own winnowing of the Biblical text and these books were available in Hebrew principally because Judaism had preserved them. Many Protestant Biblical translations are based on the same Hebrew texts used by Jews. They're numbered differently, but the texts are often the same.
Because Protestantism included a strong belief in going back to the sources, the availability of these books in Hebrew from Jewish sources made them the natural starting point, and thus the Protestant Bible ended up with only the 39 books that could be sourced in Hebrew.
This was not a unique concept of Protestantism, and Jerome's Latin translation, the Vulgate, regularly referenced the Hebrew texts in addition to the Septuagint, a principle for which he was sharply criticized by contemporary Christians who held the Septuagint to be, itself, strictly canonical. That said, there is a long custom of seeing the books totally unavailable to the ancient world in Hebrew as part of a different category than the Hebrew-available books. Protestantism didn't invent this. Jerome himself had complicated views on the Old Testament canon, and in particular thought that including the non-Hebrew books in the text was harmful to Christian dialogue with Jews, and that founding doctrine on these books was questionable. He was incredibly controversial in his day for his views on the canon, but in many ways his views do approximate the views of more "apocrypha-friendly" Protestant churches, though he quoted the extra books with great frequency and respect, as did Luther, occasionally. It should be noted, of course, that when Jerome was questioned by other Christians for his views on the canon, he stated firmly that if a Church authority contradicted him, he would accept the judgment of the Church.
Because some of the readings of the Septuagint lend themselves to a Christological interpretation of the messianic prophesies more than some of the Hebrew readings (Isaiah 49 is an infamous example), it was a not-infrequent accusation among early Christians that the Hebrew texts used by post-second-temple Judaism had been altered from the originals as a manner of deflecting from the application of these texts to Jesus of Nazareth. Archaeological study has shown that there was a considerable diversity of Hebrew texts in ancient times and it's likely that both the Septuagint and the texts that would ultimately become the Masoretic Text were pulling from Hebrew sources of equal vintage and ancient authority. No modern Christian source informed on the matter would make an accusation of deliberate post-Christian defacement against the Jewish Tanakh.
I should also note that many of the books in what Protestants would call the apocrypha were not necessarily considered bad by magisterial Protestantism; it's just that they weren't considered authoritative for the establishment of doctrine.
A good example of the approach of magisterial authorities to them is found in the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles, which lists the Protestant canon of the Old Testament, and then states:
And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine
and then lists the extra books from the Catholic canon. I presume the justification for this choice was basically "all the good Protestants are doing it," based largely on the Hebrew Masoretic tradition custom.
That's not a massively satisfying answer to you, but as far as I know it just kind of... happened this way, and justifications were back-filled in to justify what was essentially a ressourcement movement that used the Masoretic Text as a basis because it was available in Hebrew. The Protestant take on this wasn't radical and wasn't new, but what was new was how firm Protestantism as a whole would ultimately take the rejection of the deuterocanonical books. It's one of the many areas where 16th century Protestantism and 21st century Protestantism are very distinct.
The truth is that, with the Old Testament, there really isn't a canon, other than the 39, and this is a reality that goes back to ancient times. Just about the only thing that can be conclusively said by the Christian tradition is there are between 39 and infinity texts written at some point by Hebrews under divine inspiration.
What were the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches using instead of the Hebrew texts? Generally the Vulgate or the Greek Septuagint/Greek New Testament.
The Vulgate has a strong authority in historical Catholicism, and many of the canonical and doctrinal principles of Catholicism are based on its unique readings (for instance, 2 Corinthians 2:10 being translated roughly, "What I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the person of Christ", which relates to the doctrine of the confessor as being in persona Christi). It's also notable that the Catholic Bible does not contain the entire Septuagint, and Trent's formal holding of the Catholic canon did not include some books like the books of Esdras and 3 Maccabees.
The Septuagint and original-language New Testament have a privileged position in Orthodoxy, as the Orthodox churches (Eastern and Oriental) trace their theological lineage to the Hellenistic world, where ancient Greek was a sacred language. I have joked, considering the long history of the Septuagint's authority in Christianity and especially eastern Christianity, that in the same way many American Bible Churches are King-James-Version-Only churches, the Eastern Orthodox Church could be described as a Septuagint-Only Church -- don't be quoting the Vulgate or the Hebrew to them.
There is no good English translation that follows this mode of the EOC's Biblical canon, and "Orthodox Study Bibles" generally just launder a Protestant translation. I've heard, however, rumblings that there is a push inside the growing English-speaking Orthodox community to make a genuine Orthodox critical text of the Old Testament.
Various Orthodox Churches have various numbers of Greek books they add to the 'standard' canon, with the Ethiopian Orthodox famous for having a lot. This plays a very minor role in inter-Orthodox dialogue because the Biblical canon is not a first-order issue against the reception of tradition. It's also my understanding that many of the Septuagint's additional books have been found in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic as part of archaeological finds, but those are not considered authoritative in the churches that include them.
You asked about the New Testament, and I've been neglecting it thus far.
There are no canonical differences in the New Testament among mainstream Christian churches, which is nice.
Luther, particularly initially, pushed for some, and personally demoted the so-called "catholic epistles", which have nothing to do with the RCC and are called that because they aren't written to a particular group or individual like Paul's letters and were addressed to all Christians ("the Church Catholic"). Luther had a particular misgiving about the book of James, which he once described as "an epistle of straw", because of the way James 2 discusses justification. Ultimately he pushed James and some other books to an appendix, but his views cooled, and Lutheranism and Protestantism as a whole accepted them as fully canonical.
I'm unfamiliar with Luther having an issue with the book of Revelation/Apocalypse of John, and in fact Luther could be called the most creative interpreter of this text in history. Because the subject, to secular and serious Christian scholars, of the book of Revelation is the Roman Empire, the book makes frequent references to things that are intended in code to reference Rome, like the whore of Babylon being seated upon the "seven hills" which John wink wink nod nods to us in order to communicate this means the seven famous hills of Rome. Since Luther's project was to sharply criticize the Bishop of Rome, who of course resided in and ruled a meaningful portion of Italy from the very city of these seven hills, it was incredibly rhetorically useful to him to describe the Pope as the very "whore of Babylon" and the "Beast," and yes, the antichrist. Similarly, it was rhetorically useful of Luther to speak of Catholicism as "the Babylonian Captivity" of Christianity, in reference to the Old Testament event.
You can actually trace the history of 'modern' debates over the book of Revelation to these fierce disputes between Luther and the other reformers and Catholicism.
Ancient Christians were actually fairly slow to accept the Apocalypse as canonical, and it was in many respects the 'last' book of the New Testament to be fully accepted. This has a lot to do with its intense scenes, obviously coded nature, and cryptic predictions, which of course are the subject of considerable theological debate. It was, in fact, so slow to be accepted that the ancient calendars of Biblical readings still used by some churches like the Orthodox Church do not include it -- not because they reject it, but because they had a good rhythm going before it was universally regarded.
Ancient Christian sources reference it, and sometimes give their own interpretations that often rhyme with the later syntheses, but Revelation was not the subject of great theological debate in ancient Christianity and interpreting prophesy wasn't a matter of great import.
The claim of anti-Papal reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer that the Pope was the antichrist dropped a thermonuclear bomb in the middle of apocalyptic interpretation, and the Catholic Counter-reformation sprung into action, with many of the approaches to the book theologians recognize today -- futurism, amillenialism, preterism, etc -- being developed in response by Catholic theologians and especially Jesuits, to provide a coherent reply based on a fresh interpretation of Biblical prophesy.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
26d ago
Is it really that disgusting for a straight man to think about having sex with a man?
Generally, yes.
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.
This is really fascinating. I've heard similar commentary online, but it's hard for me to imagine "finding the way you experience emotions to be quite different."
Every serious girlfriend I've had has been like this -- I haven't had many of them, 3 or 4 I suppose if we're generous, but the experience isn't at all foreign to me and when I've been in relationships, the women I've dated have given every appearance that they've valued being this way around me, and we've enjoyed each other's presence because we cared for one another, made each other laugh, felt like the best versions of ourselves around each other. If that experience is as rare as you're suggesting, then swipe right on my profile and call me gigachad.
It's true that things like being able to be a provider, being a psychologically stabilizing in the presence of crises, and caring about her physical and mental needs to an intense and specific degree, are things that women care about in their partners in a way that men don't necessarily do about theirs. Even as stable and formidible a writer as 2rafa, when she talked about being engaged, described how wonderful it was that her fiancé remained calm and helpful even in moments of crisis. Women aren't quiet about this stuff, and it's not stupid or malicious that they value these things. Husbands and fathers exist because women, especially pregnant women, are vulnerable in moments of crisis, and men's adaptive function to hominid evolution was to protect them and provide for them.
But there's more symmetry, at least at a greater level of abstraction, there than you seem to be implying. Both men and women ultimately want a partner that cares for them as an individual person specifically, who pays attention to their needs, and supports them and roots for them when times get tough. Maybe that's not possible in the long term, I'll grant the manosphere the possibility of reasonable doubt, but my experience seeing my mother with my father, my grandmother with my grandfather, my friend's mother with my friend's dad, and my own experiences with women, indicate to me that it is possible.
It may be true that this is much harder to find in modern times, and I don't actually doubt this at all. But blowing it up into an overall model of human behavior given the WEIRD and unique and socially atomized nature of modern times is a pretty serious empirical error.
It's true there's gender asymmetry, but gender asymmetry isn't malice in the same way that the fact that women menstruate and men don't isn't malice; it's just part of what the world is like for a sexually dimorphic mammalian species.
If you've ever been in online dating where you receive male attention, and I have, having explored in a bisexual phase, you realize pretty quick that a lot of male attention is low-quality not just in the sense that the men are basically normal, friendly guys who just aren't hot, or whatever, but that the men are simply just not great prospects under anyone's definition.
You'll get attention from 50 year olds, you'll get people who don't read your bio, you'll find a lot of guys whose profiles are basically "the worst possible selfie a human being has ever taken, obviously taken because the app asked, plus a bio that describes nothing about them." Oftentimes these guys will be aggressive, not even in a threatening way but in a really dumb way, like messaging you and then two hours later, after you don't reply, messaging "well it sounds like you don't actually want what you say you want, you jerk," like externalizing their frustration at one person who doesn't reply will somehow change their fortunes.
And that's not even an environment where the gender asymmetry you're talking about exists -- that's gay men, the most sex-forward group of human beings ever to walk the earth, and many of the same principles that women complain about encountering from men are present there in men looking for men spaces, too. This isn't really because men are horrid people or anything; it's just that the floor for men's attractiveness and basic social competence is pretty damn low, and because of the realities of the species men have to put some effort into being attractive, even to other men who are looking for men.
Complaining about that is of the same genre to me as women complaining about men not having to get pap smears -- your complaint is with God or Darwin or the universe as it exists, it's just what biology is, symmetry and equality was not evolutionarily adaptive. Feminists complain endlessly about the world not being equal for women, and the most confusing thing about the manosphere to me is that they copy them: yes, men and women are not biologically equivalent, them's the breaks.
But also, the main reason that many women don't like dating apps is their perception, which is not without evidence, that a huge number of men are looking ultimately to play the field and not commit to a particular woman. This is a gender asymmetry that resolves in terms of men not looking so great on the LTR-orientation front, and it too has its deep connections to evolutionary biology.
If you tell me the idea of a harem of beautiful women has never occurred to you as compelling because you're just so LTR-oriented and the picky dating app women just can't see that, well, I don't believe you. The thought's in my heart as much as yours, and if we want to be brutally honest about gender asymmetry we have to acknowledge the male desire for polygyny, and the fact that a massive number of men -- both hot and frumpy, rich and poor -- would take the option given the means and opportunity. If we're allowed to question seriously women's 'wonderfulness', then questioning men's 'wonderfulness' is also fair game.
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