urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
No bio...
User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
I'd quibble that I've been specifically tested and found not
Was it a concern at one point that led to evaluation?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
It's disagreeable town, with autism town being a bit of a side hustle.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
The fact that he's actually Bulgarian makes the professor's anger about it being a Communist uniform more explicable -- Bulgaria also suffered as part of the Eastern Bloc.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
Distressed students pointed the costume out to their principal, Joe Powers, but Powers explained to students the boy was dressed as a Communist-era East German soldier, Powers wrote Monday in a note to staff.
"I tried to explain the context and time period of the uniform to the students who spoke with me, but apparently the student who wore the uniform may have told people it was from the 1940s," Powers wrote.
A video of the male student goose stepping during a school Halloween parade — accompanied by a chorus of boos — has since made the rounds on social media.
On Thursday, in an email to parents, Powers acknowledged the situation should have been handled differently.
"As more information has come to light, including additional video of the incident and through conversations with our staff and students, we realize that this has greatly impacted our community and acknowledge that we should have handled the incident with greater care, and communicated more clearly with the school community about the nature of the incident," Powers said.
"Let me say clearly and plainly that what occurred caused harm to many of our students and staff who recognized this as an act of antisemitism. Let me also say clearly and plainly that intolerance, bigotry, and bias-based behaviors have no place in our school," Powers said.
Cassie Creswell, who has a child at Jones and is a former chair of the Local School Council, said Powers should have immediately made the student change out of the costume and called the student’s parents to have a serious discussion about the situation.
"I’m very concerned," Creswell said. "I have been tracking the rise in right-wing extremism in the suburbs for a while now, and this is a real thing, and it’s connection to actual physical violence is a real thing and to have the response from the school be what it was, it’s very disturbing."
Special support staff were scheduled to be at the school this week, and safe spaces would be made available "for students to process the harm they’ve experienced," Powers said in his email to parents.
This sounds like an onion article.
One the one hand, the student's parents were really dumb for letting him go to school dressed like this. On the other hand, the principal was really dumb for not realizing this was going to cause blowback, and not realizing that, since he was already embroiled in a dispute with the school board over him not being obsequiously leftist enough as per the article, this was going to be politically dangerous to him.
On one foot, Creswell sounds like she'd be fun at parties and probably gives out toothbrushes to kids on Halloween. On the other foot, I love that the principal was just autistically explaining to the students that this was a Communist soldier outfit, not a Nazi soldier outfit.
No, you haven't been harmed because a weird kid did a weird kid thing and you took offense to it. Grow up.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
But that isn't special
Well, try telling them that.
Even worse are the people who apparently have diagnosed (or suspected?) BPD, and then openly brag about it. Even on dating profiles.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
German 27%
Autistic 67%
help?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
It's a pretty unique level of weaponized stubbornness and autism to wear a military uniform for a defunct, abolished country on a university campus that looks like that, and then have the gall to get upset that people are thinking its some kind of NeoNazi thing.
Sweetheart, the fash won the drip game and the boys who are into ideological military uniforms want something edgier.
That said, I'm genuinely confused as to whether this is a student or something, because "arms engineer" implies this is a graduated and professsionally accomplished person. But they're on a college campus and this is dead to rights college femboy energy.
It cuts against the theory of absolute female mate-status-optimization, but sometimes women meet a man in just the right situation and just the right time where he does appear high-status and confident, and they make a real love connection and she locks onto him as worthy and hers despite any evidence of his low status. Falling in love with someone just does that to people.
This seems to happen more often for women from lower-class backgrounds, where, say, a middle class guy who nonetheless sucks might be perceived as higher status in a durable way that’s not amenable to correction based on behavior. I guess what’s in her head is that she got her prince, and now she needs to hold onto him.
But you really can’t eliminate the power of an actual love-connection from this — maybe he’s abusive and doesn’t contribute anything, but when they go on a date he looks her deep in the eyes and tells her she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, or has a sense of humor that lines up perfectly with hers. The lows might be low but the highs might be really high, for reasons beyond just “good in bed.” The guy who hits her might also be the only person who’s ever made her feel truly seen in some particular way, which might be fake and manipulative but might also be strikingly real (because people are complicated messes and evil coexists with good). It’s hard to overstate how powerful that can be.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
But like the lobotomy, it was popular for a time.
It's still shocking to me that it won the nobel prize. I understand the harsh experiences and conditions of the instutionalized and that people genuinely did 'improve' in the sense that they didn't express wild emotions any more, but the null hypothesis for any such change, especially when it came with cognitive impairment, would obviously be that you've butchered them and something about their internal experience has been seriously degraded. I wonder at times whether the lobotomy was a product of behaviorism, or of the medical neglect of the mentally ill. Probably both.
unequivocal success stories who aren't sure if they became bisexual or just became comfortable being bisexual
This seems hard to tease apart. But I guess it's genuinely an open question how someone actually "discovers" what turns them on, and what the difference is between "being comfortable with it" and "being it sexual." Even within a particular orientation there are obvious features that seem culturally determined, like of course the tension between the "I want me a woman as thin as a rail" guys and the "I want that venus tummy" guys.
a tiny number who had organic changes cause overt and undeniable differences in attraction (mostly trans people on hormones
Really? In terms of being attracted to people of a very different kind than before, not just being more attracted to the same kind of people?
I'd kinda naively expected trans men with vaginas to maybe be less psychologically difficult for a 'straight' man trying out gay sex, (and a lot of trans guys reasonably don't like being seen as training wheels), if only in a 'it's nothing you haven't seen fucked before' sorta way, but your specific reactions seem fairly common for guys who strongly prefer women.
I will say that I think straight men love the general body shape and appearance of women more than they love the vagina, specifically. I guess 'pussy pics' are a thing, but it's telling that the main thing men want to see in a woman is really something more like the curves, the breasts, the buttocks. Even more than that, there's an angle on the female body positivity movement that's 'vulva positivity', because a lot of pornography selects for ladies with minimal labia minora, which suggests a kind of genital minimalism in men's attraction to women. Perhaps this contributes to why gynandromorphilia is so common as a thing that it has a whole porn category?
(To be clear, I don't think men actually have strong opinions about the size of a woman's labia, and it is sad, I guess, if women feel bad because they think their genitals look ugly. This is a kind of body positivity I can support.)
Even well before male pattern baldness or mastectomy, most normally-straight guys, no matter how much they've gotten used to the idea of men having sex, aren't into a bit of even soft and downy chest hair. Go figure on that one!
Chest hair specifically is very male, and it wouldn't be suprising to me if, in recent primate evolution, it became one of the primary selection points for males to tell themselves apart from females. Perhaps this remains as a sexual preference that subtly encodes heterosexuality. You might say something about breasts, but lots of women naturally have small breasts. Some men even prefer it -- "Itty Bitty Titty Committee" is apparently a lesbian film (TIL), but I've always heard the phrase online as a joking discussion of male preference for the small-breasted. It's not a wild leap from "this small-breasted lady is hot" to "this pectoral gentleman is hot" or even "this individual who once had breasts but no longer does is hot" (although mastectomy scarring can jarring to a lot of people), but body hair serves as kind of an immediate "THIS IS MALE, CANNOT BE REPRODUCED WITH, ABORT" signal in the broad and crude sense that lots of evolved preferences are. Noticable facial hair is also a major turn-off, perhaps for the same reason, and this is where a lot of trans men I think explicitly try to simulteneously mascmaxxx and minimize their attractiveness to the straights by growing a beard.
Women naturally have some level of hair (usually quite light, but sometimes darker) on their arms and legs, and while I think men overall prefer them shaved, I don't actually think it's actually a massive turn-off or an intense male fascination the way some feminist takes consider it. Obviously our distant ancestors didn't have any issues with females growing hair all over, so this is probably a recent adaptation in geological time scales and I presume the sex differentiation in hair was very crude and focused on key, noticable differentiators that could be sacrificed without harming survival.
I have a lot of chest hair, and my hair is very dark, women comment on this sometimes. My girlfriend said she showed a picture (fully clothed, so I guess it was just the hair peeking up over my collar) of me to her aunt, who exclaimed, "he's hairy!" Whether this is evidence of my androgens being high, a genetic inheritance from... someone, or just luck of the draw, I don't know. But I will say that this makes me polarizing, and only the true androphiles can understand my appeal.
For that specific comic
Ah, I see. I am used to you linking comics with a very... creative set of descriptions for genitals, so I suppose I was linking that terminology to that pattern.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
Frankenstein is Incel
Interesting. I've always encountered Frankenstein discussed in exactly the opposite way among feminists, because it was written by Mary Shelley and some feminist interpretations discuss it as an allegory in favor of women's unique role in creating life because trying to create life without them resulted in a Monster (which is, of course, rather a conservative interpretation in a lot of ways, but nevertheless a popular one).
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
It also doesn't help that society's entire concept of romantic relationships is gynonormative.
What do you even mean by this?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
Most of the information I've seen suggests that formal use of 'hard' aversive stimuli (eg, electric shocks, physical impacts, harsh chemicals) fell out of favor by the mid 1980s.
I think using positive punishment in order to create a conditioned response is just a very, very bad idea to do to people and can mess them up in ways that we don't fully understand. #JusticeForLittleAlbert
But the flip side is that a lot don't, even within the small group who seek this out the hardest: a large portion who try are only able to shove down same-sex interests for short periods, or they're able to function with women but still crave men in ways that they're not really comfortable with.
Ok, this is one of your sentences I had to read thrice before I got it. I thought you were talking about the straight-to-gay people here (I guess you call them the 'bihackers'?) and I was genuinely confused for a few minutes because I thought you were saying "they could only shove down" in the sense of "avoid throwing up because of" same-sex interests for short periods, and I was trying to discern how that was different from your next sentence about the guys who were no longer grossed out by gay sex. It took me longer than I care to admit to understand you meant "repress" and not "keep a full stomach on", which are very much the opposite thing.
bihackers
I thought about making a matrix joke, but then I realized that making a matrix joke about gender and sexuality wasn't particularly original.
(or even top the 'most gay lite' guy available, cw: furry comic).
Wait, is the point that the 'most gay lite guy available' is a trans man with a vagina? I will admit that I've found some people who call themselves trans men attractive, but this is on the "I have changed literally nothing about my appearance--I am now wearing masculine clothing but I've done nothing irreversible--I am a proud trans-masc-femboy and this is a masculine pink skirt I'm wearing" spectrum of trans men, or in other words the ones where they could just say 'I am a woman' and no one would think anything of it. When male-pattern hair or surgeries start getting involved that's where my brain nopes out. I suppose that's a long-winded way of saying I'm not attracted to trans men.
At the more extreme, I'd expect rTMS to have some impact, and while I think experimenting like that is a terrible idea regardless of what you're trying to change your mind on
I mean, this doesn't not sound like someone's kink. We already live in a world in which gay hypnosis pornography exists.
Do you see a link between reinforcing those “masculine” behaviours and it decreasing your attraction to men? Sports and roughhousing especially. Nothing like seeing a hot fit guy take his shirt off in the locker room, or wrestling with the boys, to set a bicurious man straight…
No, probably not. I think if you're really interested in the masculine form, getting close and personal with it is probably going to be erotic. But more specifically, this world is full of gay bodybuilders and straight guys with a complicated relationship to sports.
My point was not really an apologetic for conversion therapy but was a personal reflection, I guess, on masculine norms and behaviors I see in myself and male friends, which I don't think have much to do with sexual orientation. Obviously, masculine norms are a sore spot for me and neither myself nor my father are very invested in sports culture, cars, or fishing, so I'm often a little amused and a little confused at this being considered constitutive of male identity. The overall topic is a Supreme Court decision, so in that connection, you can read what I said as as an urquan obiter dictum that's not really about the topic of conversion therapy.
In my opinion, conversion therapy of that kind is essentially medical fraud, in that it’s extracting money from gullible patients (or parents) for a “treatment” that cannot possibly work. The free speech argument could be used for a priest or a self-help coach, not a licensed therapist.
I think conversion therapy is unlikely to work. That said, I have a very critical view of many of the therapeutic modalities that licensed psychotherapists often make use of in their practice, like psychodynamic and humanistic methods that are re-headed 20th century woo, but nevertheless popular. The US government actually sometimes pays for veterans to receive EMDR therapy which supposedly 'works' and is 'evidence-based' in treating PTSD, but its actual theoretical basis of bilateral hemispheric stimulation is... wildly dubious, at best, and Wikipedia lists it on the pseudoscience category (same as conversion therapy, humorously enough) because there's no evidence its unique factors do anything.
Basically all therapies are evaluated on the basis of patient self-report, which means that patients' belief that something will work may be as important as any actual therapy method. This means that a huge portion of licensed therapists are, from my point of view, just extracting money from gullible patients for treatments that aren't based on any reasonable theory of how the human brain and mind work -- and nevertheless some of those patients, afterwards, say "wow doc, joie de vivre! joie de vivre!"
I don't really love the whole teen pray away the gay summer camp thing, and Lord knows residential programs intended to cough straighten-out religious youth are often questionable-to-evil, but I have serious concerns that singling out conversion therapy as a broad concept becomes an isolated demand for rigor from a profession for whom 'rigor' means 'lots of people said they liked it.
I'm not sure what the situation is like in various countries of Europe, but unfortunately, in the US, even the licensing system doesn't do much to prevent significant ethical breaches and therapeutic abuse. There's some wildly dark quackery that licensed therapists claim is therapeutic and whose damage goes far beyond conversion therapy. Jodi Hildebrandt used her sway over Mormon couples to separate children from their fathers because dad occasionally watched a pornhub video, and also prescribed much worse in terms of direct physical abuse and starvation of children for disobedience. Nevertheless -- licensed counselor, with the stain on her record prior to her criminal conviction being her violation of patient confidentiality, not the fact that her psychological and therapeutic theories were, let's say, not on this side of sanity.
Licensed therapists are already permitted to practice therapy that includes elements of a spiritual or religious tradition if this is disclosed and desired by the patient, and many people of faith explicitly seek out counselors who share their worldview (which, given how significant patient belief in the therapeutic modality is, probably means this is more effective for them). It's hard to meaningfully distinguish this from spiritual woo, quackery, and even conversion therapy to some extent, and the freedom of speech concern is that this targets the therapeutic desires of people of faith in a way that violates the fundamental principle of psychotherapy that patients are the ones in charge of shaping treatment goals. At some point, what you're saying is not that therapists can't try to convert their patients' sexuality or gender identity, it's that patients can't desire anything that rhymes with sexuality or gender identity conversion, and that's where the freedom of speech/expression concern comes into view.
If what you're calling for is something more akin to a complete rewrite of standards for psychotherapists and counselors as a profession, or criticism of parents using psychotherapy as a worldview weapon against their children -- I'm with you. But there are some deeper concerns in play.
Yes, and I tried my best! I didn’t want to be attracted to women for various reasons. But in the end feeling guilty over it didn’t help, and there’s no real point trying to repress it.
Ah, this took a turn I didn't expect. I can understand why a bisexual man might not want to be attracted to men (while pursuing a heterosexual marriage, for example), but it's interesting that a bisexual man or trans person might find being attracted to women distressing or guilt-inducing. I really like being attracted to women because women are pretty awesome, but also my pattern of attraction is almost exclusively to femininity, so I suppose it just works to my advantage.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
When I said something about 'the sticks of men's enforcement,' I didn't particularly mean 'putting rocks in people's shoes and having them walk around,' but I suppose that's not too far off from what I meant.
There's nothing wrong with sports, fishing, working on cars, and fixing things in some vague sense, although that does lean a bit towards a red tribe and slightly older application of masculine behavior, where a lot of younger guys are fixing computers and installing cat6 in their walls, doing carpentry, and yeah, playing sports/roughhousing alongside competitive gaming or local multiplayer as a bonding ritual. I don't know about putting rocks in your shoes (and that seems very old school Catholic to me, they might as well have been wearing cilices), but it is true that men generally admire competence, doing, endurance, skill, camaraderie, pursuit of an ideal, and stoicism, and I'd count myself among them. I'm willing to admit I'm stereotypical enough to be a fan of Marcus Aurelius.
I do think that sexual attraction is malleable to some degree, and it's probably not all that hard to get someone who's 80% attracted to women to be 99% attracted to women, and perhaps even vice versa. There's probably some segment of the bisexual population for which sexual attraction can be a conditioned stimulus in one direction or another, but I suspect that it would be impossible to make a gay man exclusively attracted to women just as much as it would be impossible to make a straight man exclusively attracted to men.
I’m bisexual myself and despite my best efforts, I never felt like base attraction was something I could exert real control over. Behaviour, yes, but not the underlying desire.
Did you want to exert control to change your base attraction?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
There’s no judgment to either one of you, but this is genuinely one of the more hilarious discussions on the motte recently and I had to chuckle out loud.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
Are the purple pill debaters still going at it?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
I liked the book review, but there are things in the original book that strike me as almost entirely wrong, like the "when do you eat dinner" part:
Destitutes and bottom-out-of-sights eat dinner at 5:30, for the prole staff which takes care of them wants to clean up and be out roller skating or bowling early in the evening. It eats, thus, at 6:00 or 6:30. The family of Jack and Sophie Portnoy ate at 6:00, an indication of the prole pull on them despite his having a middle-class job, barely, that of an insurance salesman...The middle class eats at 7:00 or even 7:30, the upper-middle at 8:00 or 8:30. Some upper-middles, uppers, and top-out-of-sights dine at 9:00 or even later, after nightly protracted cocktail sessions lasting at least two hours.
Older people eat earlier, just as they get up in the morning earlier and go to bed earlier. The general pattern for most Americans is to eat dinner when the last breadwinner arrives home, which is probably around 6:00.
The discussion about consumerism also strikes me as clearly wrong, and I think Scott would be shocked at how many genuinely upper-middle-class people like Disneyland and conspicuous consumption (and how few proles could afford it nowadays). That said, the book seems to hint at this: "it urges us to watch for "prole drift", the tendency of lower-class signals and behaviors to become higher-class over time." Perhaps this has to do with something called... gasp social mobility?
But, in particular, I think the book he's reviewing is very much a WASP's view of class, which is simply not so relevant to American society and power nowadays -- it does you no good to be old-money upper-class in a society where that caste of people wields less and less concrete political power and fewer and fewer people even know about your standards enough to think they're lesser than you. At some point you're just insisting on things because they've always been done that way, while the new money powerhouses reshape society in their image.
That said, the physiognomy chart was rather funny, particularly in that I was reminded when the news interviewed a Republican from Massachusetts who looked every bit like the guy on the left, who talked about leaving the Republican party because of Trump.
Having been a teenager during the bronie era, I thought you were trying to say that the man had both a multi-monitor setup and a my little pony collection. Also, IMO, multi monitor setups are highly popular in the workplace among both men and women, and it wouldn’t be surprising to me for a woman who works a computer-based job at home to have a multi-monitor setup for productivity.
That said, on the trans question, I’ve met trans women who struck me as masculine in their hobbies, some who struck me as more autistic than anything else, and some who struck me very feminine in a stereotypical sense, like being a reader of romance novels or having strong opinions about makeup in the way only women and guys like James Charles do. If some fraction of gay men are feminine, like gay hairdressers, it doesn’t beggar belief that some trans women would be, too.
Having grown up in a very red part of the US, I’d say that trans women from rural or conservative environments often seem much more invested in femininity than trans women from the coasts, which may speak to the level of dysphoria or femininity a person needs to reach in that kind of environment before taking the social risk of transitioning.
As magicalkittycat says, this type of person is rare, very rare, and my very loose outsider’s impression is that they’re happy to ally with the more flamboyant elements of the trans coalition or the broader the LGBT coalition because of strength in numbers, while privately being more reserved and actually rather conventional, if you get to know them.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
They believe gen AI will be like NFTs, where the general consensus is that the technology was overhyped and has limited use cases and was mocked both at the time and in hindsight. They believe gen AI has few to no actual use cases and is essentially useless technology that wastes water, electricity, and compute to create text and imagery that is unreliable, useless, and has no function.
They’re wrong, but they’re very confident. In the case of gen AI images and video, they have enough numbers that they’ve been able to make gen AI art controversial and low-status, which in creative fields is a death sentence. They believe they can combine that power with generative AI becoming more expensive to use because of a burst bubble ending cheap generation for end-users to make it both low-status and expensive.
That said, I get the sense that uptake of AI generated artwork is slowly growing in the corporate space, particularly as an adjunct or aid to human design instead of a replacement.
I used Sora 2 for about a week when it came out, then never used it again. I might have used the app for funny video generation, but they insisted on watermarking everything and creating a social media bubble for Sora content, which was always a dumb idea. Meanwhile Sora 1, which actually had a cool discovery feed for generated images, was just sunsetted as well.
The OpenAI ecosystem sucks now in a way it didn’t 3 months ago. Claude is ascendant.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
The company line is to buy your own router if you need access to other settings, but that's about to become a lot harder.
Me using OPNsense on commodity hardware with an Intel NIC PCI-e card
I actually use UPnP because it makes building direct-connect tunnels over tailscale easier (and my ISP offers symmetrical fiber, but no IPv6, riddle me that), but I monitor it and have some restrictions in place. Most users shouldn't use it though.
Actually my ISP puts IPoE on a VLAN, but none of their techs know anything about it and I had to reverse-engineer it using reddit. Their loaned-out gateway (which is bundled in the price, apparently?) can give you a WAN link for your own router on VLAN 1, but that's another device you have to put in the path. Maybe breaking up Ma Bell wasn't such a good idea, they at least had "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" instead of the hodgepodge of nonsense that passes for telecommunications in this country.
My girlfriend's ISP-provided router let me change the subnet, but not the DNS IPs distributed by DHCP, weirdly enough, and they're locked to the default ISP DNS. (She at least gets v6 though, God Bless American Telephone & Telecom.) I could go through the effort to run a DHCP server on her network, but I'm really only freeloading on her network for my backup server, so I just gave all my devices their own manual DNS servers set to my preference and we're good to go.
I'm trying to write up something more serious for urquan on this, but I need to go into more detail for his use case.
Uh oh. I wasn't trying to prompt an instruction manual.
I'll caveat what I've said before with the point that I don't really engage with the gay community much any more, and when I did it was more of an experiment due to loneliness than it was a serious desire to build a world there. I think you could technically call me bisexual, but the number of men who do anything at all for me is very small, and very highly selected as the most feminine group among those. Basically the sort who you could sort of squint at and imagine they're a woman.
The kind of masculine disgust towards the effeminate and the flamboyant that you see in gay men like self_made's brother and the other gay commenters here was never true of me. Even limiting to that group, a 10/10 on my scale is about as attractive as a 3/10 woman, and that's being generous. I find true masculinity actively repulsive, and still cannot describe how even straight women could possibly find men attractive, despite understanding they have every mechanism of natural selection on their side. Given those limitations, and my romantic orientation that contrasts with what you typically find in the gay community (even if subcultures that are more assimilatory exist), the project was always rather statistically doomed to failure.
If anything, I'd say I identify more with the gynandromorphile concept that rae once discussed than with bisexuality-re-bisexuality, and I can't distinguish passing trans women from cis women in my patterns of attraction. That said, I do not experience autogynephilia and find the concept rather strange.
That's the actual takeaway I had from my college experimentation (my moral and visceral opposition to casual sex were pre-existing, though it strengthened them). Given such inclinations are fairly despised by straight men ("faggot"), gay men ("tourist"), and trans women ("chaser") alike, I had limited opportunities to act on it and ended up just dating cis women with whom my pattern of attraction was well-trod and socially legible. I broke some hearts along the way, and so some element of my subsequent interest in the topic is trying to find the right sequence of words so I can explain to myself, to the cosmos, to no one and to everyone, that my desire was never to hurt anyone and I was just lonely, lovelorn, and surprised by what I found in places I never expected to find it, and I broke hearts because I was afraid I would pull someone truly close and then devastate them in a worse way if I turned out to be wrong about myself.
'Sapiosexual' is a really obnoxious self-identifier, but it is pointing toward and around a concept with some meaning, just corrupted as a signifier by the mess of people who kinda abuse it.
Hm. I'm not familiar with any changes in the term's significance since around 2013 or so, but I dated a girl in school who unironically called herself that. And genuinely every woman I've ever dated has said words to that effect -- my current girlfriend jokes that she wants her children to have "your juicy brain genes." I'm not the sort of person that goes around bragging about IQ, but the thing that is statistically unusual about me is verbal intelligence, so it's not really surprising to me that people who went, "that guy is special" all identify the same trait in me as the most attractive one. But words, of course, are both my gift and my fortress, and the instrument I use to connect is the same instrument I use to hide.
Maybe it means something else now, but back then it meant something like, "attracted to intelligence as a personality trait more than other features (but not exclusively)." Some people are like that.
That's fascinating -- me too. I hate smalltalk and I struggle to make connections with a stranger, but I love public speaking even if it makes me nervous. My father is the same way, he is a teaching professor and an extremely animated one, but also extremely introverted and hard to get to know.
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