2rafa
5hr ago
There is a typology of feminine gay men, but there is also a typology of hyper-masculine bisexual men. The modern agp phenomenon is just the latter run through modern technology, legal codes, academic cant and social hysteria.
The bisexual top phenomenon is real and distinct, but it’s not the same as AGP even if it overlaps with it. If you want to be a hyper masculine gay man who fucks men, this is after all a desirable gay niche today, at least as far as I understand it. Certainly there is no incentive to transition.
2rafa
5hr ago
What occasioned this reflection?
I suppose that I think the TERF treatment of HSTS is unnecessarily harsh, but that such a judgment requires a clearer categorization.
2rafa
10hr ago
The ‘Kathoey’ or Ladyboy designation is a more honest way of categorizing both very effeminate / camp gay men and most ‘straight’, feminine transwomen (HSTS in Blanchardian typology).
Transwomen of a kind are obviously very common. I understand there is still some social discrimination, but probably 70% of Sephora sales assistants in Thailand are ladyboys/transwomen/kathoey/your preferred term here. This is even more common than in Seattle, which I wrote about previously. In my local Sephoras (London Westfield - Shepherd’s Bush NOT Stratford, please - and Soho on Broadway I guess) there are some transwomen and a large number of very feminine, makeup wearing gay men, but something about the experience in Thailand just underscored to me how similar the two are.
It reminded me of a pioneering British local TV documentary I’d written about before, produced in the 1980s about gay life in London in the 1930s. One of the things the men make very clear is that the gay community, such as it was at the time, consisted entirely of camp, effeminate men who were to the man, in terms of sexual role, bottoms. Often they described each other, semi-ironically, with female pronouns or roles (queen etc) which are still used by many camp gay men today. The tops they had sex with were not considered part of this community. In a very real sense, they were not considered gay at all, even and perhaps most clearly by the men they were having sex with.
This wasn’t a legal distinction - a ‘top’ was still committing a crime at the time under British law in having sex with another man, and would flee the night club in the event of a police raid all the same - but it was a clear social one. The femme men themselves didn’t have sex with each other (this is, at least, implied in the documentary), only with the ‘straight’ or ‘topping’ men whom they solicited in clubs, parks, outside barracks and so on. More broadly, the sexual and communal landscape the men discuss seems to be by far the most common way in which human societies have historically understood effeminate or camp males who are primarily sexually attracted to other men. The ladyboys don’t have sex with each other for the same reason that the gay ‘queens’ of 1930 London didn’t. And then men who have sex with ladyboys - or who had sex with those men in the thirties - aren’t or weren’t gay in the same way that they were. That isn’t to say they’re straight, or not bisexual, or not anything else, but it’s clearly not the same thing. The modern Western gay identity, in which tops and bottoms (and indeed lesbians and gay men) are grouped together is essentially a consequence of the civil rights movement and AIDS crisis; it is ahistorical and unusual compared to all historical treatment of non-mainstream forms of gender and sexual identity.
Blanchard’s key contribution to the understanding of transsexualism was that he acknowledged - based on his own practice - that homosexual transsexuals or HSTS and autogynephilic transsexuals or AGP constituted two clearly defined, vastly different populations of males who identified with womanhood or female-ness. HSTS fundamentally existed along the spectrum of camp male femininity, expressed both sexually and generally. As I understand it, the gay man at Sephora who wears a skirt, a full face of makeup and speaks in a camp, exaggerated feminine voice is - even if he is not on hormones - considered a kathoey in Thailand. And this makes sense - camp femme gay men who are sexually submissive, may wear drag etc and HSTS transwomen are often divided solely by the extent to which they are committed to presenting as female (that commitment ultimately expressed in medical intervention), and nothing else in terms of dress, presentation, sexual preference, interests and so on.
The reason why Blanchard is controversial is not his categorisation of HSTS, of course, but its inverse. The non-HSTS, the top-who-transitions, the man (often in Blanchard’s own experience) who decides after 30+ years of normal heterosexual life, marriage, children, relationships with only women etc, that he is actually a woman, is not part of this long continuity of effeminate homosexual males. He is something different, something new, something comparatively unusual. He is a product, it seems to me at least, of modernity. In naming the autogynephilic transsexual man, Blanchard acknowledged a sexual identity largely divorced from sexuality (consider that many if not most AGP are attracted to women at least before heroic doses of female hormones, meaning their sexual identity is not a key part of their transition). The AGP male is closer to the archetypal modern fetishist (I won’t name examples because inevitably that will devolve into a pointless argument), except that the object of his attraction is inverted. His motivations for womanhood are completely different to those of the HSTS, but our understanding of trans identity doesn’t allow us to acknowledge this essential difference.
If an argument one occasionally hears about clearly differentiating HSTS and AGP is that it is impossible to tell the difference, I think the Thai example is a good counterargument. Perhaps someone else can correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it hard to believe that these transwomen are particularly interested in lesbian relationships with ciswomen. They are, of course, interested in relationships with men, with males, because they are gay males, but that is about it. They have their own bathrooms (at least in some Thai malls and bars I saw clear male, female and other (with the gender icons overlapping) bathrooms, which seemed - above all else - reasonable.
2rafa
11hr ago
Some are very good, but you have to sort the good from the bad. In a way it’s like the internet. Because the contemporary art world has no real relationship to meritocracy (since almost everyone involved, at every level from artist to gallerist to dealer to buyer to journalist to viewer, is rich because almost nobody is making any money) bad pieces or showings are marketed the same as good ones. Price has no relationship with quality. So, like YouTube, your own research is necessary, and over time you find what you like, which gallerists have similar tastes, etc. One good thing if you ever move to London is that so few people really care that the motivated individual can essentially gallery-hop for free champagne every Thursday if he or she so chooses. Occasionally you even see something very good.
2rafa
11hr ago
Sam Kriss is a good writer (a great one, even), but a bad thinker. Once you’ve read enough of what he writes, you can not only predict the broad outline of a Kriss Essay, you can also write your own in your head by stringing together obscure references, the occasional semi-ironic blasé fabrication, and a contemptuous leftist sneer for both the masses in general and anyone who works a regular job specifically.
2rafa
11hr ago
Somewhat funny watching very online people / nerds discover the state of a lot of contemporary multimedia (we could use the word multimodal) art over the last 20 years. Of course the references in a default show at a Gagosian or whatever will be more ‘normie’, but the spirit - a jumbled, largely incoherent reflection on the itself incoherent shared reference library of modernity - is the same.
2rafa
16hr ago
My REAL suspicion is that AI will get good enough at predicting case outcomes that it will discourage active litigation/encourage quick settlements, as you can go to Claude, Grok, and Gemini and feed it all the facts and evidence and it can spit out "75% chance of favorable verdict, likely awards range from $150,000 to $300,000, and it will probably take 19-24 months to reach trial."
As I understand it a lot of commercial / divorce / etc outcomes are already predictable and it doesn’t make people less litigious.
2rafa
17hr ago
A functioning Congress is only possible if the senate filibuster is overturned. 51 votes must be able to pass any constitutional law.
Indian women don’t really out marry at particularly high rates, the culture is more sexually conservative in any case. The main place one even sees particularly visibly promiscuous Indian women is probably the West where there is some second/third onward generation assimilation. India also has an extremely high gender imbalance, especially in the north, and a very strong continued tradition of true arranged marriage that has survived longer and stronger than almost anywhere else in the world.
Working class Thai, Filipino, Viet, even some Chinese and Japanese women married to blue collar or lower white collar white men are not uncommon in Western/Northern Europe and North America. But if I think about the not insignificant number of couples I know with an Indian woman and a white man, every single one is some kind of second gen PMC Indian woman and PMC white guy of the JD and Usha or “we met in medical residency” type. I think it’s hard to say that Indian women are undesirable when - outside of this small slice of the diaspora - they don’t appear to seek intermarriage the way many other Asian women do.
Ethnic SEAsians are pretty distinct from Chinese/northeast Asians ime; yes, there are plenty of swarthy Chinese but broadly speaking ethnic Indonesians or Malays and ethnic Han or most other Chinese, assuming the same dress and no other identifying markers, seem pretty easily distinguished, at least that’s my impression.
2rafa
1d ago
In the end tourism is a choice. Bhutan still has a $100-200 per person per night tourist tax to discourage budget tourism and it works for them.
When people in places like Barcelona, Venice, Tokyo etc complain about tourism without stuff like this they are making an active choice to keep the money flowing at the expense of crowdedness etc.
2rafa
1d ago
Religion is very relevant, especially in Malaysia, but the Chinese are still endogamous in Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines despite substantial non-Muslim, non-Chinese populations in each of them.
2rafa
1d ago
As I understand it Thailand forcibly assimilated the Chinese so now everyone pretends not to notice that all the rich are Chinese (although some assimilation did occur, a lot of intermarriage etc, certainly much moreso than with affluent overseas Chinese anywhere else in SEA).
They are only just starting to promote tourism again with the recent visa free travel deals. Luxury hotels that cater to tourists rather than business travellers (like the Amans) are still pretty empty in the mainland in my very recent experience. The English proficiency of hotel staff even at top international chains also varies much more than elsewhere in East Asia, yes including Japan (this may be true even if the average Chinese person speaks more English than the average Japanese, I couldn’t comment); there is always someone relatively fluent, but many staff aren’t. I don’t expect this but it obviously makes it harder for international tourists, whereas you can navigate as an American with no real experience in Asia in Tokyo with almost no problems. In Beijing and Shanghai having local coworkers around felt if not necessary then very useful.
China is also in that place where tourists looking for cheap beach vacations will naturally go to Thailand / Vietnam / etc over China. As a big, increasingly expensive and seasonal (in the sense that a lot of key cultural sites are in places that get [very] cold in the winter and [very] hot in the summer) destination, places like Beijing seem more like Moscow or St Petersburg before the war in terms of rich world tourism, in that they are going to attract primarily (upper) middle class, relatively well travelled people who want a glimpse into another culture rather than to go for a bucket list item, for food, because it’s cheap or for status (all the above have driven the recent Japanese tourism boom for example), which is a small proportion of the total.
2rafa
1d ago
you just make a tiered society
This is, of course, what economic stratification already does. The question is how you do that when people are no longer differentiated by economic contribution.
2rafa
2d ago
Why? Even in such a society, the behavior of fellow people is important to us. We don’t want violent addicts on the subway, we don’t want ugly people covered in tattoos, we don’t want people who are antisocial, rude, vulgar, loud etc to the point of damaging their community or the broader social fabric. We want to minimize scammers, cheaters and criminals.
Putting everyone on UBI doesn’t solve any of these problems alone.
2rafa
2d ago
The mistake is in assuming this won’t happen anyway. The system already ruins your life, shuts you out of flying, having a bank account, shames every would-be employer for hiring you etc if you have a disapproved-of opinion, and in most of the West you can even go to proson for it, where you are likely to be the victim of ethnic or religiously motivated gangs if you’ve said anything or done anything to offend or hurt them before your incarceration. During Covid there was even plenty of chatter about prioritizing “higher risk” Black and Brown patients over white people.
You have - by the way - stumbled across a more general reality of the welfare system or entire modern state (discussed elsewhere in this thread): the system already exists to extract money and dignity from you and give it to others; you cannot destroy it, only redirect some of that extraction and humiliation toward others and some of the loot towards yourself.
2rafa
2d ago
Given that with mass automation due to A(G)I, many more of us (possibly all of us) may be living off of a form of welfare before long, it’s time to have what has long been a taboo discussion, namely that government should enforce standards of behavior on welfare recipients.
To me it’s not really a question of generosity. If recipients didn’t use hard drugs, dressed well, behaved decently, were polite and generally didn’t disturb anyone else, I would even be in favor of more generous welfare in certain cases. But welfare for slobs, addicts, the obese, antisocial people, and groups with a track record of poor interaction with mainstream society should be curtailed to the point of making life very difficult.
In general, the greatest failure of liberal universalism is that it does not adequately distinguish between categories of citizen by social contribution. It did originally (eg almost every 19th century democracy initially limited the vote to landowners or taxpayers) but these restrictions fell - long before even female suffrage in most cases. Welfare initially was often led designed to promote prosocial behavior in the underclass, but again, much of this fell by the wayside.
Idea: Tiered welfare, including food stamps. Very low, third-world-beans-and-rice level baseline. Take a drug test every x period and come back clean, get 25% more money. Have kids? If they all attend school 97% of school days and are on time 90% of the time, get 25% more money. Kid scores in the top 20% of his grade on a standardized test? 50% more money. Kid is arrested? 30% reduction in money (or down to baseline, whichever is higher) for 2 years, rolling reset every time a child is arrested. Your ‘welfare tier’ also determines your tier of social housing, more recently renovated apartment in a better location etc. Every year of full time tax paying employment prior to going on welfare also increases your welfare. Local beat cops can also allocate a pool of welfare to ‘trusted’ informants, making snitching higher status.
2rafa
3d ago
I would say that the decline is classically dated to begin in 1873 with the start of the long agricultural recession, during which the American economy rapidly overtook the British within a period of perhaps fifteen years after the Civil War. The height of the empire in terms of landmass was in the mid-1920s, yes, but this has a lot to do with the outcome of WW1 in erstwhile Ottoman lands, the distribution of some German colonies and US isolationism than it does imperial expansion; America had been wealthier per capita for 30 years and more populous for 50 years by then.
2rafa
3d ago
The rules of engagement coupled with casualty tolerance in Afghanistan prevented any long term victory.
Different interests latch onto different causes but they are all obviously connected. The occupation failed because Wester troops were garrisoned in bases while the Taliban controlled much of the countryside essentially uninterrupted for the period. Many ‘soldiers’ never left base and most who did did so very infrequently for largely choreographed ‘patrols’ that anyone could avoid if they wanted to. Why? Because troops were terrified of IEDs and ambush attacks, which in turn led to a paranoia that was only reinforced by rare trips out of base (psychologically this creates a fortress mindset in a soldier in which every trip outside base is an expedition into a hostile land). This tied into the broader situation that, because the US DoD and (even moreso) European armies had extremely low casualty tolerance to a degree unheard of in almost any historical or other current conflict, fighting a guerrilla enemy that stationed soldiers in houses and villages and schools was essentially impossible.
There were two possible ways out of this situation.
The coalition could have swallowed much higher casualty rates and stationed soldiers and support personnel in town and villages, forced a larger degree of cultural transformation / imperialism on particularly rural natives, and used a form of summary justice (ie simply executing anyone suspected of assisting the Taliban in any capacity and the entire immediate family or tribe, which would involve plenty of false positives, but that’s wartime) to make cooperation with the enemy much less attractive while making cooperating with the occupying forces much more attractive (since it would no longer be about making a deal with the guys in the military base 10 miles away while you deal with the enemy sympathizers in your village alone).
Or, the coalition could have taken the Israeli approach in Gaza which, while likely still higher in terms of casualty rate than the recent Afghan War (depending on how you calculate it), still involved a relatively low tolerance for soldier deaths on the Israeli side. That would preclude a total victory (Hamas still exists and has many soldiers after all) but - by dropping insane volumes of ordinance on any cultural, communal, religious, social, healthcare, educational and other institutions that might possibly house enemy fighters - you can demoralize a population and slowly reduce both the absolute number of and relative quality of enemy fighters (as more experienced soldiers are killed) even in a high fertility population. This plan would have involved probably the deaths of 5% or so of the civilian population as a direct consequence of the coalition campaign but would, coupled with the targeted killing of all major religious and cultural figures, the reinstatement of the King (not doing this was one of the great failures of the war) and a ban on Afghan civilian government for at least 15 years after the invasion, have had a higher chance of success than the plan that was pursued.
In general views on transsexuals before the 2010s were either similar to or more tolerant than those on gay men. The extreme example for the latter case is obviously the Iranian situation but I think a lot of mainstream American media in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s was also broadly sympathetic to people we would today call transwomen. Even many examples of the ‘trans panic’ thing often framed the transwoman sympathetically if present-day politically incorrectly, like Chandler’s dad in Friends.
2rafa
4d ago
It seems better to model it like a normal distribution where the vast majority of people are in the 3.5 to 6.5 range. Your way seems to lead to a lot of ambiguity between what counts as an 8 or a 9 or a 10, for example, because they’re all equally common.
Shy male nerds at 17-22 certainly wish that a hot girl with little or no sexual experience would fall into their lap, have sex with and marry them (in that order) and then never look at another man again.
But this is because (1) of male sexual jealousy and fear of performance inadequacy, (2) fear of rejection and (3) male mate guarding instinct, all of which are significant in sexually inexperienced young men. Men also know that having a child with a woman kills her value to other men on the marriage market, which means she is more likely to stick with them (another man she dates as a single mother will likely be much lower value on several or all axes), which makes having children as soon as possible with this hypothetical hot girl who is into you more attractive so she doesn’t leave you.
The evidence consistently shows that young men below their mid-20s (later for late-blooming men) who are attractive, have charisma and know how to talk to women prefer to play the field rather than settle down with their first attractive girlfriend, even though thee are plenty of women their age who would be happy to do so. There are certainly clear exceptions, but not the majority. Most hot, charismatic men I know who did settle down at say 22 monogamously partied and slept around heavily in high school and college (women do this too). Women vary, but I think the average beautiful and charismatic 22 year old woman would be more willing to get married to the right man than the average beautiful and charismatic 22 year old man would be willing to get married to the right woman.
2rafa
5d ago
especially 9s and 10s
I suppose everyone has their own definition, but assuming a “10” is at least 99.9th percentile for fit, healthy people your age (so probably 99.99th percentile overall; one in ten thousand men or women) I think seducing many 10s would be quite impressive.
2rafa
6d ago
There was a lot of discussion of the case in the UK press and by opinion columnists, feminists prone to sharing infographics on social media certainly shared infographics about this case. The present Queen commented on it. Beyond that stories from non-Anglo countries are never going to be as prominent in the anglophone press for obvious reasons, but I think it received extensive coverage.
Attraction to someone in particular being attracted to you and being attracted to a fantasy of yourself as a woman are two quite different things, in my opinion.
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