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?
13hr ago
My preferred mode of forming relationships, particularly romantic ones, involves knowing the person in some personal level (at least 'acquaintance,' possibly 'friendship') before actually initiating romantic intent.
I'll say that this is my preferred mode too, but I also am wary that the average woman feels the same way. When I look back on my dating history, even back to secondary school, I can't remember a single time when "this person is attractive, but I want to get to know them as a person first before expressing romantic interest" ever actually worked out, or ended with a relationship. Inevitably, if I decided I liked the person and I would be interested in knowing her romantically, any expression of interest would just be rebuffed -- typically politely, but still.
You do often see women online complaining about "I thought he was my friend, but then he asked me out and he was just lying about being my friend to get in my pants," as though being friendly and engaging with someone as a person instead of immediately asking them out is a kind of duplicity that can only be understood in a prurient manner. I don't know if those exact thoughts run through the typical woman's head, but it does accord with my experiences being friends with and dating women.
I'm not always a fan of their methods, but I do think the redpillers are descriptively correct when they say that women generally have a separate mental track for "potential romantic interest" and "potential friend," and you have to behave in a certain way to be put into the first category rather than the second. Every woman I have ever seriously dated expressed -- either with their body language and flirtation (when I got better at reading this), or in hindsight, after we were dating and she would look back upon meeting me -- that I did something that impressed her the very first time I met her.
It was always something that was more than just "urquan was really nice and friendly," it had to be, "urquan was the class clown and I thought his joking was really confident," "urquan proudly said he was a Democrat when the teacher in poli sci class used him as an example of voter registration," "I liked how urquan made jokes that built upon each other when we talked and incorporated things I was saying," "the way urquan writes about what love means to him was so romantic, it makes me feel like I'm in a romance novel," or "urquan gave a lecture to a college atheist club where he made a historical argument that the US is a Christian nation because of the large influence that Christianity has had on its history," which, to use her words, "made me think you had your own independent thoughts and didn't just think what other people wanted you to think."
There was also, of course, the time in school where I was waiting for someone in the lunchroom, a girl that sat at the table and I started talking, and I absentmindedly and unconsciously started suggestively flirting with her and thought so little of it that I blacked it out of my memory. (The only thing of that flirtation I can recall is she was eating a banana, and, well, schoolboy-tier phallic jokes were made.) What a surprise when I subsequently did the, "I'd like to get to know her as a person before I express any interest" thing, having forgotten that I'd implanted the mental image in her brain that the fruit she was eating was my fucking penis, and then 3 months later she drops a note on my desk as she shuffled out of the classroom that told me she was in love with me and asked 'would you go out with me?' Man... the high of reading that note was so intense that I'd compare it to heroin, if I knew anything about what heroin makes you feel like.
You should note that, in all my examples, I did something actually impressive in some sense: I was confident enough to say something controversial, or to take a stance proudly, without reservations, or to state how I felt about something in beautiful and moving words, or to express my sexuality clearly and unapologetically. I wasn't nice, I wasn't friendly, I was confident, without fear of rejection. Confidence is the engine of attraction. The engine!
The other thing I note from my dating history is that, of course, in most of these situations I subsequently did the "I really just want to get to know this person first before I express any romantic interest", enough that multiple relationships of mine have started because I did something impressive enough, and was subsequently intransigent enough in my withholding of romantic interest, that eventually these young women took matters into their own hands and directly stated their romantic interest in me out of sheer desperation. Obviously they would have much rather preferred that I ended my sequence of impressive acts of sheer confidence by confidently suggesting something romantic. That's how you get swept off your feet.
The reality is that women want to be impressed before they do the "I just want to get to know this person" thing; it's just how their attraction works. Men are actually the same way -- it's just that their attraction is more visual, and women's is more an attraction to the gestalt of a man.
So, if you're attracted to a woman, you do nothing impressive, subsequently become her friend, and then later decide you like her enough to ask her out. The read she has of that situation is: "well, you did nothing to impress me or to trigger my attraction, and now you're springing this on me, why are you making me have to romantically reject my friend after this time knowing each other?" They see "being friends before suggesting any romantic interest" as a failed strategy -- in which case it's pathetic -- or a covert attempt to "let her guard down" before she knows what all you want out of her, in which case it's considered creepy, like espionage. I think that's a harsh judgment, but it's the kind of judgment I think is being made.
I think in most cases men don't mean it like that, and it's not so much a strategy as men just being slow to warm up to someone, even if they're attracted to them. Men's romantic interest is much more gradual, while women's is much more binary, in or out. Hence why men are more commitment-phobic than women: they escalate from "cute" to "beautiful" to "worthy of adoration" to "eternal and undying love" more slowly.
(Evopsych terms -- maybe men's up-front sexual attraction is the thing that bridges this gap ancestrally? Women ramp up sexual availability slowly, men ramp up romantic/emotional availability slowly, both are withholding something the other wants, so they have a reason to stick around with each other and try to build it up?)
I guess what I'm saying is, I feel you. But some element of the obligation to "bring that enthusiasm to the date" is that you have to impress as a man, or you've already lost. I got really lucky, in that a few times in my life I've just been being my stubborn, headstrong, fiercely intellectually independent, and paradoxically public-speaking-enjoying self, and a woman has taken note of this and found me attractive when I'm being what I consider to be the best version of myself.
So, perhaps "Just be yourself," and "be confident," really were the best pieces of dating advice, because the best relationships come from authentic attraction to personality.
It's just that this assumes that "yourself" is attractive or impressive in some way, and additionally is horribly mismatched to a world in which men and women are less and less interacting organically, in the real world, where real personalities and authentic strengths are present. The end result is, well, the Game.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
When I went to school there, there would be ads in the Pitt News advertising that you could rent a room in South Oakland for $200-300 a month. My general sense was not that it was a slum or anything, but that the general behavior of college-age people made it such that it made no sense to live there if you were older than 23 or so. I had several classmates who rented places there and would throw parties on the weekend. The general model was that you would pay $5, they would give you a red cup, there was a keg in the kitchen, and you would fit about, idk, maybe 100-150 people, into a 2 bedroom row house. The music blared and you couldn’t hold a conversation, then the neighbors, quite reasonably, would call the police. The police would show up and everyone would scamper away through a back alley.
I think I might have been to 4 or 5 parties that fit that description before deciding it wasn’t my scene and spending my weekend evenings doing other things. My general sense from walking around is that there were several parties like that per block in South Oakland on your typical Friday and Saturday evenings. The idea of actually living there as a college-age student didn’t appeal to me at all; the idea of some poor adult living amongst that, idk, it struck me as insane back then, and it still does.
Peak college town energy, lol.
I went to a public uni with a similar vibe. Partying was never my scene, but you could tell that it was the scene for the whole campus. I ended up often just going home or (after we started dating) hanging out with my girlfriend on the weekends. I really enjoyed the academics there and I met many profs I got along with well, but the social scene of campus was so draining, the mix of preppy and normie, I guess. I ended up transferring somewhere closer to home after a mental health crisis. Sometimes I joke that it was the Tale of Two Cities time in my life: the best and the worst of times. Sometimes I wish I could have the optimism of that era back.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
I'm in a similar boat to cablethrowaway. What things on a resume would help someone stand out?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
The problem that affects young people with career searches is the same problem that affects dating: the proliferation of internet matching has made automated, algorithmized, and impersonal selection not only the default, but the preference. This creates a market where you don't just have to compete with those in your social circle -- you have to compete with everyone who has access to the internet. Boomers like to talk about "meeting people in person," and "submitting your application in person," but neither works today. Increasingly employers will laugh at the idea of submitting a paper resume, just as women will increasingly give you dirty looks if you try to ask them out in person (even if its an appropriate situation in which to do so).
Both have become a selector's (read: employer's) market, and those are always immensely painful for selectees, particularly in that they're thralls to the algorithms and the AI that are used to delineate the worthy from the unworthy. And, of course, to the dehumanization that being a PDF or a set of stock photos and a bio does to oneself. But the powerful prefer it this way, where hiring can be made impersonal and optimized -- and therefore any negative feelings that come with active rejection can be minimized. Illegibility is strength.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
To some extent, although from inside my personal experience is less about who was worthy, and more about who could have a thing done, in a way that worked successfully. I haven't exactly had an easy or good time in gay dating spaces. But I don't get the same 'learn a foreign language' feeling.
Hm. I guess this is one of the lines in your posts that I find hard to parse... could you expand on what you mean, with the "who could have a thing done" thing?
you get some chasers that think that trans-femininity is going to mean a ultra-submissive barefoot-and-in-kitchen trad-wifing that doesn't seem to actually be that desired by that many trans women
Yeah - that's what I was gesturing at with the "cis women are bitches, I'm going to date a *trans-*woman" protests. I think there's some level of belief some folks have, as in the motte post I quoted, that dating trans women is a kind of Konami code to unlock "super extra real hardcore femininity mode" and get the goods that cis women aren't giving them.
That said -- I recall once reading a reddit thread where a trans person actually endorsed that framing to a degree, to many upvotes. I tried to find it, but alas I couldn't. If I recall correctly, it went something like:
We should assume that as the cis dating world grows increasingly rough, that some portion of straight men who are open to dating trans women will start seeking us out. The best relationship I've had in my life started because I met a guy on grindr who said he was a straight man only looking for trans women.
That was definitely surprising, and went contrary to my understanding of how such things tend to go.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them; and secondly, just getting out and touching grass.
I think this is the "draw the rest of the owl" kind of problem.
Another issue is that a lot of people who grow up with these sorts of traits have trouble making friends, especially in youth. I think the cause of the kind of fantasy we're talking about is a disconnect from the social world as much as from the physical one, and atypical traits make that more difficult. Motion/body disconnect is often part of a syndrome with social phobia; I myself often have experienced a kind of hyper-body awareness in certain social situations that are particularly anxiety-provoking, where you kind of move manually and are dissociated from the normal coherence of your body, like when you consciously start to control your breathing -- as you are now, that I've mentioned it. That's common among people with social phobia.
I think masculinity is fundamentally a good thing, but I think there is a real tension between the broad male phenome -- the sum of all the ways in which men are like -- and various models of masculinity. A common underlying set of traits is hierarchical competition, or resource provision, or physical strength... but the issue is that many, if not most, of the ways we describe the social role of men are in some sense zero sum, and in such an environment there will be social defeat. IMO, a great deal of the extremely online stuff we see is caused by people who have suffered (or perceive themselves to have suffered) social defeat trying in some sense to construct a social hierarchy where they can win. See, for instance, NEETs playing competitive online games.
I think the main issue with any model of masculinity is that it's typically enforced in one of two ways: the carrot of women's attention, and the stick of men's violence. You can see that, for instance, in the military, where boot camps, strict regimentation, and obsessive hierarchicalism force men into a mold. In World War I, the British government ran a program allied with prominent suffragettes in which women gave unenlisted men white feathers in a shame ritual calling them cowards. I hold that one of the major reasons the USA became unable to run a successful conscription campaign for the Vietnam War is that the military lost the support of young women, who began rewarding rebels against the system with adulation for their courage. The same I think is true of gang violence in minority neighborhoods; men enforce compliance with guns, and, often, the women from these communities reward status in organized crime with attention. You get from men what men enforce and women reward.
So any model of masculinity and positive male role models have to have women and girls on board. The issue is that, in the West, it's not clear what women and girls are on board with, and in fact the dominant social mode of discussions of masculinity are to discuss its abberations and possibility for harm, or occasionally to praise men for doing things according to what women desire of them (and not praising them for being masculine on its own terms). The people who do talk about masculinity on its own terms are often selling their own inane fantasy, like the bodybuilder RAW MEAT influencers. The social inflection behind "man" as a category is incredibly negative; it's no wonder to me that some young men are going, "well, that's not me! Teehee!"
I don't think it's just about wanting to be with women, but I also think the kinds of men we're talking about place a high premium on being seen as fundamentally good by women; the "creep" designation, in a sense the white feather of the day, carries so much stigma precisely because "being a threat to women" is considered deeply wrong by both men and women writ large, for good reasons. But I think young men feel like there's no stable and broadly-recognized way to do this. Sometimes religious subcultures do a better job at this than the secular world -- I often noted when I spent time with the young Catholics group at my college that the men and women got along much better than those outside, and generally considered each other trustworthy and worthy of respect -- but it's not guaranteed, and in a world where the Church is optional as a social institution and increasingly at odds with secular assumptions, "just leaving" is an option that many people are going to take. As, obviously, transitioners tend to do.
The grass, of course, is never greener on the other side. I never struggled with gender identity issues -- clearly I'm a man, the idea of being a woman seems nebulous and foreign to me, and has no appeal. I know enough from having female friends that women are entangled in their own thorny world of backstabbing and status competition about which I'm not jealous. Even if someone could transition perfectly, magically, I don't think that men would find women's social world astounding or grand in the way they imagine.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
If you've ever lucid dreamed (I haven't, sadly) then that demonstrates the ability to be aware and at least partially conscious during REM sleep.
I've never lucid dreamed, but I do experience vivid dreams in a REM state and would describe it as a variation of consciousness. I usually forget my dreams, but immediately after waking I can typically remember the whole narrative experience of a dream, which felt real while I was in it. I tend to think of REM as a state of consciousness where sensory input is turned off, things that would set off "this isn't normal" alarms are somehow disabled, and conscious awareness is redirected to... randomness? emotionally unprocessed experiences? fears? Something like that.
With how vivid my dreams are I do experience them as places where I am making decisions, they're just decisions that are enthralled to the content of the dream. Lucid dreaming is the ability to know you're dreaming, and thus control the content of the dream to an extent.
I don't know how that lines up with current neuroscience, but that's my impression of how my own dreams work.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
Alex was adrift. He often misunderstood social cues, and his habit of talking like a college professor made him seem pedantic.
Young men such as Alex tend to prize autonomy, be it intellectual, creative, or physical: they react badly to being reined in.
Certainly, for jockish boys and the girls on the cheerleading squad, the purported gender/sex distinction isn’t of any particular interest. By contrast, many of the smart kids, gamers and hobbyists who spend a lot of time inside their own minds, may already be aware that they don’t quite fit in, and often being bored and underchallenged, have more time to spend on the abstract mental game of “What if?”
There’s a useful word in the German language, fachidiot, that describes a particular kind of cleverness. The first syllable, fach, translates to “subject” or “field of study,” as well as “drawer,” implying a distinct category of knowledge. The second part means—well, it means “idiot.” Fachidioten are specialists who can describe in mesmerizing detail the many reasons for the collapse of Byzantium, or the mechanics of pasteurization, or the influence of African rhythms on the various musicological substrata of modern jazz. Yet while they hold forth on such arcana, a petty thief walking past might ask the Fachidiot for his phone, just so he can “make a quick call,” and the Fachidiot will cheerfully oblige. When the parents I spoke with impress upon me how gifted their children are, they are not suggesting to me that they are intellectually overbearing or arrogant. Just the opposite: Many of them are keen to stress that their boys couldn’t successfully make a doctor’s appointment, or catch the right bus. As Rosalee puts it, “He couldn’t even tie his laces.”
As a toddler, he burst into tears in a diner because the ceiling fan wasn’t turned on. Ceiling fans are machines; machines should work; and the fact that it was just sitting there doing nothing indicated that the world had somehow fallen ever so slightly into disrepair.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
Never considered gender transition, though. I think my cohort was a bit too old for that. I'm also enough of a weirdo that I'm suspicious of putting myself in any category, even the weird ones, which I guess was protective.
What I'm confused by is MSM who prefer "feminine" men. Naively, you'd expect that they'd want the most masculine gay men they could find. If you like femininity that much, why not just sleep with women? Why seem out "passing" transwomen or ladyboys or twinks or...
find it easier to sleep with other men. Solve for the equilibrium.
I think you came to the answer on your own.
Another element that 2rafa doesn't mention, but I think gestures in the direction of, is the whore/madonna split. There's some fraction of bisexual men who see women as beautiful angels deserving of devotion, nothing as icky as raw sexual lust, but see twinks/femboys/trans women as essentially fallen women by default, and therefore worthy of sexual instrumentalization. Add to that the fact that the folks in this group are often unironically eager for sexual instrumentalization in a way only a minority of cis women are (and even then, they need foreplay and trust first), and well, the opportunity to derive gains from trade (my favorite of all Scott's jokes) emerges.
As self_made_human has realized, getting sexual attention from gay men is trivial, and so is both easy to obtain and less valuable per-interaction. So madonna/whoring your mindset and searching for disposable sexual attention from men (whores) while seeking out reliable partnership with women (madonnas) is something you can do, if you're so inclined.
The other thing is that gay men, particularly ones who are interested in companionship more than disposability, often feel trapped by the expectations of gay dating, and are jealous of straight men for whom long-term commitment, exclusivity, and broad social acceptance feel like table stakes. So bisexual men can be "traitors": taking from gay men whatever they can get from them and then fleeing to the arms of a woman when one arises.
This has been somewhat sexualized lately, with the "femboy bf"/"femboy hooters" meme culture which prompts great recrimination in the ongoing femininine-man/trans-woman civil war, but of course that also comes with the corollary memes of "breaking up with my femboy bf because I met a real woman." (I have no idea what the actual prevalence of this stuff is, I'm just way too extremely online.)
Intriguingly, this pattern seems to mirror many complaints about women's sexual behavior from men, and women's complaints about the sexual behavior of extremely attractive straight men: if sexual attention is abundant, using it for temporary affirmation while utterly disposing of your partners' interests and needs is a real possibility.
There's also a bit of the "cis women are so awful, hoeflation is abysmal, women are terrible whores who don't know how to please a man" -- I'm not pulling these out of my own head, these are things I've been told by people in this orbit -- both on the offering and the receiving end of this kind of transaction. There's an element to this subculture that's kind of the male version of political lesbianism.
This very dynamic actually showed up on the motte once, several months ago:
As dating grows more complex, and sometimes risky for men, we’re seeing the rise of alternatives: AI girlfriends, VR porn, sex robots. Add to that a growing visibility of trans women in romantic spaces, and a strange new question emerges:
What happens when women can no longer command attention?
I think of this memeplex as the "strong independent man don't need no woman" imaginary rebellion, but of course it involves consorting with men, because for these guys somebody's gotta appease the sexual appetite they're angry at women for not satisfying.
As I wrote back then:
Sometimes straight men like to proclaim, "maybe I will go gay!" like a kind of protest, same way that women annoyed with men sometimes start investigating political lesbianism, but same-sex pairings are just different in important ways due to biological and cultural factors. The grass is rarely greener on the other side. Fantasies aren't going to save you, and trans women aren’t your fantasy. They’d be the first people to tell you that.
Almost uniformly, trans women of the HSTS/transmedical bent are massively and uncompromisingly angry about the whole thing, and a decent amount of the discourse around trans chasers is trying to imprecisely talk about this dynamic. Obviously, "you're my substitute for a real woman because real women are hoes and I'm looking for the poophole loophole" isn't exactly what this demographic has in mind when they talk about wanting romantic attention from men. In particular, they tend to strongly dislike gay culture, to which this dynamic is directly adjacent, and if you'll excuse a purile pun, into which it penetrates without commitment.
Some fraction, however, of femboys, crossdressers, and twinks are more than happy to play along with it though -- especially if it means they pull a straight man. Or a "straight" man.
(AGPs, however, are obviously not particularly interested in men anyway, and themselves have kind of a madonna/whore thing going on -- where women are madonnas, and men are whores, and they wanna be madonna: "like a virgin." Some of your confusion may have to do with the fact that the West often glorifies and literally angelifies women as innocent and fundamentally decent, in ways that the rest of the world doesn't, and we're now dealing with the cultural fallout of a world in which this is colliding with women attaining positions of power.)
Whenever this discussion topic comes up, I always wish I had a "summon gattsuru" button. I usually understand... at least half of his posts, but on this topic he's far more familiar with the terrain than I am.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
Ok, the fact that she shared an obviously staged Xbox account is a hilarious unforced error, like Elizabeth Warren getting the genetic ancestry test. They realize she has a perception problem, but instead of just... ignoring it, as one of the most powerful corporations in the world, they insisted on trying to appeal to it. They legitimately could go, "she's not from gaming, but she's a good leader, and we think she's the best for the role," but instead they have to try to make up word salad about gaming passion and fabricate a record of gaming. Gamers are going to hate Microsoft no matter what they do, it's just in the culture, why are they trying to appeal to them? Make some good games and it won't matter whether a trained seal is in charge of the gaming division.
I'm very much a cis male, but I do find this relatable. In some ways the impulses of male sexuality are annoying and distracting rather than fulfilling.
But in my case there are a lot of hypotheses that can easily explain it without reference to an etiological mismatch: religious upbringing, teenage dissatisfaction, but especially being inundated with feminist memes from tumblr when I was young, that have me walking on eggshells to know what's helpful. In a sense you could say that every superegoistic (to borrow without endorsement a Freudian term) influence on me has been about how my sexuality could go wrong, so it's very, very hard for me to intuitively know where it could go right. It's a lot easier to eject sexuality from your conception of the self if you see it as corrupting rather than enlivening. Repression and/or viewing sexuality as egodystonic seems like a common result of that kind of pressure, as it sometimes is for me.
I do wonder if some of the 'flight from masculinity' you talked about some men having has to do with that; the male sexual role asks much, and in modern times with limited and radically contradictory guidance, and I think it's much harder for men these days to understand who they're supposed to be than it might have been in the past. I feel like I have to be a different man to different people, and in particular how I have to relate to women romantically and -- especially -- in the bedroom in order to please them is profoundly distinct from how I am in every other avenue of my life. I have a hard time integrating those things. I actually think this is much more common than you're suggesting.
I've been meaning to write an effortpost on how male sexuality and male romanticism align or sometimes don't align, but I'm often reluctant because, as much as my posts here are highly confessional, I worry about exposing too much of my internal gears to culture war analysis, and anyway I'm concerned about reinforcing the belief that men are walking sex pests whose sexuality is inherently disordered rather than simply a biological urge that you can deal with in a healthy or an unhealthy way.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
this sexualized MTF social contagion disproportionately affects men for whom both the HSTS and AGP pitches have meaningful appeal
The technical term for this cluster is “sissy.” Don’t look this up unless you’re looking for NSFW content.
This kind of man exists in very high numbers, they just aren’t open about it. Go on Grindr and you’ll find that there’s no shortage of “discrete” tops who love twinks and femboys, and not enough supply to meet the demand.
The general complaint among the, uh, supply is that the demand is high, but extremely low-quality, even by gay hookup culture standards of quality, precisely because the demand is from people who are principally heterosexual, and probably have deep roots in heterosexual culture -- including, possibly, a wife. Therefore they're exceptionally flaky/indifferent/uncertain, leading to the kind of debasement I discussed in my other reply to you as a desperate attempt to lock-down any reasonably qualified leads. So I'm not sure this is a lopsided market in the way you're suggesting; it's more of a matching market where neither side seems to be happy. Cf all other dating environments.
However, by far the most common kind of pairing you find for this type of person is actually femme-to-femme, both because the masculine options are so low-quality, and because some meaningful fraction of this group is bisexual or AGP. In our earlier discussion on this topic, I was talking about this sub-population; when you assumed I was talking about transmasc-transfemme pairings, I was actually confused! When you said that transitioning "is weirdly common among men willing to openly date trans women," well, that wasn't surprising or confusing at all to me, and it was interesting to see that it was confusing to you.
IMO, trans women who try to date men are, for obvious reasons, often pulling from the pool Blanchard described as "gynandromorphophiles", which are often also AGP. Gender transitioning, for this pool of individuals, is often both appealing in the AGP sense, and appealing in the sense that it gives them "skin in the game" that establishes cred among bisexual trans women who treat cis men with suspicion.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
Blanchard’s theory is true in the sense that AGP and HSTS populations exist, but it’s overly reductive in the sense that they’re not the only categories of trans people out there. Of course, it was more accurate than the previous view at the time which would lump them all together in a single one.
I'm curious, what would your typologies of trans people look like, if you were to describe the different categories you've seen?
Men who are sexually into wearing female clothing and find the idea of being a woman erotic have probably been around since the earliest proto civilisations (see François-Timoléon de Choisy, who probably lied about seeing the royal family dressed as a woman, but not about being aroused by wearing a corset).
One thing that I often like to note is that the Blanchard typology misses an important detail, which is that "men who find the idea of being a woman erotic" isn't exclusively a thing for men attracted to women; it's in fact extremely common among men attracted to men. So the idea of lust for women being misdirected into self-lust for the state of being a woman has never struck me as an exhaustive explanation for the crossdresser-to-trans pipeline, or even the primary one.
I think there's a mode that's almost something akin to vagina-envy, where the default attraction for most men is to women, and therefore attaining womanhood is a means of becoming the archetypal appeal to the male gaze. I've certainly known people who've seemed to fit that bill.
That said, I don't know that the general public would find this cluster more sympathetic than the AGPs -- there are often a lot of immensely sexist assumptions baked into their idea of what attaining womanhood to appeal to the male gaze would look like. You know, "I exist to serve men, my body is a means of satisfaction for men," often combined with an intense desire to appeal to bisexual or bicurious men by insisting on their willingness to debase themselves for men in ways cis women will not. What exactly that debasement might entail is left as an exercise for the reader.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
others had always been nerds (e.g. one had also been a NASA mission control specialist)
Man, the word "control" there really changes the significance of this sentence.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
9d ago
Most girls besides online too much feminists want some male glaze.
Hm. Intentional or typo?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
Yeah, in the US with the presidential system the main election people care about is the presidential electors; legislative elections take a back-seat and typically win by riding coattails in straight-party voting. In parliamentary systems I presume “which party did you vote for?” would be the more significant question. Something like “how do you feel about gay marriage?” feels less intrusive to me, I could see that coming up in a reasonable conversation. The entire point of the voting question is specifically to interrogate polling booth behavior, not political values (which is why I find it so offensive — I’ve voted for Andy Griffith, my mother, Walter White, and Rishi Sunak for various local elections, my political values don’t fit into a party).
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
Unfortunately lots of people are convinced that the country is falling actively into dictatorship and the question is roughly like asking if you’re a collaborator in occupied France. That’s where people’s heads are at.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
I will often go on record defending the good name of men from criticism, but I think men are generally more commitment-phobic than women. That is all it takes to convince women that men are commitment-phobic, because they’re comparing them to themselves and not to a hypothetical ideal.
For market reasons, a lot of men become attached to women they consider less than their ideal, and likewise for market reasons said women try to lock down the higher-than-expected man who’s Just Not That Into Her. Men also have a hard time with a commitment to monogamy, because they see it as a lot to promise (and a lot to expect from) one lady in particular.
It’s relatively common for women to end up in long term relationships with guys they’d wish would move more quickly. Actually if your partner never wishes to move more quickly than you as a man, that’s a red flag that She’s Not That Into You.
It’s just a pretty clear fact to me that, as a population, women move more clearly towards commitment and men just don’t, setting aside if he’s madly in love with her, then all bets are off.
That said, I also am often disappointed that the perspective I bring about what it’s like to be a man is often unacknowledged by women in internet discussions, but that just is what it is. Women in my personal life are occasionally able to have a real discussion about gender roles and experiences, and I learn more from that anyway.
How a woman regards your perspective on gender roles as a man is highly dependent upon how she perceives you, and men who comment critically on them on the internet start with a negative perception score which takes a lot to undo, because it’s perceived as being essentially sour grapes. “If he were actually a decent man,” they imagine, “he wouldn’t have so much to complain about.” To be fair, a ton of men complaining about dating on the internet is sour grapes and turns nasty pretty quickly.
But it’s still disappointing when I try hard to understand the perspective of women and state my concerns in a way that concedes ground and establishes good will, and then receive negativity or nothing in return. I think a positive way forward has to begin with mutual understanding and patience, but it’s often my impression that women aren’t willing to understand or have patience for men they consider low-status — and, after all, high-status men don’t need mutual understanding and patience, they already have status.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
I’ve also had a similar experience. I believe the “who did you vote for?” question is the updated progressive’s version of trying to intelligently discover your values; they believe it’s the question that you can’t dodge without revealing you’re a Trump supporter. They earnestly believe “I did not vote” is code for “I voted for Trump and I’m trying to hide it,” which explains the nasty reaction, particularly with how you tried to explain it.
That said, I’ve often wondered what would happen if you said something like “I don’t vote because there is no ethical political participation under capitalism, I work in my community to create change using syndicalist methods, and I reject the fascist-capitalist method of false representative democracy,” and whether said progressive girl would give a similar kind of disgust face, or look on you with awe. I wouldn’t lie to someone to sleep with them, but the temptation to lie to troll someone is real.
Ultimately, when someone asks this question, you’ve already lost. I think if someone is that neurotic about political persuasion, it’s unlikely they’d be a stable person to befriend anyway. There’s a long tradition of progressive women going, “I’ve been seeing this guy for months and he’s so nice and we have fun together, but I found out yesterday he voted for Trump, should I murder him or just break up with him?” They consider it tantamount to an undisclosed felony conviction, and acknowledge no legitimate or strategic reasons why someone might have voted for him. They believe voting for him is an endorsement of his personal behavior and misconduct, like anyone who voted for Trump is liable to start grabbing random women by the pussy at any moment. To them, it’s better to reject anyone who doesn’t clearly endorse the Democratic Party, because they believe Republican men are out to assault them. TDS is strong.
Someone who thinks like that seems like an awful friend and a worse partner. So I’d say she did you a favor.
I don’t really understand your point, or what you’re trying to say. I care about and love the women in my life a great deal. I empathize seriously with the experiences of victims of sexual abuse, and in fact I find their stories hard to encounter because I feel such anger and outrage at the loss of self-possession and immense sense of shame and guilt that survivors struggle to overcome. It’s evil, plain and simple.
The reason it’s not a subject of debate is just what you said last: there’s no toxoplasmosa. It was a horrible crime and the guilty were sentenced.
You seem, at least to me, to be trying to argue from this case that heterosexual love is impossible, or that heterosexuality is inherently corrupting. Well, actually, you said “male sexuality.” That’s interesting.
Your profile hasn’t seen any posts in two years, and in one of the final posts before this valentine’s post you wrote this:
I bring these examples up not to harangue men but to explicitly set aside the discourse about romantic relationships, in which most men and women seem happy to accept a certain asymmetry. A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy. As a spergy gay man, I don't have a dog in this fight, if it is a fight, but I do find explicit commentary on the expectations of gendered social interaction helpful (and entertaining).
Do you believe that love between gay men is possible? Is lesbian love possible?
Both, as I’m sure you know, have cultures of asymmetry and opposites, of masc tops and femme bottoms and dalliances with much older, wealthier men and daddy kinks, of butch lesbians and lipstick lesbians. Is gay love fairer than straight love to you?
Asymmetry coexists with mutual desire all the time, and with every orientation. And so, of course, does abuse and sexual assault. Love exists in spite of the evil of this world, and indeed sexual tenderness exists in concert with the impulses of male sexuality.
Most men are driven by a desire not only to please themselves through sex but to please their partners as well. I don’t doubt that, as a gay man, you are highly familiar with gay men who would rather give head than receive it; you should understand that the desire to please your sex partner exists among straight men as well. Most men highly enjoy sex noises and dirty talk from their partners, as a sign of that dirty phrase, “enthusiastic consent”, and of mutual pleasure. There could be no jokes about women faking orgasms if men did not find the idea of women faking orgasms to be Ego-destroying. Men overwhelmingly find the idea of sex with an unconscious person unarousing, in addition to morally unconscionable.
I guess I wonder what drives you to believe that male sexuality is inherently corrupting, instead of merely a force that can be used for good as well as bad — obviously, in this case, for bad. Have you ever fallen in love with someone, and wanted more than anything their happiness? Have you ever desired sex with someone out of a desire for unity with them, to make them feel good, to be as close with them as physically and emotionally possible? These are all compatible with the intensity of raw, undifferentiated male desire, and if you might allow me to say, far more erotic than mere lust.
My understanding is that this comes under fire by the GC people Edit: I meant strict self-ID people because it means that passing is actually highly relevant to how you're treated, and a combination of late transition/no money for treatments/lack of self confidence/depression makes that seem like an oppressive obstacle. I get their point but I guess it's always been obvious to me that in the real world passing is eminently important, and the reality is that everyone's identity (on every axis) is a negotiation between them and society. My attitude's always been: I'm fine using your preferred pronouns if that makes you feel better, but can you please make an attempt to help me out?
I wouldn't say this is quite accurate. I'm technically in the zoomer bucket, and can't remember 9/11, but I absolutely remember a time with more optimism than we have now. Perhaps it's just that I grew up in a conservative part of the US, but the George W. Bush hate especially after Iraq just wasn't really present in my childhood. He was kind of buffonish sometimes, but obviously all my evangelical Republican family members loved him. I remember being impacted by the great recession, but I was young enough that it didn't seem to matter very much. The idea of patriotism was just real, people believed in it.
And even as I grew older, Obama's election was a moment of massive optimism on the left and center, a black guy named "Osama" "Obama" was elected president of the United States.
The smartphone (and before that the iPod) were actually a big part of the optimism of the time. We remember these changes as negative, but people were massively excited about them at the time in a way they just aren't for technological changes today.
I place the turning point USA around the time that the Black Lives Matter movement started, that's where the left abandoned the narrative of Obama being the signpost of full racial integration and brotherhood. The modern culture war can be traced back to that, IMO. Feminism and gamergate and that kind of stuff were fellow travelers, but around that time that stuff was just a few weird girls on Tumblr and hadn't hit the mainstream yet. I guess in some sense it never did, I can't imagine the left legitimately scrawling "KILL ALL MEN" in all caps like an Umbridge punishment the way the Tumblrinas used to do.
where harsh truths conflict with what their elders told them the world should be
I guess in some ways this was true, particularly as we look at prices for major expenses. But I'll say that my elders are just as flabbergasted at cost disease in healthcare and ballooning house prices as any young person. My parents are shocked at how much the family home is worth, and my mom is kind of a YIMBY.
But the big thing I think that's changed is just social trust. My dad was a hippie back in the day, and hasn't gotten a raise as an associate professor in a decade; he's no evangelist for institutional loyalty. My mom is, but she trusts everyone, so that's just her personality.
I actually think the boomers have a good counterpoint when they say that young people just aren't willing to do low-tier work and consider a hard day's labor beneath them. I think that's true. I think about the kinds of things my dad put up with before he got hired as a professor -- 12 hour days, cleaning buildings in the middle of the night, saving all week to buy a movie ticket as his weekly entertainment. I'm pretty sure zoomers would call that a human rights abuse. But many, many boomers did things like that.
If there's one thing where I feel resentment about the scripts I was handed not fitting reality, it's that the depictions of flirting and romance in popular media were almost calculatedly misleading about how you actually develop a relationship with a woman. Lots of friends-to-lovers arcs and will-they-or-won't-they nonsense. That makes for good TV. But real relationships usually require some level of approach and some kind of status display, even if we're polite and we don't call it that.
I think a lot of our intimacy crises kind of go back to that, we never taught young men how to flirt and young women how to intelligently discern flirting from offense, and hence we're in a place where lots of young people don't know how the fundamental human mating ritual is supposed to work and either fear it or smash through it like a bull in a China shop. I guess we assumed it's instinctual -- it isn't. Turns out our prefrontal cortexes were actually a load-bearing part of human reproduction after all.
If culture as a whole doesn't teach this, that's how you end up with the PUA subculture and redpill bros doing it. They're winning the social game among young men because they actually give actionable information about how to achieve an intimate relation with a woman. The honest truth is that it's not so different to court a woman passionately as it is to seduce her, at least in terms of the feelings of attraction and interest you have to create in her for it to happen.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
18d ago
There's absolutely a lot of Christian- or ex-Christian people who will recall the Song of the Cebu, the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, or the Hairbrush Song.
I think listing iconic VeggieTales songs without reference to the Cheeseburger song is a crime.
I think that’s fair — the instigating “this person is impressive” feeling can be after you’re already aware of someone, but not close with them. Looking back, I don’t recall any flirtations like that, so I guess that’s my blind spot.
That said, I think my point is a little more subtle; I suspect that with many of your friends in those relationships, there was some initial level of spark or interest or “this guy is attractive/high status” even before the flirting started. I’m not a mind reader, and I could be dead wrong.
If you naively look at my dating history, you’d probably say the same about mine — in all cases I knew the person for at least a bit before we started dating. But, in hindsight, it was clear that attraction existed from the beginning. It’s possible that some level of “getting to know you” was necessary — just not nearly as much as I let play out, either because I was scared or because I was ignorant.
I’m mostly picking on myself here, as my experience is that I often didn’t act on my romantic interest after signals of mutual attraction were present, either because I couldn’t read them, or felt like I hadn’t ‘earned’ any kind of attraction by doing something bold.
But what you definitely can’t do is be unimpressive, boring, standard, and ‘merely nice’, and expect any attraction to develop. Most guys who are of the “get to know someone for a bit before you express romantic interest” perspective are of that type, and often naively believe that their presence or emotional availability expresses their romantic potential. It doesn’t.
That’s my main point: impression has to come before relation.
Dating apps are definitely an unfortunate means of meeting someone, because a photo reel and a short bio does not a person make. Nevertheless some people find a great partner there, I just honestly never tried because I believed they were just hookup apps, and by the time I realized people were meeting their spouses on there I was already in a happy LTR by the grace of almighty God. Maybe telling a room full of atheists that the US is a Christian nation was a meritorious act, I don’t know.
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