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Are Republicans shamelessly sexually-humiliating their opponents enough to win this election?
I’ve long held the belief that the opposite of slut-shaming is incel-shaming. A woman's reputation is damaged if she sleeps around, but a man's reputation is damaged if he is deemed a weird incel who can’t get laid. Recently, the Democrats launched a “weird incel" attacking strategy against JD Vance. Tim Walz alluded to a fabricated story about JD Vance fucking a couch in his first speech as VP. This is wholly fabricated: the origin is a twitter user who made up a paragraph from Vance's book, something easily checked. But the meme was astroturfed regardless, and Walz shamelessly referenced it in his first speech. Last night, 5 of the top 10 default posts on Reddit’s /r/All were references to Waltz’s remark.
The strategy is in line with the Democrat push to label Trump “weird”. But it actually seems to cross a line. It is bullying in an especially purified form. It’s the sort of thing you would hear in a middle school, where a bully ostracizes a student by making up a story wholecloth and having his friends repeat it. The bully knows the accusation is false, but the point is to say it confidently and shamelessly where others can hear it and join the ostracizion to protect their reputation. There’s talk about Trump being a “bully”, but nothing he has said has come close to the shameless slander against Vance. Calling Hillary “crooked” is par for the course of political messaging and doesn’t actually impact her reputation. Making fun of McCain for being captured as a PoW also doesn’t really affect McCain’s reputation, and if anything harms Trump’s. Trump usually exaggerates something true, but the attack against Vance is wholly false in origin.
I checked in on the incels over at 4chan to see what were saying about this. And I actually found an insightful analysis:
It can also be noted that the attack against Vance has an element of sexual harassment. What would our “cultural elites” (D) say if Republicans went all-in on a story about Kamala Harris violating the intern’s Oval Office laundry machine? Or that she used a priceless piece of White House memorabilia as a dildo without cleaning it off after? This would just be shameless sexual harassment, right? But so is the official DNC strategy against Vance. It’s harassment for the purpose of humiliating someone sexually to change voter perception via shame response.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few days. The short answer is, no, Republicans are not shamelessly sexually humiliating their opponents enough to win the election. The long answer is, it’s not enough simply to sexually humiliate one’s opponents, one must imply that one’s opponents have something to gain from giving up or switching sides. The subtext of the “these guys are just weird” campaign is that if you young man simply stop trying to police women’s sexual behavior, you too can get laid. Consider the following:
“Since #TamponTim is trending I'll point out that in high school, any boy who casually was like "Oh you got ur period? I stashed a pad from the bathroom in my backpack in case one of my friends needed it" -- that boy would be king stud. That boy would be drowning in prom invites.”
This woman is a “gender and society” columnist at the Washington Post. The message is clear; submit to power [ours] and you will get pussy. What is the Republican message to young women? Become based or you will grow into a childless cat lady? That could work, but it is inherently a multi-step argument. Frankly, conservative media just isn’t good enough to get across a message that complex.
Kind of off-topic, but what the hell is that columnist smoking!? No, a boy who goes "don't worry, I have pads just in case my friends need one" would not be drowning in prom invites. He would be relentlessly mocked and ostracized for that behavior. The only scenario in which it would perhaps go the boy's way is if he was hot, in which case he doesn't need to do that to attract girls anyway. Just an absolutely bizarre take that makes me wonder what the heck the writer is even thinking.
Women mostly have no clue what sexually interests them and don't have the language to describe it other than vibes ("I just didn't feel a spark, you know?") and so you should assume that any time they give romantic advice to men they're just saying something they'd find useful or pro-social without being able to consider whether that's something that would really interest them in a man. I'm rarely one to make sweeping generalizations about the dating world, but even women I really like and respect for their thoughtfulness and honesty in other areas of their life seem totally incapable of describing their real romantic interests. It's the closest thing to a universal I've found.
My theory is that women in general have a significantly lower sex drive, and that it might be a completely different kind of mechanism compared to the male one.
I've known plenty of women who've gone without sex for years and basically didn't really find any need to fix it. And the ones who have a lot of it often use it as a way to obtain in-group status, not for the physical act itself.
As an 16-25 year old man, all you need to connect the dots is to realize none of your female friends masturbate on a daily basis or have frequent sexual thoughts about their friends or classmates. Then it becomes completely obvious that something quite different is going on in their heads.
Bonus: women are almost universally unaware that any such difference exists. A real, visceral difference. Imagine a race of people who never went hungry, but still consumed food out of social pressure. They wouldn't be aware that others have different motivations for eating, and would think they're also just "doing it for vibes"
A while back I made a controversial comment that was along the lines of "When women dress sexy, they don't really understand what it's signaling to a guy. They want to be beautiful, like a sunset, and these are the clothes society is telling them makes them beautiful." A lot of men have a hard time believing it, but it really does tie in to a completely different understanding of sex between the sexes.
Women know the difference between dressing sexy and dressing beautiful and they very deftly choose which kind of signal they want to send all the time. If they didn't they wouldn't be able to accuse other women of dressing like whores or realize when their daughters need to change their clothes before going out.
Only very stupid or very young women wouldn't be able to figure it out. The reactions of other women help them learn even more so then the male reactions.
I did say it was a controversial comment. I am a woman and I can tell you that dressing "sexy" versus dressing "beautiful" is like trying to look pretty like a sunset or look pretty like a flower.
I can tell my six year old not to wear tights and a t-shirt because I understand that this is inappropriate with the rules of fashion, not because I understand what it is to look at a six year old with sexual lust. But as the rules of fashion change so goes clothes, and my kids have "jeggings" they can wear under both dresses and shirts, which makes it easier to let them pick their own clothes for now.
Yes, women understand that they are sending different signals when they dress. They understand that this cardigan makes them look smart and serious, this skirt makes them look fun, etc.
But they don't understand sexual hunger and how they dress impacts it. We witness patterns and try to act accordingly, but we don't grok the underlying mechanism, so sometimes we think we understand a pattern but a man behaves differently than we expected. This explains a lot of the disconnect between women thinking men act creepy, and men thinking a woman wearing only half an outfit must be down for a good time, and if she rejects the man it's because he's not hot enough.
I don't agree women are so blind, even if you are a woman yourself.
The girls showing off their assets to simps online know perfectly well what sexual hunger is and how to stoke it. They didn't learn it from some secret e-thot grimoire. There's tons of male gaze materials online to learn from.
Maybe they don't understand that intuitively, but it is certainly an attainable skill.
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I was reading your comment while taking the subway today. And there was this woman, wearing super professional attire (white blouse with no cleavage, light makeup, sensable hairdo). Except that she was also wearing a super short skirt with a slit up the middle, almost as if she was trying to show off her crotch.
It was... confusing. This was a weekday morning, so I assume she was going to work? I doubt she was going clubbing or anything at that time. But it really just made it awkward for me as a man to even look in her general direction. So I appreciate your comment, because I was genuinely wondering "is she doing that on purpose, or is she just clueless about how she looks?"
It also made me think of this star trek TNG episode where Picard is carrying a sexuality symbol without understanding what it means, and the local women keep approaching him, and he's like "dammit just leave me alone I just want to read my book in peace!!!" Quite the communication error.
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