Terracotta
1d ago
(we have taxed their virtue to redistribute it to rapist men and stupid women, and now wise men don't want to exercise that virtue or see doing so as too risky? And now they have anxiety and won't come out of their room(s)? couldn't have seen that coming).
Sure, there seems to have been a cohort of hyper-conscientious Millennial men of ~Scott Alexander age that got traumatized by Title IX culture and now complain about it. But those men are now aging out of family-starting age, anyway. And Title IX was never actually about gender relations, just about a parasite class of university administrators finding an excuse to justify swelling their retinues.
I don't see grounds for presuming that "teaching men not to rape" has created any more recent crop of hikikomori-style dropouts, if that's what you're arguing. I haven't heard a Zoomer say they didn't want to date because rape accusations, just that dating feels awkward, is a PITA and they worry the girl would be judging them. I can spin about ten different just-so stories for why they might increasingly express those feelings, but "because they were taught not to rape" is pretty low in the plausibility ranking. Certainly it's far below "too little free play as kids, now permanently anti-social"; porn fucking up sexual desire and behavior; Netflix, weed and videogames fucking up attention and motivation; collapsing economy fucking up developmental pathways; anti-family culture fucking up availability of role models; and youth mental-health memetics destigmatizing "I can't, I have anxiety" as a life narrative.
On the other hand, assuming that Anti-Rape-Culture Did It means you can blame the whole thing on girls being so darn sensitive, so there's that.
Terracotta
1d ago
We need to let parents internalize the full value of their children by ending government-mandated transfers of labor to freeriders by ending medicare and social security. That's the situation we're in: everything about our society is geared around socializing the benefits of motherhood while privatizing the costs. All we need to do to get above replacement fertility is to just stop doing that.
So you'd be cool with your mom taking a cut of your paycheck? Interesting plan. Unfortunately, I'm not sure who would be the constituency, given that professedly people want above-replacement fertility because of the need to prop up Social Security and Medicare.** What would be the point of draconian policy if the community weren't planning to socialize the benefits?
**Although the back-to-the-kitchen arm of the discourse never seems to consider that you start by deliberately deactivating a large chunk of your current taxpaying workers, in exchange for a nebulous promise of additional workers two decades down the road. Unless the stay-at-home mom happens to have daughters, in which case her sacrifice is in vain for forty years until one of them pumps out a son.
Terracotta
1d ago
Experience in the military is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to carry out orders while working as a team under time pressure-- a.k.a, most well-paying jobs.
Really? Slavishly following orders and following repetitive protocols under conditions of extreme physical stress sounds more like McDonalds jobs to me. And one could argue that running a household with small children is far better preparation for C-suite roles that require big-picture strategy, critical thinking about efficient use of limited resources, thoughtful design of people-friendly processes and institutional structures, etc. But both sides are just special pleading, because of course there are many military tasks and many mom tasks that will cross-apply to any given job, and many others that won't. The point of preferential hiring is not that the person is inherently more qualified for every position; it's that their resume gap was undertaken in order to render something of value to the public, so they shouldn't be disadvantaged for it versus a similarly-qualified person who didn't serve.
But I'm getting from your comment that you pretty much agree that mothers should be disadvantaged in hiring? The claim about how women with children should be unhireable lest they eventually bear more children makes no sense unless you're rationalizing a general sense of "moms, eeeeeeew": men could similarly acquire health problems or decide to become stay-at-home dads at any time, and statistically a childless man is far likelier than a female hire to eventually create expensive workplace issues through drug and alcohol problems, running-off-with-a-floozy problems, white-collar or violent-crime problems. But better to hire Schroedinger's embezzling coke addict than... a lady who's at some point changed a diaper, I guess. On account of the mom ick.
So yeah, this is kind of an illustration of the problem: if raising children well is not respectable professional labor, just base "caretaking," and if moreover being a mom at any point condemns you to be fit for nothing but caretaking scutwork jobs ever after, regardless of your pre-childbearing education and professional skills, then it's no wonder young women get nervous about the tradeoffs involved. Seems like a little open-mindness would fix the whole thing, but I guess there must be a lot of people who don't respect their moms.
Force employers to disregard that the fact that having less experience and less availability to work makes someone worse at their jobs? In the best case, they'll route around you by just being more bigoted. In the worst case, every business collapses.
This seems like an unnecessarily fatalist take on an already very solved problem. We already have working structures to encourage people to enter the military while ensuring that their time in service won't work against their employment prospects when they return. Vets are also people who have not necessarily been gaining experience that's 100% relevant to the civilian workplace experience during their time away, but who have been building job-adjacent skills and demonstrating conscientiousness while away, as well as sacrificing pleasure to serve the greater good. I haven't noticed that mild preferential hiring standards for vets have caused every business to collapse, and employers aren't forced to give vets credit for more experience than they possess, just forced not to use their work gap to freeze them out versus other similarly-experienced candidates. It seems to me that most mid-20s professional women leaving the workplace to raise young children would be happy simply to reenter at the same step on the ladder, the way veterans get to; what I've seen in practice is that employers just arbitrarily won't even consider them, so they have a terrible time reentering at all.
If preferential hiring for returning moms seems like an unthinkable drain on productivity while you don't feel the same way for returning vets (notwithstanding high rates of PTSD, etc., etc. that make vets at least as empirically risky to hire), then I think that intuition merits some extra scrutiny. Is it possible that we don't really believe increasing the TFR is actually a contribution to the public good, the way bombing villages in Afghanistan was? In which case, it's a fair question why that same TFR would then require public investment in robot wombs.
Or is it possible that we don't actually believe that raising small children is a respect-worthy task for a talented person to spend time on, the sort of thing that should look good on a resume the way military service does? In which case, wouldn't the feminists be correct that people pushing momhood are mostly doing it as a way to demean women?
Terracotta
2d ago
I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.
I know plenty of mid-20s women who would love to find a kind, conscientious guy to have three kids with, followed by a nice Boomer-style dual-career middle age. I know absolutely no real-life girlbosses wishing someone else would pop eggs into a slow cooker so they could get back to those late-running meetings with Marketing. Thus, the fact that the discourse keeps presuming the latter rather than the former feels like an artificial move to guide the conversation to a place it wouldn't normally go.
Terracotta
2d ago
Except that people in medieval oral cultures had a ton of durable physical metis around complex daily life tasks, exploiting the natural environment, etc., which our peasantry lacks. Instead, your average semi-illiterate remedial math student has that same mental real estate devoted to... I guess, half-remembered sitcom plots, Vine memes, videogame cheat codes and obsolete Netflix navigation structures?
Maybe that doesn't matter; I don't know why it should be better to understand how to hunt a rabbit, skin, cook and eat it, or grow barley from scratch, than to know a bunch of 2000s-era Disney Channel theme songs and how to achieve a middling Fortnite score. One does feel viscerally more freeing than the other, though.
Terracotta
2d ago
I've only ever encountered birth rate concerns in the predictable context of "p.s. they should get out of my workplace and onto my dick"-type sentiments, but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.
Tinfoil-hat read is that the whole fertility panic was deliberately astroturfed on Twitter as a way to lay the groundwork for "....so this is why we need to invest heavily in artificial wombs," with incels as useful water-carriers for the interim messaging. I can certainly think of entities who'd plausibly want to push that based on stated values, but speculating about end goals gets too bizarre to waste much time on.
Terracotta
7d ago
So why keep going, if not for some purpose? For some reason to keep going through this miserable existence, instead of just ending my suffering now? But I don't have one that I have any hope of pursuing.
The purpose of life isn't pleasure, it's agency. What are you doing to help other humans, to create beauty or to add order to the world?
If you live with a parent and many small children, then there are certainly parts of your daily environment that desperately need to be put in order, repaired, or spruced up. Can you tidy up, repair or clean one thing per day in your living space? That's valuable even if it eventually gets messed up again. I tend to think the outdoor living space is better to start on, but I don't live in Alaska.
If you live near the most-shoplifted Walmart in the entire world, then there are many areas of community life in your area where help is urgently needed. Maybe that's in direct ministry to the elderly, children, animals, maybe it's in civic areas like cleanup, archiving, lobbying, research, information management. The time of an intelligent, conscientious person who writes well is a tremendously valuable resource. As others have said, can you find an organization that is doing good and regularly contribute your time in service to them?
And unpopular take, but if you're consuming a lot of porn or other superstimulating media (including internet), cut it out. If you're already displeased with how your motivation/reward systems are working, then start by not deliberately screwing up your dopamine circuitry any more than you can help.
As for Stand Your Ground laws, the connection is in how "polite liberals" talk about them. There seems to be this presumption that a civilized person must always defer to the uncivilized.
Doesn't this make some sense as a countersignaling performance of elite strength and nonchalance (what used to be called sprezzatura)? Realistically, the average PMC person faces little direct risk from random crime or violence, and less risk the wealthier/ better-connected they are. Simultaneously, the average middle-class person has lots to potentially gain from appearing impressively high-status, secure and confident to their PMC peers, including by showing that they don't need to fear the underclass, don't worry about job competition from foreign workers, etc.
Kyle Rittenhouse feels more cringe than anything else, and for middle-class status purposes it's often worse to be cringe than to be wrong.
Edit: to the original question about Alex, I think Chesterton points out that sometimes when people preach toleration and mercy, they actually just don't disapprove of the action in question. It's a shame you're no longer friends, because I'd be curious to learn whether they would endorse punishment for actions that are unsympathetically gauche rather than just immoral in a plebe way. (I'm not sure what would feel genuinely "gauche" for a well-pedigreed law student who's also a former edgelord/troll, but perhaps you can imagine something? Perhaps if a white, female fellow-student from Alabama, failing some key classes, were caught trying to bargain for grades by faking a rape accusation against a well-regarded male African-American professor - would Alex argue that she should not be expelled? That the professor shouldn't be able sue her for damages?)
Terracotta
10d ago
I don't know, man, I can only speak from my own experience as a happily married person, surrounded by other single-to-low-body-count people in similarly normal marriages, plus several nice, friendly and pretty low-body-count single ladies who I wish would meet these true romantics you say are out there. From where I stand, all that redpill dogma from those ponytailed/overtanned skeezy old influencer dudes is about as close to lived reality as the Flat Earth stuff. Some of it sounds like an elaborate fantasy by people who never moved past high-school resentment of the cheerleaders and football stars; a bit of Heartiste quoted here the other day was so frankly homoerotic (in a masochistic way) that I kinda wanted to tell the guy to just marry Chad since he finds him so fuckable.
Anyway, like I said, I'm sorry you've had some bad experiences so far. Hope you find someone to be happy with.
You seem very confident in your intuitions about your partners' enjoyment during sex, which is not something that men or women are notoriously great at judging. (And for reference, young women mostly giggle when they're nervous or uncomfortable, and vaginal fluid fluctuates with hormones, not necessarily with arousal.) But your experience is your own, and I'm sorry you apparently had some bad sex with a woman who loved you.
I'm a little confused by the wider claim, but if the idea is that women exclusively enjoy casual sex with Chads, hate sex with men they love, and are unaroused by romantic attention, emotional intimacy, care or commitment... well, that's a pretty extraordinary thing to argue, but if true it seems like it should be not "funny" but great? "Bang as many hotties as possible, no uggos, no fats, no true love, lie as much as you can" closely matches various classic evopsych statements about men's preferences and MOs, so if that's really what girls like too, then seems like we should be headed into a golden age of harmonious gender relations.
Terracotta
11d ago
You sound pretty firm that this isn't any kind of inferiority complex. Have you tried unpacking a bit more what it actually is?
For instance, when you think about the body-count disparity, are you angrier that you waited (FOMO) or that she (maybe) didn't?
When you say you wanted it to be "special" and that you feel "bitter" about your first time, are you most upset about the experience getting devalued in itself? Or that she might value it less (giving you feelings of rejection/ being unappreciated)? Or that you are getting someone less pristine? Or just pure anger at the idea of someone preceding you?
For what it's worth, although randy Aellas apparently do exist, a large proportion of most young women's early "body count" outside committed LTRs will have been owing to some combination of: unpleasant direct pressure or manipulation by a date; unpleasant social expectations to seem cool and not like a boring prude; and/or maladaptive coping impulses from some kind of painful trauma or personal issues. Women mostly talk about these youthful encounters as war stories, and while not everyone would admit outright regret, I've never, in my whole life, heard a (non-professional) woman express enjoyment of the sex itself in an early-20s hookup. No icky memory of a casual hookup will make the average woman less appreciative of the deep, intimate sexual connection she's finally found with the love of her life, so if you're at all concerned that she won't find it special... that really really is not an issue. You might as well be jealous that she had some near-miss collisions with drunk drivers before setting out on a road trip with you.
Terracotta
14d ago
It's pretty easy to argue that any psychology based on survey data is bullshit-- which is, from what I can see, most of psychology. Much of the rest of it, even when you take out the large portion that was derived from outright fraud or BS methodology-juicing, suffers from the problem of being so abstract that the results are baked into the terminology itself: for instance, once you create a taxonomy for "attachment style," or once you agree that homosexual inclinations are or aren't a disorder, you've guaranteed a certain range of findings for your studies no matter what.
On the other hand, as an expression of our society's current conventional wisdom about human personality and relationships, I think most mainstream psychology does fine. It really does seem to serve a cultural function similar to the role of mainstream theology in earlier eras, which I guess makes sense given that etymologically psychology is "study of the soul."
This happened a while ago but I have been thinking about it lately because I feel like my falling out with Alex illustrates a quintessential failure mode of the sort of polite liberalism espoused by commentators like David Roberts, Bill Kristol, and Scott Alexander.
I'm confused by this; are you in the role of polite libertarian here, or is Alex? Facially, this sounds like a bog-standard case of pampered sociopath twentysomethings happily bullying a weaker person for laughs, but feeling shocked and offended when any unpleasant consequences come for a Real Person of their class and social circle. Tale as old as time, surely? As Mel Brooks said: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
The only slight wrinkle here is that Alex had the cognitive capacity to build a bullshit ad-hoc argument around his visceral indignation at a system that would impose any suffering on him or his friends. But as you point out, the argument makes no sense, and presumably Alex himself would drop it immediately if someone ever committed a crime against him. What is the connection to Stand Your Ground laws?
Virtually all political structures seem like an attempt to engage group dynamics and/or abstract logic to remedy personal grievances. What does gender have to do with it, or what are the male-coded political structures that you see as somehow pure of personal considerations?
Are you sure it's not just that areas of greater practical concern for women (family, children, sexual morality, domestic violence, etc.) seem inappropriately "personal" to you because you don't share the concern, whereas you naturally perceive male-coded personal issues as just objectively Important?
Edit: for instance, there's a discussion lower down about Stand Your Ground laws, which seem clearly like an attempt (on both sides) to use the law to work out a set of very personal, very male-coded feelings about physical aggression and dominance, regulating a set of interactions that are overwhelmingly between men. One might argue "oh no, that's actually a question of objective safety/ public welfare/ individual rights," or "plenty of people of the opposite gender also take sides in this debate," but after all the exact same thing could be said about family law or rape legislation, right?
Terracotta
19d ago
Seriously? Stories of guys eagerly pursuing naive virgins, seducing them with promises of marriage, then becoming becoming disgusted and rejecting them once they succumb ("I could never marry such a slut") are commonplace to the point of cliché through most of Western history. If you don't hear as much about the dynamic in the context of marriage, it's because (a) people generally have more serious reasons than pure arousal for entering or maintaining a binding economic contract, and (b) the SOP for a man who's less aroused by his wife has not been to shout it from the rooftops but just to pursue alternative options elsewhere.
Terracotta
20d ago
Well, innocence of personality can be endearing. And chastity, continence, fidelity, strength, self-control are admirable character features in both men and women.
But purity isn't any attribute of the beloved themselves, it's just an imagined state of non-contamination by sex: for instance, feeling that a woman is pure when no cocks have ever touched her but impure when 1,000 cocks have touched her, whatever. That's a clear setup for a fetish-based arousal, i.e. arousal by a thing itself separated from the person, because the energy of the appeal comes from one's feelings toward the contaminant, not toward the partner themselves.
For some folks, it appears to be impulse of underlying disgust for one's own sexuality, the virginal submissive tradwife envisioned as a retreat from all those dirty whores and your uncomfortable desire/repulsion toward them. For others, it seems more motivated by aggression/dominance and the appeal of getting to be the one whose sexual contact destroys the pure thing. Either way, the big complex feelings driving that attraction would be between the guy and his own self-image, not actually between the guy and his partner.
Which is a point the article also makes, actually, when the writer realizes that all the gooners' cave photos seem to center on their own erect penis standing up in the middle.
Terracotta
21d ago
Do I think that Ezra Klein or other feminists are primarily or even substantially responsible for a subculture of porn addicts? No, but the force they apply does push in that direction.
Am I recommending "men being allowed to rape" as being better than this or that social ill? No! But the thinking that supposes that that's the only alternative is going to be increasingly destructive.
From the original article:
What binds these disparate masturbators together, then, are the communal rituals surrounding the goonstate... By far the most popular of these rituals is “feeding,” a sort of porn-mediated cybersex in which one gooner sustains another’s session by sending them curated porn from their private collection.
There is, it should be said, a separate, equally vibrant, and by all accounts far less psychosexually muddled world of gay-porn gooning.
this phenomenon in its full sweep can be traced at least partially to the fact that, in the span of about five years earlier this century, virtually every child in the developed world was granted instant, unrestricted access not merely to hardcore pornography but to some of the most extreme examples of it ever produced in human history. Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit.
he’d spent part of our call trying to explain the appeal of damaging your penis badly enough to permanently prevent getting an erection, but not so badly as to prevent masturbating for hours on end.
In the introduction to his recent video “Follow Me,” a woman’s voice whispers ominously, or perhaps sexily, that “over two hundred ten million people worldwide are addicted to social media. You are one of those people. Keep scrolling. Further. Deeper. Forever. And ever. Submit. To porn. You can’t. Turn back.”
Whatever conversation needs to be had about little boys getting traumatized by hardcore images at 10 and proceeding to spend 20-30h/ week frantically rubbing themselves to 27 windows' worth of simultaneous pumping penis images... the need for more tradwives is not at the heart of that conversation. If anything, tradwives are the shadow selves of egirls and thots: the two reciprocally determine each other within the same memetic system, and that system doesn't make a lot of sense beyond online porn.
Plenty of people have thought they could escape tedious self-loathing by using/ controlling/ hating/ destroying another person instead, but I don't think it ever really works that way.
Terracotta
3mo ago
Yeah, I do understand using the LLM for search or even for a link-enriched overview to cross-check with real resources, as you describe.
I mostly get confused when people Ask ChatGPT, consume the generated content and stop there, which (for a Motte level of understanding "assertions can be wrong," "sources can be mistaken," "context matters," "models sometimes confidently hallucinate") seems like a weird combination of definitely caring and definitely not caring about whatever fact you're researching.
Terracotta
3mo ago
So effectively you're using ChatGPT as... an ad blocker for spammy sites?
That's a pretty interesting development in the eternal war of consumer versus enshittification. It'll become still more so when all the wiki content is itself LLM-authored and the LLMs pivot to putting secret ad space in their system prompts, like Google's sponsored results.
Terracotta
3mo ago
It still leaves unanswered questions, though, because however cursed bars and the internet may be, it's not like they actively interfere with developing relationships by more normal means (do they?).
Nobody needs another rape-culture/ perving-at-work debate, so let's set aside the decline in school and workplace relationships, but that chart also shows an approximately 35% drop in the proportion of people who met through friends and a 50% drop in the proportion who met through family. Say in 1995, Ann's cousin might have set her up with his cute pre-vetted army buddy Jim, or Cathy might have invited her friend Dave to a board game night with one of the single girls from her softball league. Well, cousins, army buddies, softball leagues, personally compatible humans still exist, so what's happening to interfere with those connections now? Do Ann and the army buddy still meet, but now he thinks she's too fat or she thinks he's too short compared with the hotties they shop online? Do Dave and the softball friend still do board games, but now they're under-socialized and both kind of self-absorbed, so neither of them makes a move while still feeling offended at the other sex's lack of interest? Or what?
Terracotta
3mo ago
And maybe it's regional, but after HS I never once encountered a woman who wasn't "acting like that".
This feels so bizarrely foreign, because almost every married couple I know, myself included, built their early relationship in a way that closely matches @urquan's account. This happened mostly in college, but with a smattering of post-college relationships as well. Just a lot of average-looking, average-quality people hanging out and doing random social club things, shyly getting to know a similarly average-looking person and asking them to a play or movie or something, eventually getting serious then either breaking up or getting married and starting a family in a more-or-less dual-career household. Nobody "acted like that," that I'm aware of. No first-date hookups, negging, harems, nude pic demands, findom, tradwifery, false or true rape accusations. Very rarely any cheating, even. The guys were mostly respectful, earnest and nice, the women were mostly honest and friendly. Some of those marriages got worse over time, but many are still doing OK.
I would really love to know where all these apparently horrible young singles (of both sexes) come from. Are people trying to date way above their league and getting toyed with as a result? Did all the helicopter parenting just raise a generation of unpleasant narcissists who will never play well with others?
Terracotta
3mo ago
It’s more akin to web surfing or browsing Wikipedia than chatting on a forum or whatever. I will use it as an open format encyclopedia and explicitly not as a conversationalist sounding board.
OK, this has mystified me for a long time. I use LLMs for various editing, writing, coding tasks, occasionally to kludge a moderator for party games, to simulate human feedback on human-oriented questions, and once in a long while to suggest a starting point for a lit review or to locate a half-remembered link. But can you help me understand the "encyclopedia" and "web surfing replacement" use-cases, when we have actual encyclopedias and a web to surf?
When I see a granny or a teen just asking ChatGPT, I assume it's because they can't internet, can't read, or don't give a shit about the quality and provenance of their information, but for a super-online, epistemically hyper-aware Mottizen to do this feels like hearing someone say they hire a guy to order all their food, chew it and spit it in their mouth.
Terracotta
3mo ago
I mean, I chose engineering because it's an area where genuine technical ability/ technically excellent work exists, and because it draws personality types (both male and female) who tend to get excited about the material work itself and who want to use their technical ability to do a good job. Also because I have first- and second-hand personal experience of adjacent things happening.
Sales and similar bro-professions seem much more like jobs where persuasion through performing a social role is the whole point, so it's hard to imagine someone complaining about their externally-imposed social role getting in the way of their good work. I know a realtor who works her augmented breasts very effectively as part of her job, and she doesn't seem upset about it at all, any more than the local car salesman who leans into stereotypes with his down-home aw-shucks accent. But maybe I'm being unfair to sales, and actually there is a lot of technical subtlety there as well, who knows?
Serious question, how would one gather evidence on which way the causal arrow runs between "no motivation, poor social skills" and "no gf"? "I would do it if they changed" is just the default narrative for people with external-locus-of-control, same as the /r/antiwork people who would totally work hard if someone made them a tenured professor of philosophy.
Legions of awkward, self-indulgent, self-absorbed Gen Z men complain that girls are too picky about sex, sure; and legions of plump, vain Gen Z women complain that boys are too withholding about relationships. When both sides in a stalemate plaintively assert that it's the other side's fault, and when both have what the other side claims are unrealistic expectations of what's owed to them, what's a good method for adjudicating where the actual ZOPA should lie?
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