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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   29407 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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(I posted this in last week's thread in error, having forgotten that today was Monday. I've now reposted it in this week's thread.)

Nowadays, whenever I meet a woman or gay man who's millennial or younger, I'm counting the seconds until they ask me "so, what's your sign?" Among young Western women, belief in astrology seems to be right up there with an interest in true crime podcasts and Taylor Swift.

I have the impression that this is a fairly recent development, like in the last decade or so. When I was in secondary school I don't remember any of my female classmates expressing any interest in astrology, and I sort of remember the general opinion was that reading your horoscope in a tabloid was seen as a low-status spinster thing to do.

Three questions:

  1. Has there actually been a recent resurgence in interest in astrology? Or is my gut feeling actually mistaken, and interest in astrology has actually been constant over the past twenty years?

  2. If "yes" to the previous question, what are the underlying causes? If astrology underwent a resurgence in popularity over the last decade, why so? Is it a "god-shaped hole" effect (when people give up organised religion, they immediately start looking for something else to take its place)? I've heard that there was a lot of VC money floating around for astrology apps a few years ago, could that be behind it? Or is that an effect rather than a cause?

  3. Why is it such a gendered phenomenon? I literally don't think I've ever been sincerely asked what my sign is by a straight man - 100% of people who've asked me have been female (or far more rarely, gay/bi men). Is this true everywhere, or am I in a bubble and it's a less gendered phenomenon in other regions? I wonder how it ties into a tendency among women that they seem to enjoy the act of classifying people into "types": a few years ago when I was single, something like half of the dating app profiles I saw had their Myers-Briggs listed somewhere.

Pew Research Center did a comprehensive poll in 2023 on spirituality (aside from religion) in US, with intention to periodically repeat it. They say that there aren't any good longitudinal surveys on the subject.

Glancing through the breakdowns on spiritual beliefs, there are indeed some gender differences once we get past the stuff of organized religion, like:

  • 85% women / 77% men: "there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it"

  • on the flip side, 12% women / 21% men: "the natural world is all there is"

  • 22% of Americans are "spiritual but not religious".Among those, 57% women / 42 % men.

Nowadays, whenever I meet a woman or gay man who's millennial or younger, I'm counting the seconds until they ask me "so, what's your sign?"

Could it be that you're being subtly hit on? Asking "what's your sign" is a low-stakes maybe-flirt, in my observation. It's asking something about you that you probably don't mind sharing, general time of year when you're born, and it's a starter to a conversation about you (or your interlocutor) that is mildly personal.

Unless the ladies are pulling out star charts. That would bust my hypothesis.

Could it be that you're being subtly hit on?

Potentially, but I've even had female colleagues who are happily co-habiting with their boyfriends and/or engaged ask me about my star sign.

I have seen nothing of that here in Sweden so perhaps you should restrict yourself to American women rather than western women?

That said, of the people reading horoscopes and pursuing things like alternative medicine it seems like the overwhelming majority is female. I would imagine this has to do with agreeableness. Agreeable is a short distance from impressionable and some % of people will be conned into astrology. Then, when you reach critical mass of followers then others will simply engage in the activity because others are doing it, especially those vulnerable to social contagion.

Men have other gender specific failure modes, like chronic contrarianism and overconfidence, leading to things like falling for crypto-scams.

Same in Finland.

Perhaps I'm just in some kind of anti-astrology bubble or what did you mean was the same in Finland? That astrology is or isn't rising among women?

Same as in I've seen nothing of the sort among young women.

perhaps you should restrict yourself to American women rather than western women?

I live in Ireland.

Anglo-sphere women then.

I. How does straight sex work?

Evolutionary psychology* tells us that women want to reproduce with the most fit man that she can find. This creates a situation where most men are outcompeted for reproduction by fitter men. For simplicity’s sake, from here on out I will refer to any male who is more fit as “alpha” and any less fit male as “beta.”** Non-monogamous societies are nearly always polygynous (one male with multiple wives) rather than polyandrous (one woman with multiple husbands.) Polyandry doesn’t generally happen because women simply choose the most fit male and the other men don’t really want to stick around having dick measuring contests with each other all day. Women are rewarded by going after higher quality mates while men are rewarded by going after a larger quantity of mates.***

Whenever more than one man is present, you can rank each man’s fitness as a sexual partner. The only thing that matters in this hierarchy is physical dominance. When judging the hierarchy between men, imagine them fighting. The one who would likely win in a physical fight is the alpha. To judge this we look at physical characteristics: Height, weight, muscularity, dick size, waist/hip ratio, meanness or neotony of face, baldness, and so on. Traits like intelligence, kindness, virtuosity, and so on, are important in other situations but not in sex. This hierarchy of men is so ingrained that we don’t realize it. When you walk around in crowds, smaller men move to the side for larger men. If you don’t, larger men get irritated at you. Smaller men often subtly bow and fawn to larger men. Once you notice this you won’t stop noticing it.

II. How does gay sex work?

Gay sex is downstream of straight sex. People imagine gay men to have a “female” and a “male” partner but that isn’t really accurate. When two men have sex, they are two men having sex. They are competing for the same roles. Most gay sex acts have a dominant and submissive position: In anal sex the bottom is submissive and the top is dominant, in oral sex the dick sucker is submissive and the oral top is dominant and so on. During gay sex you must sort out who is going to do what. Here are the ways that gay sex can happen, in order from most positive to least positive.

Positive gay sex experiences from your perspective:

  • You are both acting as alphas. You may not be perfectly matched on the hierarchy, but you both believe you are strong powerful men who are good choices for sexual mates. You lift each other up, the real alpha feels secure in his position lifting up the lesser alpha who feels like he is able to learn from and enjoy the other alpha’s sex. It is equally positive for both of you.
  • You’re the alpha and he’s the beta. You both know that you are a bit better than he is, but he accepts the role. You feel good because your dominance is respected and he helps support your ego.

Neutral gay sex experiences:

  • You’re the beta and he’s the alpha. This can be positive as well but is definitely ranked below the first scenario in that category. I rank this as neutral because if you aren’t trying to be the top you will feel on some level slightly melancholic about the experience afterwards, that you should have tried harder to push your desires further during sex. But it can also be positive especially if he is so attractive to you that you don’t mind playing the beta role. Many, many gay men seem stuck in this beta dynamic, it seems very stable but creates problems I’ll describe below.
  • You’re both acting as betas. Sometimes no sex will happen at all, it is the most neutral. As an aside, in prison dynamics, alphas will allow their betas to play with each other but not share betas with other alphas. I suspect it’s because the alphas imagine the betas to be having this sort of sex with each other, which is plausible but also may be more of an alpha/beta dynamic between the two betas (but the power dynamic is narrower than between the original prison alpha and beta.)

Negative gay sex experiences:

  • You’re the beta and he’s the alpha but you take advantage of him. Controversially, this could include rape or situations where you’re doing something he doesn’t like. This is neutral for you, because you don’t have the satisfaction of knowing you’re his superior which simultaneously makes him look weak and also makes you feel bad for taking advantage of him. I would not rank it as fully negative because you may get some pleasure believing you were his alpha in some way but you can’t fully convince yourself of it.
  • You’re the beta and he’s the alpha but he takes advantage of you. Of course no one likes to be raped or forced to do something you don’t want but it is still slightly less bad than if…
  • You’re the alpha and he’s the beta and he takes advantage of you. This is the perspective of your partner in scenario 1 under “Negative gay sex experiences” above. This is the worst situation because you will have to live with knowing that you didn’t defend yourself from someone smaller than you and were hurt because of it.

In the positive experiences, the most important aspect is respect, and mutual understanding. You both have to understand where the other person is in the hierarchy. The worst experiences are when one or both of you misjudge the situation and do something to upset the natural order. The best experiences are when you both see each other for who the other is and can have sex together while comforting the insecurities of the other and celebrating the others’ strengths as well. It is similar to a well played game of strategy or wrestling.

III. What makes a man gay?

I don’t know what makes a man gay. It has been shown that statistically a man is more likely to be gay if he has more older brothers. The cause of this is unknown but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them. Speaking personally, I was raised by a rageful father and had a bullying brother and another older brother who was more neutral and an abusive stepfather all while I was young. It’s easy to imagine that these frightening males caused a fawning response in my adolescent brain that developed into homosexuality as I aged. Indeed I see a lot of fawning from gay men, especially younger gay men toward older gay men. I even catch myself fawning at stronger more dominant men though I feel some shade of disgust toward myself when I do this as it triggers memories of earlier years when I felt stuck as only a beta and primarily tried fawning at older men for affection/sex. That said it’s an effective strategy when a beta man fawns to you it’s very attractive but when an alpha fawns at you it’s rather irritating and awkward.

When analyzing why a man is gay we usually focus on the attraction to men but I think just as important is the lack of attraction to women. When I see women I imagine that they won’t love me. I find their ability to discriminate between men irritating and feel that it points to my lack of physical appeal and don’t want to suffer the indignity of not being attractive to them. I strangely have a habit of watching straight porn but I only look at the men who mostly behave confidently as alphas in straight porn, whereas in gay porn there is usually the alpha/beta dynamic and sometimes the real hierarchy is reversed (especially in commercial porn) which I find irritating and unrealistic. Relatedly, I once dated a bisexual man who said that he used to only be interested in women, and imagined that men would never be interested in him. But his male friend confessed his attraction to him, they started having sex and now he’s bisexual. I can imagine situations where if a woman was attracted to me and I really believed it, I could have sex with her, but it is basically not something I want to seek out because my attraction to men is so much greater.

IV. How does culture affect all this?

The Middle East is very interesting to me. Muslim countries have the reputation of being the most homophobic countries on earth. But in my (admittedly very short) experience in the Middle East, my experiences were very different. In fact I was hit on by men there constantly, and I am never hit on anywhere else. Never in the USA, once I was catcalled in Europe but I suspect they were making fun of me, and never in Asia. But in the Middle East I was overtly hit on by men everywhere I went. I don’t know if it’s because they see white men with blue eyes as so beta that they aren’t practically considered male, or that they believe every rich western country person is completely LGBT globohomo, or if they are all really horny all the time with each other and their homophobia is a ruse that they put up to keep everyone else from thinking they’re gay, but I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The Middle East is the most polygynous culture that I’m aware of- centuries of harems would naturally produce tons of alpha male offspring from relatively few men. In my opinion Middle Eastern men are very masculine, handsome, and alpha, more so than anywhere else in the world.

Speaking of the Middle East, most of the homosexual relationships between men that you’ll find there are intergenerational. It is nearly always an older man with a younger male. Anecdotally I think these are the strongest types of gay relationships that there can be. Increasingly as the older I get, the less I want to be with someone my own age. What would I as a full grown man want to do with another full grown man living in my house? It really doesn’t sound great, even as a homosexual. When I was young, under 25, I dated almost exclusively men in their 40s and 50s. I drew the line at a man who reminded me too much of my grandfather, but otherwise was happy to date men my father’s age. I suspect this also reflects some resentment toward my father which I didn’t recognize until after his passing as well but it’s hard to say.

Now, speaking on East Asia. I have spent at least a few months each in Thailand, South Korea and Japan. From my perspective, these cultures are very hierarchical. These countries are so ethnically homogeneous that everyone seems to be completely aware of their hierarchy and since social order and harmony are valued no one seems to step out of line or be uncomfortable with their place in the hierarchy. In Japan, the gay bathhouses have huge rooms full of mattresses where men sleep naked. Alphas approach betas and betas rarely ever refuse the alpha. I have seen betas sleeping or pretending to sleep be approached by alphas who have anal sex with the beta, all while the beta doesn’t open his eyes or move. This is not done outside of Asia. Men in Japan tend to be bottoms compared to South Korea where they are more conformist and competitive and have a more pressing military threat to the north. South Korean men seem more likely to try to be alphas than Japanese men, though they will still generally fawn to white men.

Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha. It does not bother me just when American men are my alpha, it bothers me when they are my alpha but see themselves as not an alpha at all. This is really the worst because it puts us in the “neutral” or “negative” sex experience categories above. If you have sex with a man who is your superior but doesn’t act like it, you are either going to come away feeling like you’re taking advantage of him or no sex is going to happen at all. Imagine a younger boy who wants to play a game with a bigger boy, but the bigger boy is depressed or doesn’t feel like playing, either the younger boy irritates the bigger boy or they just don’t play a game at all and both parties are sad. This is what it’s like to try dating among men with low self esteem who don’t realize the position they hold. This is so common in America and Western Europe but so uncommon in the Middle East and Asia where men seem to be much more self aware of their masculine traits and comfortable with it and respect others’ traits as well.

V. Race and sex

So, if all men are judged on their physical characteristics and sexual fitness, how does this extend to race? Basically, some races are more physically dominant than others. If you charted all men, with physically dominant traits on the Y axis and nonphysically positive traits on the X axis, you would have most black men in the upper left and most East Asian men on the bottom right. (For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me. Asian men are better at certain types of intelligence but are smaller and less physically aggressive than blacks. I realize this is a controversial portion of my thinking and can provide further evidence if needed.) White men would probably be broadly in the middle of the graph, with Latino men and Indian/South Asian men being somewhat closer to the origin of the graph, with Latino men being closer to white/black/ or Asian men depending on their specific admixture of white/black/native blood. (Mexicans/Peruvians are closer to Asians, while Cubans/Dominicans can be closer to whites/blacks etc.) Of course there are countless exceptions to all of this- a black midget would be to the bottom right of an Asian linebacker, and so on.

This graph would be a sort of reversal of the hierarchy of race in society today. Statistically blacks are the poorest and least educated, whites are richer and more educated while Asians are the richest and most educated populations in the USA. In this way I envision mainstream society as a sort of “losers hierarchy” situation wherein the sexual losers become society’s champions in a sort of David & Goliath inversion of base reality.

I should note that age somewhat complicates the entire hierarchy. Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to women and other younger men. It’s not hard to imagine that age can be an indicator of status and fertility among preindustrial societies and we seem to have kept the instinct today.

VI. Conclusions

Am I racist? I am making broad classifications of people based on their physical characteristics and their ancestry so I would probably fit someone’s definition of racist. But I do not see myself as racist. I love traveling abroad and do it every chance I get. I am genuinely repulsed when I see people treating other people poorly based on their race. I am not racist, really what I want is to harbor mutual respect between people, and immutably, race is one aspect of their person that can’t be avoided. When I am in Asia, people see me one way, because of their own experiences and backgrounds. When I am in the Middle East, people see me a totally different way because of their own experiences as well. And I see Asian people differently from Middle Eastern people, because we relate to each other in a different way. We are not all blank slate interchangeable human beings, and we should steer ourselves from thinking that way. Really what I want to propose is mutual respect, seeing each other for who we are as we are, and understanding that about each other. I think so much of modern society is dysfunctional because we are encouraged to ignore the physical characteristics of each other for the sake of social harmony, but it’s impossible because our physical characteristics are so much of who we are.

Relatedly, physical power is essential to understanding relationships between people. As I’ve grown older, my parents have naturally waned in their power over me and among the entire family. Of course when I was a child they were able to make all my decisions, and my independence grew over time. At some time in my early 30s, my father had a health problem, he became quite weak and frail, and I was his caretaker for a few months. He continued to treat me like I was a child, not respecting my adulthood and the power I held in the situation. I put up with it out of respect for him as my father, but at some point it became so degrading that I had to assert my power over him. He didn’t like it but after I stood up for myself he had more of a respect for me that I hadn’t been given previously. I had a similar experience with my mother a few years later. Relationships where someone is abusing the power of a stronger person really are toxic and it is up to the stronger person to assert their power in the situation if both parties want to come out with dignity. Similarly, men need to assert their power and strength, see themselves for who they are, respect themselves in their position in the world and respect those around them for who they are too.

I wanted to start my post with an introduction about who I am (a white American gay male in my mid 30s, average height, a bit overweight, and so on) but it’s rare on themotte and may have felt a bit too identity driven. I dislike identity politics as it’s defined by the left but on some level I find it to have a redeeming quality if it can enable mutual respect between people and understanding of where we fit with each other. I don’t need to be the most powerful strongest hottest person, I am happy being grateful for what power and strength and hotness I do have, and to have the opportunity to see others for the strengths and weaknesses that they have as well.

*Everything I know about evolutionary psychology I learned from Satoshi Kanazawa’s blog [ https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist?page=11 ] and otherwise assumed from my experiences with real people and watching straight porn. Feel free to tell me I’ve got it all wrong.

** I know these are loaded terms and probably carry connotations in the meme world that I’m unaware of but I think it is effective at illustrating my point.

*** Further reading: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200802/the-paradox-of-polygamy-i-why-most-americans-are

Edit: Formatting

You are both acting as alphas.

The term "power bottom" is such a cope.

Do you have experience with long term relationships? I know that gay men on average aren't known for being in monogamous long term relationships, and I don't think these dynamics really apply in long term relationships.

Also, anecdotally, I have an older sister and no older brothers and I'm still gay.

And in regards to anal, I enjoy masturbation and especially being the bottom, and I've never felt any pain. Here is a really detailed guide for it. It's not like it'll change your mind, but it might be interesting at least.

Do you have experience with long term relationships?

Not a huge amount but I have been in two longer term relationships. I disagree that the dynamics don't apply in long term relationships, when I think of my own relationships and those of friends, as well as non-romantic relationships, they all seem to fit the power dynamic I've outlined. Even relationships with friends, parents, other family members, and so on. I suspect if you don't see it you're shielding yourself from seeing it, I don't know if I would have believed any of it 10 or 15 years ago but once the pattern emerged I can't unsee it now.

I seem to recall there was a massively upvoted "Quality Contribution" here a while back, where a gay man wrote a similar post. Basically arguing that all gay sex was about these power dynamics. But then a bunch of other gay men clapped back at him and told him he's wrong, that's just one niche/stereotype, and there's lots of other gay men who are loving and equal. So I don't know what to think now.

That was me, I'm back. I would say on the one hand that I don't know how you can read my post and think that the entire point is that it's a one sided stereotypical power dynamic concept when really what I am trying to get at is the need for mutual respect between partners and how that happens. The fact that other gay men don't like to hear anything I have to say and "clap back" at me further illustrates the frustration I feel with gay men, I am not here to sugar coat the experience or present the mainstream homosexual view of love and relationships and sex but rather point out the difficult aspects that underlie the entire situation. Besides that my post isn't really about gay sex at all but rather I am using something I think about all the time that people here aren't as familiar with to make broader points about power and relationships.

Nice post, thanks.

The cause of this is unknown but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them.

Interesting! And I wonder to what extent modern parenting & lifestyle - having few kids that don't spend as much time outside with other kids as in previous generations - is contributing to that. If you're used to unstructured play with kids of all ages, you adopt a wider variety of social roles than if you spend a lot of your "free" time at home with parents and older siblings.

Your terminology here seems a bit confusing.

You start out defining “alpha” and “beta” for the scope of this post as comparative terms based purely on fitness, which seems ambiguous... I guess that since reproductive “fitness” obviously isn't on the table, you mean rather health? Specifically strength and non-obesity?

For simplicity’s sake, from here on out I will refer to any male who is more fit[sic] as “alpha” and any less fit male as “beta.”

But then you imply that the comparison isn't between the partners, as you say that a relationship between two “alphas” would be positive... so I guess that you only mean that an “alpha” is fit relative to the population? Or at least relative to their own genetic and environmental potential?

I rank [a beta’s non-abusive relationship with an alpha] as neutral because if you [the beta] aren’t trying to be the top you will feel on some level slightly melancholic about the experience afterwards, that you should have tried harder to push your desires further during sex.

That seems weird. Surely a “beta” (unfit person) would feel even more melancholic after “trying to be the top”? Or would you consider that necessarily an attempt at “taking advantage of” a fit partner?

Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha. It does not bother me just when American men are my alpha, it bothers me when they are my alpha but see themselves as not an alpha at all.

So, is whether someone is an “alpha” based on their fitness, or their mindset? If someone is “your” “alpha”, but they don't “see themselves” that way, and that's a significant and “frustrating” part of your experience of the world, why did it not factor into the model you introduced at the start of the post?

You enumerate out seven different prototypes of gay relationship:

  1. PoV “alpha” × “alpha”, no abuse
  2. PoV “alpha” × “beta”, no abuse
  3. PoV “beta” × “alpha”, no abuse
  4. PoV “beta” × “beta”, no abuse
  5. PoV “beta” × “alpha”, you abuse him
  6. PoV “beta” × “alpha”, you are abused
  7. PoV “alpha” × “beta”, you are abused

but you conspicuously leave off several possibilities from your enumeration:

  • PoV “beta” × “beta”, you abuse him
  • PoV “beta” × “beta”, you are abused
  • PoV “alpha” × “alpha”, you abuse him
  • PoV “alpha” × “alpha”, you are abused

are these just not relevant? Do you think they statistically don't occur that much versus the seven cases you highlighted? (The claim would seem astonishing to me that two fit men getting together in a healthy, mutually fulfilling relationship is more common than two unfit men getting together in an asymmetric, somewhat dysfunctional relationship...)

If you have sex with a man who is your [physical] superior but doesn’t act like it, you are either going to come away feeling like you’re taking advantage of him or no sex is going to happen at all. Imagine a younger boy who wants to play a game with a bigger boy, but the bigger boy is depressed or doesn’t feel like playing, either the younger boy irritates the bigger boy or they just don’t play a game at all and both parties are sad. This is what it’s like to try dating among men with low self esteem who don’t realize the position they hold. … in the Middle East I was overtly hit on by men everywhere I went … In my opinion Middle Eastern men are very masculine, handsome, and alpha, more so than anywhere else in the world.

Really, this feels like it could have been the whole post, and even it seems ultimately subjective — 3,200 words to ask “Why aren't there any REAL Man's Men / psychological tops in the United States?” — I dunno, maybe we like cuddling more than “acting like” the other's “superior”?

I dunno, maybe we like cuddling more than “acting like” the other's “superior”?

@aiislove To expand on that a bit: From my own perspective, a gay relationship is supposed to be a pleasant escape from the Red Queen’s Rat Race. As someone who doesn't seem to be eligible for the runner's high, strength training is fucking miserable; the only enjoyable part of strenuous exercise is being massaged while sore afterwards; why would I bother for anyone who isn't packing gametes capable of co-producing an actual child with mine?

Positive gay sex experience[:] You are both acting as alphas. You may not be perfectly matched on the hierarchy, but you both believe you are strong powerful men who are good choices for sexual mates. You lift each other up, the real alpha feels secure in his position lifting up the lesser alpha who feels like he is able to learn from and enjoy the other alpha’s sex. It is equally positive for both of you.

If you think that this relationship is really such an underrated delight, and vastly superior to the asymmetric relationship you're “frustrated” at seeing Americans, Western Europeans, and the Japanese bidding en masse for one particular side of, why not make the case for that per se, leaving out the speculative tangents about racial trends in sex roles and your own power struggles with your father?

It seems like the case would need to be made in 2 legs, which are separate and each quite a hard sell:

  • What the case is for being the “real alpha”, especially vs. just getting a wife who's into fitness plus making male friends who are into competitive sports
  • What the case is for being the “lesser alpha”, especially vs.* just being a regular “bottom”

most of the homosexual relationships between men that you’ll find [in the middle-east] are intergenerational. It is nearly always an older man with a younger male. Anecdotally I think these are the strongest types of gay relationships that there can be. Increasingly as the older I get, the less I want to be with someone my own age. What would I as a full grown man want to do with another full grown man living in my house? It really doesn’t sound great, even as a homosexual.

*So you might consider making a case against all the low-testosterone Americans, Western Europeans, and Japanese…

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/

I am probably one of the people Ozy calls “cis by default”. I obviously can’t be sure, but I feel like if I woke up tomorrow magically transformed into a (hetero) woman, my first [thought] would be “Huh, cool, this probably makes it much easier to find a mate” … then I’d get into some very rational comparisons to my personality, like … “Nice, now it’s attractive for me to project my standard vibe of passive lack of interest in my surroundings, instead of having to try to appear dominant and take-charge all the time.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20220813174845/https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/god-shaped-hole/

“I think it’s a really exciting new opportunity and a way to learn about sex that a lot of men never had before. The feeling of something bigger and stronger just overpowering you and doing whatever it wants. I love it.”

…and convincing them for, maybe, a renaissance of “real”, spiritually-charged, Greek-style homosexuality?

https://www.greek-love.com/general-non-fiction-pederasty/the-symposium-by-plato

“But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are boys, being slices of the original male, they are fond of men and enjoy going to bed with men and embracing them. These are the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but out of courage, manliness and masculinity, and they embrace that which is like themselves. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are lovers of boys, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,—if at all, they do so only in obedience to custom; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded.

“One of this nature is inclined to love boys or (as a boy) inclined to have a lover, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when a lover of boys or a lover of another sort meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and can hardly be induced to be out of one another's sight even for a moment. These are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they can not explain what they desire of one another. No one imagines the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other is simply the desire for sexual intercourse, or that sex is the reason why one gets such enormous pleasure out of the other's company. The soul of each evidently desires something else which it cannot express, and of which it has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

“Suppose Hephaistos, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, 'What do you mortals want of one another?' they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: 'Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and, after your death, down in Hades, still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?'—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.

This seems to me a somewhat narrow view of gay sex.

For instance, you assume that to bottom is necessarily to be taken advantage of somehow. Just because you don't enjoy bottoming doesn't mean no one else does, or that it is only enjoyable in a psychological way. As evidence consider the market for anal sex toys and prostate massagers, many of which are advertised to straight men. Consider the endless stories of people needing to go to the hospital to remove large objects they've gotten stuck up their butts. These men were seeking a mechanical sort of gratification which may be correlated with submissiveness but which should be thought of as independent of it.

Maybe I'm just autistic or something but I've always thought that gay relationships and sex had a lot more opportunity for egalitarian bonds. To me it seems that in hetero relationships, no matter how loving, there is always the lingering tension of transaction and compromise, given that men and women generally have different needs and desires and often don't understand each other. But gay relationships don't require an asymmetry and can be closer to purely positive-sum, like friendship. Maybe that makes the relationship cheaper in some ways and more genuine in others.

Yeah, as before I'll caveat that this alpha top stuff, while a common kink, is far from a universal one. Even for people who do appreciate it, it's not always something you're gonna be feeling up for. Things like frotting, mutual masturbation, or some forms of oral don't really have top/bottom in the same sense, and there's a lot of times where providing oral to someone is fun because it's fun, not because you're submitting to them, especially with that whole oversensitivity deal you can kinda play with.

There is a lot of mechanical vulnerability to bottoming, even to women (arguably, because strapons give less feedback, more vulnerability), but being physically vulnerable isn't the same as being emotionally vulnerable, and it doesn't have to be tied into this framework of submitting to someone Better than you.

That said, I think there is a risk of romanticizing the unknown. There can be a lot of asymmetry in a lot of gay relationships: while there's less difference in sex drive on average, there's a lot more mechanical preparation to bottoming; where there's a lot fewer of the big gendered differences in expectations or interests, a lot of things that look gendered in het relationships are cultural or upraising in gay ones.

This seems to me a somewhat narrow view of gay sex.

These men were seeking a mechanical sort of gratification

On the contrary I think that to imagine sex between two human beings as "mechanical gratification" is the narrow view of sex. I personally don't mind being fingered or having small toys up my butt, I do think they feel good, but at the same time this is essentially a degrading act that you must accept or reject. A finger or object is entering your body, this can be violating, or if you have a respect for your partner it can be a positive experience.

Your last paragraph is interesting to me. In my opinion homosexuality is less egalitarian because when you are both the same thing you are inevitably hierarchically compared. One is bigger, one is smaller. With heterosexuality you have greater balance because you are both looking for something different and can offer your unique strengths to the other in a more naturally equal way.

The one who would likely win in a physical fight is the alpha.

Sorry, I stopped reading your wall of text here. Humans form alliances. We use these big calorie-hungry brains to navigate social systems. The winner in a fight is not the bigger, stronger man, but the one with the most allies.

Yeah. Charisma, Intelligence and Status are extremely important for female mate choice. If given the options, the average woman will almost always choose a popular CEO over even the most ripped man imaginable. Provided the CEO is barely taller than her, of course.

For a relationship, sure. For a one-night stand? I reckon the jacked dude is getting lucky. (The incel phrase "alpha fucks, beta bux" has something to it.)

A super-jacked dude is rare enough nowadays that he is reasonably high on the totem pole to reliably land one-nighters, yes, as long as he has some charisma to match.

But from my experience, CEOs and other high-status men are still higher even on this count.

Clumsily. (Like krogans.)

but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them

Are women who are surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males straighter than the average? That would be a point in favor of that hypothesis, and if we assume women who return to physically abusive relationships for the stated reason of "because I still love him" are telling the truth (along with, uh, every dime-store romance novel out there that's literally just this), maybe it's a data point suggesting it's correct.

Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is because very few people today have any experience in the exercise of power (along with the standard reactions to people misusing it- which I believe is far less prevalent than people say it is specifically because "saw it on TV/read it on the Internet"). Old people will complain about "kids these days not knowing how to do anything" but their failure to make ranks available and fucking delegate for once means men and women don't understand what it means to be in the middle of the dominance hierarchy. My father failed to do that, my bosses all failed to do that, my friends fail to do that (and it has a very obvious negative effect on their kids). Nobody over the age of 40 gets it.

Oh yeah, and then you have the general room temperature of "beta good alpha bad", which is

identity politics as it’s defined by the left

because women-as-statistical-distribution are betas and vice versa for men. Which combined with the above makes the problem even worse. You can tell people how to exercise power that way if they don't know it, but you can't talk about it if you don't know they don't know it. And when the people in power really don't want anyone to discuss it (i.e. they're all alpha-hating betas) that obviously gets harder.

I read a story once about how in (either WW1 or WW2, can't remember) one of the questions a potential officer had to answer to be considered for the position was how he answered how he'd dig a trench. The ones that failed would start talking about dimensions, how deep, tactical implications, etc. [as if they were going to do the work themselves]. The correct answer was, is, and always will be "Sergeant, build me a trench!".

And while one can argue "well you know it or you don't" that's a cope answer, and we'd be better off population-wise if everyone knew at least a little bit of how to do that. If you shun selfishness qua selfishness you won't know how to use it correctly, rationally, productively.

That said it’s an effective strategy when a beta man fawns to you it’s very attractive but when an alpha fawns at you it’s rather irritating and awkward.

I think betas call that Nice Guy Syndrome.

It is nearly always an older alpha with a younger beta. Anecdotally I think these are the strongest types of gay relationships that there can be.

Yeah, straight relationships work like that too. People who pretend they don't are usually betas who actively resent being assigned beta at birth.

meanness or neoteny of face

I find it extremely odd that most of the more "alpha" women I meet (as in, they might as well be gay men in thought/action/general attitude towards life) have higher than average facial neoteny. By contrast, most of the "forever a beta, and very angry about that" women have very masculine faces (the 'model' look). I've come to find that I care about that more than if it's a woman or a man (and I suspect is where the "traps are/n't gay" meme comes from people who have also noticed this about themselves).

Relationships where someone is abusing the power of a stronger person really are toxic and it is up to the stronger person to assert their power in the situation if both parties want to come out with dignity.

I find this to be true in employer-employee and friend-friend relationships too. I find it difficult to deal with a lot of the time; while I eventually figured out my proper role in these relationships it took me way longer than it should have.

Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha

Is this where the desire for "straight acting" men comes from in the gay community, or is it orthogonal?

I guess, if you're a gay man who sees himself as a beta and imagines a man as "straight acting" then you're imagining a guy who is confident and secure in his masculinity and isn't effeminate. Effeminacy is a whole other thing that would take forever to unpack and it inevitably veers into trans/gender ideology which I just don't want to think about right now, not to mention that effeminacy is not limited to homosexual men really.

So, to try to parse your question, you're asking if the fact that most gay men do not see themselves as alpha that it makes them want straight acting men? Well, yes, because any gay man who is seeking an alpha has degraded himself as a beta on some level, he's not going to be "straight acting" enough to be someone else's alpha, and thus that's the problem, when he's inevitably surrounded by men more beta than he is who he can't provide love to because he doesn't have the love for himself he needs to give away. (It's getting late and I've sort of lost the plot, hopefully this makes sense.)

For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me.

I don't believe you. Last time I checked black men are generally shorter and weaker*. Do you have any data here?

Re: NFL rosters there's a simple reason for that. A white man who could maybe go pro in football also probably has a lot of more-sane options compared to a black man of the same general physical capabilities. Getting into the NFL is astronomically unlikely even for very good players, careers are often short, and the physical punishment can easily haunt the player through the rest of his -- often short -- life. Someone who has better options is likely to take them. A class of people who can't do much else is more likely to angle for a position in the NFL to begin with, especially if they don't actually grasp how unlikely they are to succeed.

Similarly, I'd guess that whites who make it into the NFL disproportionately tend to come from lower-income backgrounds.

Put another way, my offhand guess is that black men are also disproportionately-represented among lottery winners.

EDIT: Checked, and,

According to the Lottery Advertising Association for Consumer Research or Cash 3, a staggering 63.9 percent of Blacks reported the highest rate of “ever playing” the lottery, significantly surpassing both Hispanics (43.8 percent) and whites (41.2 percent). The numbers speak volumes about the strong affinity that Black Americans have for the lottery, highlighting its unique appeal in these communities.

Source

Couldn't find sources on race of winners, but in the case of the lottery I'd be willing to bet that it probably tracks pretty closely with the race of the general player-base.

* I recall looking up average height and finding that whites are a bit taller on average but also that a lot of the numbers are skewed by groups like latinos and middle easterners being counted as 'white'. Also, re: strength, I once found a grip strength study which indicated this but haven't been able to find it since.

I remember ilforte of all people pushing back on the blacks vs whites argument that I tried putting forward a year or two ago. I don't know how to even respond to it really because in my experience black men are so obviously stronger and more dominant/aggressive than white men that I don't know what kind of evidence I could point to that would change your mind.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1167935/racial-diversity-nfl-players/

The stats are that 53% of NFL players are black while making up 15% of the American public. White men are only 24% of the players. Asians are 0.1% of NFL but 7.3% of the US population. This is all the evidence I need to reassert what anecdotally seems true in my experiences, maybe someone else can chime in.

Besides that I think white men were fine with the enslavement of black men because they perceived black men as physically dominant/superior in some way. They didn't enslave Asians or natives to any significant degree because enslaving someone smaller than you makes you look bad and doesn't jive as well with Christian theology (see David and Goliath, Nietzschean slave morality etc)

Besides that I think white men were fine with the enslavement of black men because they perceived black men as physically dominant/superior in some way. They didn't enslave Asians or natives to any significant degree because enslaving someone smaller than you makes you look bad and doesn't jive as well with Christian theology (see David and Goliath, Nietzschean slave morality etc)

Yeah, no. The nascent latifundia used unfree labor from white people (usually called "serfs" or, in the U.S., "indentured servants", or later "sharecroppers" or company-town folk), native americans (in latin america just look up the "encomienda" system and shudder in horror), and, when they started coming over, chinese immigrants (check out labor conditions on railway gangs in the 19th century) as long as they could; black people were just evolutionarily less likely to keel over dead of malaria (thanks to the sickle-cell mutation) and other tropical diseases than white people in the caribbean and/or US south, couldn't run away back to their tribes like indians, and in the 17th and 18th centuries were flooding the market thanks to very rich and aggressive slave-trading kingdoms on the west African coast. Notably, the places where there were a lot of native americans to enslave, like Mexico and points south in Spanish (as opposed to Portuguese) Central and South America tended to not see a big importation of black slaves and tend not to have large african-descended populations today; there was no need to go to the expense of shipping them in when other unfree labor sources were right there.

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day? If this was football, and your weak team had a miracle one year and beat the strong team in the next county, I imagine you’d be happier to recount the glories of beating the strong team while ignoring the glories of beating all the weaker teams. Similarly white Americans have had a history of making their enemies out to be strong, portraying the native Americans they conquered as powerful because if they portrayed them as weak it would make them look unchristian and evil and sadistic. My historic understanding of the facts in my other comment may have been incorrect but I think the broad philosophy behind it is sound

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?

In part because we have a substantial black population that conceives of itself as needing to guilt benefits and sinecures from the hands of whites, while the hispanic and chinese populations do not do so, and the native americans were functionally destroyed aside from a few remnants. Thus, black slavery is politically useful in a way the rest is not, and most politics is whig history in service of contemporary political ends. And the rest is because we have terrible memories of our high school history curricula (or grew up in states without a significant history as part of spanish america. In California we learned all about the encomienda system as part of the Colombian exchange, and conditions in railroad gangs and early-industrial factories as part of early-20th century labor history. For the more advanced stuff you'd actually have to read some college-level scholarship (or just Scott's review of Albion's Seed), but it's not exactly hidden. This is all bog-standard 20th century progressive historiography that the elite are happy to teach to kids; it's hardly forbidden, red-pilled secrets.

If this was football, and your weak team had a miracle one year and beat the strong team in the next county, I imagine you’d be happier to recount the glories of beating the strong team while ignoring the glories of beating all the weaker teams.

Yes, but this is not football, and even if you were right and the metaphor holds, this rationale wouldn't have anything to do with why the actual slavery-supporting Americans imported black slaves because they were convinced that the black people, specifically, were physically superior. You've given a just-so reason for why such mythologies of physical dominance might spring up after the fact - i.e., for your own assumption.

Similarly white Americans have had a history of making their enemies out to be strong, portraying the native Americans they conquered as powerful because if they portrayed them as weak it would make them look unchristian and evil and sadistic.

A lot of the natives were very strong and impressive, for nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes. The white generals who fought them (Sherman, Sheridan, etc.) were quite open about the fact that yes, these impressive people were going to get steamrollered by industrial modernity, and that was sad, but such was the march of civilization. Not all christians believed that power = evil.

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?

Because leftists in the press and academia remind you of American black slavery every day. Remember that the root of "slave" is the same as the root of "Slav". Serfdom was extremely common in Europe. Indians in what became the US tended to make lousy slaves because it was too easy for them to escape, but that the conquistadores enslaved the South American Indians is indisputable.

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?

Because Chinese median income exceeds the white median income, and the black median income does not. Simple as.

My historic understanding of the facts in my other comment may have been incorrect but I think the broad philosophy behind it is sound

The philosophy is based on the facts, right? Otherwise you wouldn't need to mention them.

You're getting a lot of pushback, but frankly those people are gaslighting you.

NFL defenses are nearly 100% black for a reason. On average black men have higher testosterone, more fast twitch muscle, less body fat, larger hands, longer arms, thicker skin, and higher propensity for violence.

My guess is that a lot of people here have never played sports.

That may be so but it's also true that whites are taller and stronger, only those things do not matter as much (on their own anyway) for many popular sports.

What should be said is that fast twitch muscles are very important and west Africans have more fast twitch muscles.

I think is a miss reading of history. Africans where enslaved because they where the most convenient population available that European powers could enslave. Native populations where often enslaved first, but this wasn’t sustainable because there weren’t very many of them and they died very quickly from exposure to diseases from the old world. Asians where not enslaved because there wasn’t any short route to Asia and Asian polities where powerful enough to resist Europeans until the ~1850s.

I found this an interesting read, but I’m a little puzzled about the alpha vs. beta distinction you’re making. At the start, you make it sound like the alpha is just the bigger, taller, and more muscular partner, and the beta is the shorter and weaker one, but later on, you seem to be hinting at a psychological dimension as well. In day to day life, that would make sense. I’ve certainly known men who are physically not all that impressive but who exude confidence and authority, just as I’ve known men who could beat most people to a bloody pulp but who are nevertheless obvious betas (and there are plenty of men who are dominant in one social group and passive in another). Are you saying that in the gay dating world, the physically weak but self-confident and authoritative men should be submissive to anyone who’s physically stronger—that it just comes down to brute strength? And so the problem is just that too many physically imposing specimens are too meek for their own good? If so, how do you square that with younger men preferring an older partner, given that a 55-year-old is statistically quite likely to be weaker than a 25-year-old? (Also, surely that can’t actually be true, can it? “Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to… other younger men.” I was under the impression that youth is almost always the single most highly-prized characteristic among gay men. I swear I’ve heard that dating is almost impossible after 30 for most gay men, since everyone is always chasing the 20-year-olds.)

Also, with regard to the birth order effect,

The cause of this is unknown but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them.

My understanding is that the effect holds true even when the younger brothers are raised apart (when, e.g., the youngest was adopted), which would point to a biological cause in utero, rather than anything from socialization.

Basically, you have to begin by squaring the physical situation between yourself and the other person. There is fundamentally a difference between any two men that is 100% in the physical world. In a fight between two men, one will win, or there will be a draw. If I met a guy a foot taller than me with fifty pounds more muscle who was super bad at playing Cooking Mama for Nintendo DS and I was super good at it, it doesn't make me his top, it makes me better at a little game than him. If we had sex and I was using my super good abillities at playing Cooking Mama over him to make him suck my dick, it would be humiliating for both of us. If he was using his foot of height and 50 pounds of muscle on me to make me suck his dick, it would not humiliate either of us, I would have respect for his physical state. Later on, if he wants to play Cooking Mama together and I beat him, then it will make me feel good because we are both seeing each other for who we are. He is physically superior to me but I have these other traits that he can admire in me, whether it's being good at Cooking Mama or being smarter or richer or whatever.

Are you saying that in the gay dating world, the physically weak but self-confident and authoritative men should be submissive to anyone who’s physically stronger—that it just comes down to brute strength?

Well, I'm not saying that it "should" be that way as a prescriptive norm or something, I'm saying that basically you have to give credence to the brute strength between the two of you or it isn't going to work.

And so the problem is just that too many physically imposing specimens are too meek for their own good?

Yes, this is one of my frustrations with gay dating, that men who are physically superior to me don't see themselves as such. They compare themselves too much with men they imagine to be bigger or stronger than them and fail to respect themselves for the qualities they possess.

If so, how do you square that with younger men preferring an older partner, given that a 55-year-old is statistically quite likely to be weaker than a 25-year-old? (Also, surely that can’t actually be true, can it? “Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to… other younger men.” I was under the impression that youth is almost always the single most highly-prized characteristic among gay men. I swear I’ve heard that dating is almost impossible after 30 for most gay men, since everyone is always chasing the 20-year-olds.)

This sounds like a sort of dated concept, I do remember hearing this idea back in the early 00's or so but I really haven't heard gay men say this sort of thing in a long time. Anecdotally I am much more popular the older I get. I can imagine if a man wants to be a bottom that he is concerned he is getting too old and would have this perspective, but he really should just man up and be a top for the sake of everyone around him and his own dignity.

Also, with regard to the birth order effect,

That makes sense, it is my understanding as well that it is considered by science to have more of a biological cause but there is also a great bias against socialization related explanations of homosexuality so I wanted to present my theory from my own experiences.

So in the gay dating world, would it be fair to say that there is an element of—is coercion the right word?—when it comes to sex? Like in the ideal world, you’d wrestle and then the loser would have to pleasure the winner, rather like the loser when two boys wrestle might be forced to eat grass? If so, that is… rather different than what I would have expected. It sounds rather like the dynamic feminists imagine when they say that all sex/rape is just about power.

Also, though I’ve never considered it before, I think I see the cause of the problem right away. Presumably most gay men are gay because they enjoy being the receptive partner, leaving a dearth of men who enjoy being the active partner (possibly more of whom are bi than gay?). Is that a fair assessment?

No, it's not coercion. Ideally in the situation in your first paragraph, the boy who loses at wrestling is not being forced to pleasure the winner, he is pleasuring the winner because the winner deserves it. I do not want to pleasure a man who would coerce me into having sex, but I would respectfully pleasure him if I felt he deserved it.

In a way sex/rape IS just about power, but between two men you have the chance to respect the power or lack thereof between the two of you.

Presumably most gay men are gay because they enjoy being the receptive partner, leaving a dearth of men who enjoy being the active partner

No no no, well personally I don't find pleasure in being a receptive partner. (Granted, I particularly don't like being an anal bottom because it hurts me physically and feels degrading.) In romantic relationships I've had in the past where I've been the top, the bottom usually isn't that pleased with being a bottom either. He'll go along with it for a while if he really respects the top enough or disrespects himself too much. (This is where the age gap relationships comes into play, most adult men are ready to drop being a bottom in a relationship more quickly than younger men.) Most of my friends I've grown up with who were in long term gay relationships where both partners were in their 20s seem to break up when the bottom gets older and stops wanting to be the bottom.

Besides that, being a top is really more dangerous to the ego than being a bottom. The bottom gets to play a discriminatory role generally, and performing as a top is harder. Porn makes it look really easy but I'd say that topping anally is one of the most difficult things to do in sex- you have to stay hard for a long time, you have to find the hole, you have to do all these things, it's stressful and can be embarrassing. It takes a lot of confidence to feel like you deserve to top another guy. The problem is that today most men never achieve the confidence to top, even in oral sex.

Ideally in [your example], the boy who loses at wrestling is not being forced to pleasure the winner, he is pleasuring the winner because the winner deserves it. I do not want to pleasure a man who would coerce me into having sex, but I would respectfully pleasure him if I felt he deserved it. … In romantic relationships I've had in the past where I've been the top, the bottom usually isn't that pleased … He'll go along with it for a while if he really respects the top enough or disrespects himself too much … Most of my friends I've grown up with who were in long term gay relationships where both partners were in their 20s seem to break up when the bottom gets older and stops wanting to be the bottom. … It takes a lot of confidence to feel like you deserve to top another guy.

Based on what you've said, it sounds like you imagine that even in the ideal situation, a long-term gay relationship with partners in stable sex act roles isn't possible, or couldn't continue to be mutually beneficial?

Why is it that you (and apparently your past sexual partners) think someone has to "deserve" particular sex roles? How much of that is just contingent on you and them happening to physically not enjoy being the passive partner?

Basically I think men who see themselves as bottoms need to see themselves as tops to be happy and have healthy relationships with themselves and the people around them.

That seems like a very bold claim; I'd be interested to see you expand more specifically on why you think that is true.

Based on what you've said, it sounds like you imagine that even in the ideal situation, a long-term gay relationship with partners in stable sex act roles isn't possible, or couldn't continue to be mutually beneficial?

I am sort of agnostic on this point, if I had to tell you exactly what I believe, it is that it is possible to have a long term mutually respectful relationship between two men that is mutually beneficial, but it is very very rare and requires huge amounts of respect and humility from both partners who also understand the true dynamic of the relationship. And that this is not exclusive to homosexuality but really to all long term relationships.

Why is it that you (and apparently your past sexual partners) think someone has to "deserve" particular sex roles?

Because when you are doing sex acts with a partner, as two men, unless you are kissing or 69ing, there is fundamentally an alpha and a beta position. Because you have to, usually subconsciously and even unknowingly between the two of you, work out how the act is going to go, and to violate the order can hurt both of you if you don't understand that it's happening as a violation of the order between you two.

How much of that is just contingent on you and them happening to physically not enjoy being the passive partner?

As I've pointed at before I don't really "not enjoy being the passive partner" (aside from anal sex which I do not enjoy bottoming,) indeed I don't mind being a passive partner orally for either a man who is my top who I respect, or a bottom who I also respect and wants me to blow him.

That seems like a very bold claim; I'd be interested to see you expand more specifically on why you think that is true.

In seventh grade, I went on a trip with other seventh graders. There was this girl, let's call her Brooke. We were all like 13, Brooke was a skinny, hot, popular girl. But she went around all the time complaining about how fat and ugly she was. It drove the rest of us kids all crazy because we all thought she was hot and skinny, and if she was fat and ugly then that made us all obese and hideous. Dating today in the US is like meeting a million men who act like they're Brooke who thinks she's fat and ugly when really they're hot and nice and need to see themselves as hot and nice in order to share their hotness and niceness with the people around them who want to enjoy it as well, and this can't happen when they're stuck feeling badly about themselves. (And before someone accuses me of acting entitled to someone else's hotness or niceness or whatever, I try to practice what I preach and share my good traits with those around me too.) It's so elementary, read The Rainbow Fish if you don't believe me.

Because when you are doing sex acts with a partner, as two men, unless you are kissing or 69ing, there is fundamentally an alpha and a beta position. Because you have to, usually subconsciously and even unknowingly between the two of you, work out how the act is going to go, and to violate the order can hurt both of you if you don't understand that it's happening as a violation of the order between you two.

What “hurt” can come from “violat[ing] the order”?

You opened your original post up claiming that you only meant “alpha” and “beta” as referring to who'd win in a fight, saying that you didn't want to import the “connotations in the meme world”[sic] of those “loaded terms”, but that claim — that “hurt” can come if the “[physical superiority] order” is “violated” (whatever that means) — is not at all self-evident unless you're importing prison rape power dynamics, even if I grant* that there are certain pleasures available from physical and behavioral asymmetries in a same-sex relationship.

*And even this, I don't understand your position on so I'm not even sure if I'm granting exactly what you meant to communicate. If you think somehow acting in accord with the “order” of a same-sex relationship — which you define in relation to physical power / force — is so desirable, then why does your highest-ranked relationship prototype involving any serious power asymmetry between the partners have one leg ranked as not even “positive”?

I appreciate your bold desire to express your perspective from a clean slate, but that means that you need to specify your axioms. I see that you clarified in a later post that you think any kind of physical penetration is “essentially a degrading act that you must accept or reject”[sic], but why do you claim this? Do you claim it by analogy from the assumption that heterosexual penetration is “degrading”, or from some other line?

What exactly is wrong with a “beta” contributing a shy, smouldering consent & an “alpha” contributing a bright, doting energy into a bridal chamber of ecstasy, affection, non-judgement, and mutual trust that happens to include sex acts that violate your prescribed “order”?

If it's just not your cup of tea, and you would simply prefer to homoerotically wrestle out your unresolved parental conflicts with a self-confident middle-easterner who's approximately the same strength as you despite a sizeable age gap, then I'm glad you found something you like, but that doesn't seem to be any kind of “motte”.

It’s easy to imagine that these frightening males caused a fawning response in my adolescent brain that developed into homosexuality as I aged. Indeed I see a lot of fawning from gay men, especially younger gay men toward older gay men. I even catch myself fawning at stronger more dominant men though I feel some shade of disgust toward myself when I do this as it triggers memories of earlier years when I felt stuck as only a beta and primarily tried fawning at older men for affection/sex. That said it’s an effective strategy when a beta man fawns to you it’s very attractive but when an alpha fawns at you it’s rather irritating and awkward.

physical power is essential to understanding relationships between people. As I’ve grown older, my parents have naturally waned in their power over me and among the entire family. Of course when I was a child they were able to make all my decisions, … in my early 30s, my father had a health problem, he became quite weak and frail, and I was his caretaker … He continued to treat me like I was a child, not respecting my adulthood and the power I held in the situation. … at some point it became so degrading that I had to assert my power over him. He didn’t like it but after I stood up for myself he had more of a respect for me that I hadn’t been given previously. I had a similar experience with my mother a few years later. … men need to assert their power and strength, see themselves for who they are, respect themselves in their position in the world and respect those around them for who they are too.

very few people today have any experience in the exercise of power … My father failed to do that, my bosses all failed to do that, my friends fail to do that (and it has a very obvious negative effect on their kids). Nobody over the age of 40 gets it.

when I think of my own relationships and those of friends, as well as non-romantic relationships, they all seem to fit the power dynamic I've outlined. Even relationships with friends, parents, other family members, and so on. I suspect if you don't see it you're shielding yourself from seeing it, … once the pattern emerged I can't unsee it now.

Dating today in the US is like meeting a million men who act like they're Brooke who thinks she's fat and ugly when really they're hot and nice and need to see themselves as hot and nice in order to share their hotness and niceness with the people around them who want to enjoy it as well, and this can't happen when they're stuck feeling badly about themselves. (And before someone accuses me of acting entitled to someone else's hotness or niceness or whatever, I try to practice what I preach and share my good traits with those around me too.)

This complaint is completely comprehensible and I have no objections to it, but it seems almost totally orthogonal to your power dynamics model.

I could grant that the U.S. is full of neurotic bottoms who are refusing to accept themselves as sexually worthwhile, and grant that that's hamstringing them in their ability to “be happy and have healthy relationships with themselves and the people around them”[sic], without granting your much more specific claim that the cure for this is for them to “see themselves as tops”[sic].

The fact that other gay men don't like to hear anything I have to say and "clap back" at me further illustrates the frustration I feel with gay men, I am not here to sugar coat the experience or present the mainstream homosexual view of love and relationships and sex but rather point out the difficult aspects that underlie the entire situation. … my post isn't really about gay sex at all but rather I am using something I think about all the time … to make broader points about power and relationships.

If you're struggling with finding enjoyment and fulfillment while viewing gay relationships through this weird power dynamics lens and seeing recurrent “clap back” at your ideas whenever you verbalize them, the obvious implication (which might or might not be correct) is that the “difficult aspects” are actually with your perspective.

For what it's worth, I don't know that I “like” the limited preview of your model you've shared so far, but I do “wish” to see it explained in enough detail to be able to actually evaluate it.

No, it's not coercion.

I was responding to the “make him/me” in your previous comment. I think I sort of get where you’re coming from now, though it still seems like a much more power-focused dynamic than I’d have expected.

He'll go along with it for a while

Doesn’t this contradict your initial post (“Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha”) and even the end of this last post (“The problem is that today most men never achieve the confidence to top”)? Or was I misreading you? I thought you were using “alpha” and “beta” as synonyms for “top/active” and “bottom/passive.”

Incidentally, I’d like to second doglatine. This isn’t a subject I would have guessed I’d have found interesting, but it turns out that I do. Kudos.

Err, no I don't think this contradicts it. Basically I think men who see themselves as bottoms need to see themselves as tops to be happy and have healthy relationships with themselves and the people around them.

Sorry the terminology is kind of convoluted. Broadly, alpha = top = active while beta = bottom = passive. I used alpha and beta because it's more relevant to straight people and carries less of a specific meaning than the other two sets of terms which might make people think top/bottom = anal sex only whereas I am trying to describe the relationships more broadly.

I'm glad you found my post interesting, thanks for engaging.

The only thing that matters in this hierarchy is physical dominance

Women would prefer a 90s-era Jude Law or a Timothee Chalamet over any MMA fighter. Most prime-fertility age heartthrobs are not physically imposing or good at fighting, but instead possess obvious indicators of health (which is a fitness) plus social grace (which is a fitness in civilization).

Just to say, this was the most interesting post I’ve read on the Motte for a long time, so thanks for sharing your experiences, very different from the typical fare here. In case anyone else is reading, I’d be similarly interested to hear from others whose identity and experiences give them insights that others may miss.

Thank you, I appreciate this comment a lot.

So, if all men are judged on their physical characteristics and sexual fitness, how does this extend to race? Basically, some races are more physically dominant than others. If you charted all men, with physically dominant traits on the Y axis and nonphysically positive traits on the X axis, you would have most black men in the upper left and most East Asian men on the bottom right. (For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me. Asian men are better at certain types of intelligence but are smaller and less physically aggressive than blacks. I realize this is a controversial portion of my thinking and can provide further evidence if needed.) White men would probably be broadly in the middle of the graph, with Latino men and Indian/South Asian men being somewhat closer to the origin of the graph, with Latino men being closer to white/black/ or Asian men depending on their specific admixture of white/black/native blood. (Mexicans/Peruvians are closer to Asians, while Cubans/Dominicans can be closer to whites/blacks etc.) Of course there are countless exceptions to all of this- a black midget would be to the bottom right of an Asian linebacker, and so on.

Quite literally, this isn't true- interracial relationships are overwhelmingly white man/nonwhite woman(and the one exception is there are more black men in relationships with white women than white men in relationships with black women, but this is probably just obesity on the part of black women making them undesirable) and black men are on average shorter and in worse shape than other races. You see lots of them as football linebackers because no one cares if they get concussed, and outside of the NFL and NBA American sports are dominated by white men. Higher black partner count is probably due to lower average IQ's/impulse control combined with cultural views rewarding male promiscuity more strongly.

interracial relationships are overwhelmingly white man/nonwhite woman

I originally had a short paragraph about how the sexual graph for men is an inversion of the sexual graph for women- basically Asian and Latina women would easily outcompete white and black women which would explain this.

(and the one exception is there are more black men in relationships with white women than white men in relationships with black women, but this is probably just obesity on the part of black women making them undesirable)

I doubt it's just obesity making black women undesirable but rather their more masculine traits generally (Michelle Obama is a man, anecdotally, according to white men) and fewer desirable female traits

outside of the NFL and NBA American sports are dominated by white men

Because white men have the money and time to commit to sports

Baseball, soccer, hockey, etc are pretty widespread and have lots of public dollars behind them, similar to football and basketball. Still white and hispanic(many of whom are white).

And I mean, yes, obviously black women are seen widely as unattractive due to their features(kinky hair, african noses, etc), but it seems like the huge disparity between black women and men in ability to get interracial relationships has to be driven by something different between them- black features don't seem desirable on a man either- and the black female obesity rate is much higher than the black male rate.

black features don't seem desirable on a man either

AIUI women care less about facial features (on average), so even if the direction's the same, the strength of the effect on overall attractiveness might be less.

The one who would likely win in a physical fight is the alpha. To judge this we look at physical characteristics: ...dick size...

Count me skeptical that having a nice cock (bro) is an advantage in a fight.

I believe the actual explanation for this is that the nice cock is a reflection of less visible qualities. A person's digit ratio isn't going to have a direct impact on how aggressive they are, but they both reflect subtler processes and qualities that have an impact on both.

they both reflect subtler processes and qualities that have an impact on both.

This is assuming the conclusion.

Sorry for being unclear - I meant that I'm trying to model the thought process that leads to this belief. I'm not sure of the actual relationship/mechanisms behind cock size, but I am sure that a lot of people view it as a signal of virility/genetic quality.

Imagine a guy with a big dick and then imagine the same guy with a tiny dick. Which does your monkey brain pick as the winner instinctively? (You could say, well the bigger thing gives you more to attack, maybe it's a disadvantage, bla bla) but in this instance I'm purely talking about who in a split second decision is more physically intimidating to the viewer. I personally would give the edge to the bigger dick guy

I don't imagine there's any good evidence to support this claim but I believe it completely

What I'm saying is, I'm not sure that your imaginings of cocks and physiques actually has any bearing on reality.

If it's the same guy I don't think that there is anything to even discuss here.

What is the evidence?

what about a giant with a giant dick vs a human with a human dick, how does that change the calculus?

monkey brain

Most monkeys and apes have very small dicks.

Great point. Who would win in a fight, a silverback gorilla with his 1.25 inch (erect) micropenis or a human with a 6 inch monster cock?

The human, because we have weapons and advanced societies to coordinate effort and now have to make an actual effort not to incidentally kill all the gorillas.

A theoretical straight-up fight for dominance is a weird fake aberration; society with all its nuance is the state of Nature.

For similar reasons, weaker, smarter, more socially adept humans are fitter. That's why humans evolved to be so much weaker than other apes in the first place.

Is plastic surgery an essential medical procedure that a Department of Corrections must pay for, if a prisoner is sufficiently distressed about it? And if a M-to-F transwoman undergoes full reassignment surgery, will that prisoner be transferred to women's prison in due course?

A federal judge ruled the Indiana Department of Correction's ban on gender-affirming care is likely unconstitutional, and an inmate from Evansville is at the center of the lawsuit.

Source, archived version.

The prisoner (neé Jonathan Richardson, now Autumn Cordellioné) is serving a 55-year sentence for almost two decades for killing one's baby stepdaughter. The prisoner was diagnosed with gender dysphoria four years ago and put on testosterone blocker and female hormone.

While the medicine has helped, the lawsuit states Cordellioné continues to experience symptoms of gender dysphoria including depression and anxiety. [...] Cordellioné was on a wait list for evaluation for the surgery, but a new Indiana statute does not allow the DOC to provide or facilitate "sexual reassignment surgery." The ACLU [representing Cordellioné] argues in its suit that for some, the surgery is a medical necessity. In this case, Cordellioné is seeking a orchiectomy, which removes the testicles, and vaginoplasty, which is the construction of the vagina.

"By prohibiting the surgery, regardless of medical need, the statute mandates deliberate indifference to a serious medical need and therefore violates the Eighth Amendment," the suit states. "Additionally, the statute discriminates against Plaintiff and other transgender prisoners in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution."

The judge agreed, issued a preliminary injunction against the Indiana statute in question.

Here's a summary of the statute (HEA 1569, passed in 2023) that perplexity.ai provided:

It prohibits the Indiana Department of Corrections from performing certain surgical procedures for the purpose of altering the appearance or affirming an inmate's gender identity if it's inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth. Specifically, the law bans the following procedures [gives a list including castration and vaginoplasty, and in general removing healthy tissue or non-diseased body part].: The law does not define "gender" or "sex" but appears to use "sex" to refer to an individual's sex assigned at birth.

The law doesn't prohibit hormone therapy (which the prisoner got) or social transitioning:

The lawsuit states Cordellioné has lived as a woman to the "extent possible" while in a prison housing only men. She has been permitted gender-affirming items such as makeup and "form fitting clothing."

I will put aside for now how utterly annoying I find the assumption that, to be a woman, one wears makeup and form-fitting clothes. By all means fellas, go all 17th-century Versailles. My main question is this: if the Indiana Department of Corrections is required accommodate "gender-affirming" transitions, including the extreme surgeries of removing testicles and shaping the penis to look like a vagina, wouldn't the reasonable next step be to affirm the prisoner's womanhood by placing the prisoner in women's correctional facilities?

(My husband said that if he ever had to go to prison and there was an option to go to women's prison rather than men's, his only question is: what needs to be chopped off and how soon?)

Let me end on a controversial (for The Motte) note: maybe I simply shouldn't care. Cordellioné has been in prison since early 2000, which makes the person at least 40. So even if I don't see this person as a woman, this is a middle-aged male on testosterone blockers with some serious surgeries between his legs. How dangerous would he really be to the female prisoners, compared to other female prisoners already serving there?

I wonder though, can the legislature categorically decide what medical care is given prisoners consistent with the 8th/14th amendments? Seems like the answer is no, at least not in an unlimited sense.

In the specific case, I think obviously the plaintiff isn't entitled to the specific care requested. But I think that's a fact-specific thing that is subject to constitutional minimums

Yeah, there's a long line of recent caselaw holding some medical care is constitutionally required, under the 8th Amendment for convicted prisoners and under the 14th for pretrial jailed people. Was one of several matters of controversy back in the early Sovaldi days, among others. Unlike the NYT's panicked reporting then, the legal standard isn't 'standard of care', but it is pretty messy and vague.

Indeed. So Indiana has to lose on the legislative issue.

In a sane world, the plaintiff would have an uphill case to prove that the care given was so lacking as to be unconstitutional.

The issue here is that the government had abdicated the role of deciding what counts as "medically necessary treatment" to doctors. This probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but now we have reams and reams of court precident citing professional standards generated by private doctor's associations as evidence of medical nessesity, such that it now overrules state laws attempting to regulate medical care.

I think that probably is a good idea going forwards, in the sense that the legislatures are probably not the right body to be making that determination.

It is sad that the professional bodies are beholden to nonsense, but at least they have the capacity to know what they are talking about and make the evidence-based call.

Ultimately, it seems like a choice between those that don't know and those that know better.

make the evidence-based call.

It isn't always evidence that is the deciding factor. To point to another hot-button issue, I don't trust doctors to decide "when is abortion murder?", because it is more a question of moral philosophy than medicine.

because it is more a question of moral philosophy than medicine.

This conflation of "expertise in a given field" and "ability to make complex moral judgements", already far too common in PMC spaces, became turbocharged during Covid. It's baffling the number of people who seem to think that simply being extremely knowledgeable about epidemiology automatically makes you qualified to judge which civil liberties can be indefinitely suspended.

(It's easy to expose how facile this reasoning is: no one thinks extensive training in firearms automatically makes you qualified to make a moral judgement on how easy it should be to buy a gun.)

Complicating that is that Covid revealed a lot of those "experts" weren't extremely knowledgable about epidemiology either -- e.g. the charts coming from the Canadian CDC showing predicted rapid exponential growth in deaths in the short term, which kept not happening. Either these people were lying, or they were failures even in their own field.

Absolutely. I don't believe that even one of Neil Ferguson's enormously pessimistic projections came to pass, but for some reason he's still held up as some kind of guru.

Agreed, that's quite a different thing though.

I personally find the very notion rather crass. We are going to spend millions in taxpayers’ money to transition convicted felons while the people who will be paying for it can end up owing thousands of dollars because their insurance doesn’t cover 100% of their frivolous cancer treatments and heart surgeries and so on. The state doesn’t have infinite money to do everything it wants to do, and it seems that doing essentially cosmetic procedures on prisoners while other much more pressing issues cannot be dealt with due to lack of funds? If hormones plus surgery cost (totally made up number) 75,000 dollars a person, what are we no longer going to provide to pay for this?

I do personally find it a bit odd that he didn't seem to be suffering from much dysphoria before he decided to murder someone, and in fact for the first 16-18 years, he wasn’t really saying or doing much that indicates dysphoria. I’m not sure that he isn’t faking to some degree either as a “fuck the system” thing or as a way to get better treatment that he imagines he’d get as a female prisoner. In short I suspect he is playing a game here, and he’s trying to be manipulative.

Being fair to him, I don’t think he’s the danger here. Female gang members and murderers are tough and they aren’t going to take this lying down. These aren’t nice polite PTA wine moms he’s going to be housed with. They are highly likely to try to hurt him before he could try anything stupid.

On the first point, prison is already quite expensive. Even if a substantial number of prisoners would take advantage of this, it would probably make up less than 1% of the price of prison. And offering violent prisoners better conditions in exchange for castration actually seems like a good deal for everyone involved.

On the second, remember, crime doesn't pay, especially not random murder, so the average murderer is stupid, insane or emotionally disturbed (probably a combination, in fact). So he might be trying to game the system in a stupid way, or he might just be fucked up enough to believe it.

On the first point, prison is already quite expensive. Even if a substantial number of prisoners would take advantage of this, it would probably make up less than 1% of the price of prison.

I notice that this reasoning could be used to justify almost any frivolous expense. "Let's give every inmate a PS5 when they're successfully paroled." "Why?" "Who cares? It'll make up less than 1% of the price of prison."

The difference between gender-affirming care and other prison expenses is that the taxpayer actually gets something back from most of the other costs associated with prisons. Most prison funding goes towards line items which will prevent convicts from escaping (walls, bars, COs), thereby protecting the taxpayer in the short-term; or which are designed to rehabilitate convicts, protecting the taxpayer in the long-term (education, shop classes, anger management training). Of course you can interrogate whether any given line item actually accomplishes its stated goal or passes a cost-benefit analysis (maybe if you're serving a life sentence without possibility of parole, any attempt at rehabilitation is a waste of time and resources, except to protect the COs and fellow inmates from you; maybe art classes to teach inmates how to get in touch with their inner child and express themselves visually actually increase recidivism rates, who knows?), but that's generally how they're justified.

Gender-affirming care for inmates meets neither criterion: it only "benefits" the inmate. At a push there's an ancillary benefit in that an inmate who undergoes a vaginoplasty can no longer rape taxpayers with the penis he no longer has, but not every inmate who requests gender-affirming care has a history of sexual violence: if Bob already was at zero risk of committing a sex crime after release and requests a vaginoplasty, we've just spent $75k of the taxpayer's money and gotten nothing back to show for it.

Perhaps a doctor will argue that the entire reason for the inmates' history of criminality or violent behaviour was unresolved distress due to their gender dysphoria, so providing them with gender-affirming care will actually have a rehabilitative effect in the long run. I haven't yet seen anyone try to justify the policy on those grounds, however.

I don't think we disagree as much as you think; I also care very little about making prisoner's life nicer. I'm not really in favor of this policy so much as thinking that among the crazy stupid stuff we're doing, this one is pretty low on my list of priorities, and might even have some unintended benefits.

Gender-affirming care for inmates meets neither criterion: it only "benefits" the inmate. At a push there's an ancillary benefit in that an inmate who undergoes a vaginoplasty can no longer rape taxpayers with the penis he no longer has, but not every inmate who requests gender-affirming care has a history of sexual violence: if Bob already was at zero risk of committing a sex crime after release and requests a vaginoplasty, we've just spent $75k of the taxpayer's money and gotten nothing back to show for it.

This is what we disagree on, I guess. Testosterone is the primary driver of violence in general, not just of sexual nature. And castration is by far the most reliable way of reducing T-levels. Even historically it was regularly noted how tepid and submissive eunuchs tended to be; But you don't need to take their word for it, modern studies on this topic consistently find a very strong relationship between violence and T-levels as well. It's not super advertised since it leads to some conclusions that most people don't like thinking about, but in a field were many things don't replicate, this one does reliably.

On the other hand, consider this report (I've been linking to it a lot lately) which found no statistically significant differences in the rates of violent offending between males who had undergone gender reassignment surgery and the general male population.

This is quite interesting. I find no obvious problems with the design except the unavoidable (large CI, now randomisation, etc.), so it does move the needle quite a bit for me. The only possible issues I can see is that I'm not entirely convinced that criteria i) strictly requires an actual surgery to take place, that the large CI can still hold some surprises (0..3-2.1 ranges from "almost female-pattern criminality" to "holy shit even higher than male-pattern criminality") and the usual troubles with selection effects.

It's very weird that somehow FtMs have male-pattern criminality, while MtFs ... also have male-pattern criminality.

FtMs have male-pattern criminality

Is that true? I wasn't aware.

According to the paper the report is based on, yes. See there under "Results:Gender Differences".

More comments

I didn't look at those numbers, but someone compiled some stats showing it's actually higher:

https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1831735103082410239#m

Our own @ymeskhout wrote an article arguing that the stats on which this graph is based are being misinterpreted: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/contra-dolly-on-trans-criminality

Jonathan Richardson, now Autumn Cordellioné

This is a bit of a derail, but why is that kind of "flamboyant" self-appelation so common in the MtF trans demographic?

I know three people from college who have transitioned in their 30s. Their self-chosen names are:

  • Maeve
  • Celeste
  • Pandora

At first I thought it was some kind of drag queen schtick, but no, they're all legal names.

I met one renamed "Lilith".

Edit: Someone below also mentions Liliths. I didn't know that was a thing.

Lilith is an extremely common name for trans women, for whatever reason. (I'm very supportive of trans people and have several trans friends, and "Lilith" is a common joke/punchline in trans communities when discussing names due to how common yet silly it is.)

I think for most of them the name is a reference to Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Abrahamaic noncanon esoterica holds that Lilith was the first wife of Adam who was rejected before the fall and became a demon. It's a common self-appellation among eg self-declared witches as well because of the misperception that she was some kind of slutty proto-feminist temptress figure instead of a demon who tries to kill newborns and their mamas out of jealousy, as the legend actually says.

It's just cultural appropriation. Not really worth getting offended over but also highly stupid.

In (non-canonical) Judeo-Christian mythology, Lilith was the first wife of Adam (before Eve). In many depictions she's very similar to a succubus.

The traditional view of Lilith in esoterica was as a scorned woman who became/made a pact with a demon to try to kill women in childbirth and young babies out of jealousy, not as a temptress.

Its a low-key cultural "fuck you" aimed at conservative Christians. The message being that I know that you know that this is some sort of weird sex/fetish thing but I'm going to scream bloody murder and accuse you of being uncharitable if you try to point it out.

Based of them.

Probably to do with changing your name in general.

Honestly, if I ever went for a name change, even keeping my gender, I'd absolutely go for something awesome. Why wouldn't I? And I might even make "Danger" my legal middle name, while I'm at it.

An army of Liliths and Reubens.

(Also just goes to show how relative these things are: "Maeve" has been an extremely common name in Ireland for decades, and was even the 44th most popular name for baby girls last year.)

I should probably do an effort post on this at some point but the distribution of trans patients in general medical care (which aligns closeish with real life), primary psychiatric settings, and correctional/forensic settings are all wildly different.

This causes a number of headaches, since political leadership inside the prison system often has minimal experience with prison (to say nothing of more general political leadership). You might be a well meaning left leaning person, primarily interact with well meaning and convincing trans people, and assume that the prisoners are the same. They are not.

"Real" trans people exist. In say, a locked psychiatric inpatient unit (where everyone is by definition mentally ill) most of the trans people are psychotic patients or those with borderline personality disorder or some other process causing identity instability. Correctional settings has those, and also people malingering. And yes you have people malingering so hard they'll cut their dick off if given the option.

For the usual reasons of wokeism activists can't really admit these other types of trans people exist and causes all kinds of problems, although it can be darkly funny when physicians are involved.

Wokeism does not typically survive very long with day to day contact with the prison population, so you'll find staff (even doctors and social workers) are much more clear eyed about all this but they don't make the decisions. People with strong ego defenses can stay woke but they almost uniformly end up on therapy to do it, which is...worrying.

In my state (redacted) the "worst" prison doesn't have functional climate control in the high security unit because too much of the budget has been redirected towards gender affirming care.

And yes you have people malingering so hard they'll cut their dick off if given the option.

Maybe that's a win, in a sense. If a male with sufficient propensity for violence or anti-social behavior chooses to castrate himself, I'd be happy if that procedure was paid for with taxes. I would be OK with the additional tax burden there.

Hard to research but - not necessarily a good outcome, once the identity instability clears or the secondary gain abates the patient may have increased rage at the system, violent urges, etc.

People in prison almost never have the ability to accurately assign blame "I can't believe specific person/the system let me do that, I need revenge on them specifically or people in general."

Holding out women's prison as an incentive for male prisoners to request castration is a good deal for everyone except the women. It would be ideal if prisoners worked jobs while in prison to pay for their own castration. But it makes sense for the government to cover the cost, since society benefits from the reduced secretion of testosterone.

“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” - Gen. Ripper

If transferring a male convict to a women's prison was made conditional on their having undergone a penectomy/vaginoplasty, I imagine the policy would be much less controversial than it currently is, as it completely negates the possibility of the male in question raping a female inmate (possibly leading to pregnancy). In many jurisdictions, this isn't a condition of transfer at all: one must simply announce "I am a woman" and the transfer will be carried out, without even the most token effort at social transition.

However, even with his penis having been removed, if this convict is transferred to a women's prison, he will almost certainly be vastly stronger than all of his fellow inmates (even after having undergone hormone therapy). The female inmates might reasonably object to being placed in close proximity to a violent male who can overpower any of them with ease, even if the chances of him raping them are nil.

If transferring a male convict to a women's prison was made conditional on their having undergone a penectomy/vaginoplasty, I imagine the policy would be much less controversial than it currently is, as it completely negates the possibility of the male in question raping a female inmate (possibly leading to pregnancy)

This isn't true. It makes the possibility of pregnancy nil, though the hormone therapy probably already does this. They'd still have a strength advantage and could overpower and rape female inmates though. Just not with a penis, would have to use finger, fist, idk broomstick, etc. Honestly potentially more dangerous for the female.

Rape is generally defined as nonconsensual penetration with a penis. Forcibly penetrating someone with a finger or foreign object would fall under sexual assault.

Even the more strict definitions I'm familiar with usually just define it as forced penetration w/o a penis specifically mentioned. I still don't see why anyone would be relieved that male sexual deviants are forcibly fisting female inmates rather than traditional PIV though.

In the UK:

The legal definition of rape is when a person intentionally penetrates another's vagina, anus or mouth with a penis, without the other person's consent. Assault by penetration is when a person penetrates another person's vagina or anus with any part of the body other than a penis, or by using an object, without the person's consent.

Other jurisdictions use different definitions which include forcible penetration with a body part or object other than a penis.

I still don't see why anyone would be relieved that male sexual deviants are forcibly fisting female inmates rather than traditional PIV though.

While being forcibly penetrated with a fist is obviously intensely unpleasant, the chances of contracting an STD as a result are virtually nil and the chances of becoming pregnant are zero. This is why male-on-female sexual assault is qualitatively, categorically different to other kinds of sexual assault. Female inmates can and do sexually assault other female inmates, but the reduced risk of contracting an STD and the impossibility of being impregnated make it a very different risk calculus.

A male inmate who has undergone a penectomy absolutely can sexually assault (or rape, depending on definition) female inmates using objects or body parts other than the penis which he has had removed, and his physical strength will probably make it much easier for him to do so than a female inmate trying the same thing. But the impossibility of PiV changes the risk calculus significantly.

ah it's a US vs UK thing then

here its federally defined as:

Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.

if STDs were one of the main risks taken into consideration you'd think there would be more focus on male prison rape as male to male rape (anal) has a higher chance of spreading disease than PiV. Seems to me that here in the states the objections are more about putting people less able to defend themselves at risk of abuse.

I think the pregnancy thing is the main one, with STDs a distant second.

If transferring a male convict to a women's prison was made conditional on their having undergone a penectomy/vaginoplasty, I imagine the policy would be much less controversial than it currently is, as it completely negates the possibility of the male in question raping a female inmate (possibly leading to pregnancy).

I would support that. We already have various levels of security for male prisoners (minimum / maximum levels). We can adjust the women's prison to be the meek-and-weak prison. Women who demonstrate a history of attacking other inmates can be transferred to the minimum security prison.

Partially severing every muscle in the body should be an integral part of gender-affirming care.

Speak plainly, please.

Seems plain enough to me; he's saying that part of gender-affirming care for male-to-female transexuals in prison (which is the context here) should be to partially sever every muscle in the body, to make them weaker so they fit into the "meek-and-weak" prison.

I didn't find those caveats obvious. Perhaps they were intended, perhaps not. Either way, it makes for a convenient motte and bailey.

C.f. people who claim "kill all white men!" actually, in context, plainly means "politely ask a small subset of white men to voluntarily give up power."

Partial severing of every muscle in the body is just another way of saying "we should kill them" due to the combination of the hazards of the necessary surgeries and the fragility of a number of extremely important muscles (eg, the heart, diaphragm, and intestines).

Is that an oblique way to refer to the microtears that occur during hypertrophy (as an element of well-adjusted cis males’ and trans men’s “gender-affirming” lifestyle), or do you mean “severing” as part of a satirically proposed surgery to decrease over-all strength as part of an MtF transition — not as a genuine part of the personal expression project that is the medical sex/gender transition process, but as a security control, medical harm per se applied prophylactically to male prisoners seeking cross-sex asylum?