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PaperclipPerfector  17hr ago (text post)   3433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Last week there was an interesting discussion about a brewing backlash against polyamory in rationalist circles. I theorised that this was an inevitable result of the rationalist movement growing to the point that it included many “normies”, and that while polyamory might work pretty well for the first-generation rationalists who were abnormal on one or more axes (gay, trans, asexual, autistic etc.), it will probably not work for people who are comparatively normal: just because something works well for oddballs, that doesn’t necessarily generalise to it working well for the more conventionally-minded. Specifically, I think that polyamory is unlikely to work well for anyone who experiences a typical amount of sexual jealousy, a category that asexual people almost definitionally do not fall into (or so I assume).

This got me thinking about Rob Henderson’s theory about luxury beliefs. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the gist is that Henderson thinks that the greater affordability of material goods and democratisation of fashion styles means that Veblen goods are no longer an effective signalling mechanism that a person is a member of the elite (when cars are so expensive that most people can't afford them, owning a car is a costly signal that you are rich; when they become so cheap that everyone can afford them, the only way you can stand out is by buying a really expensive one, and the visual difference between a Tesla and a used Honda isn't half as distinct as the difference between have and have-not). As an alternative signal of how cultured and educated they are, elites instead promote outré-sounding ideas which sound crazy to the average person, but putting these ideas into practice has devastating consequences for anyone who isn’t an elite. The reason these ideas aren’t devastating for elites is either that:

  • while they promote them in the abstract, they don’t practise them themselves e.g. Ivy League-educated people talking about how marriage is an oppressive patriarchal construct and praising people who experiment with “alternative family structures” – while they personally waited to get married before having children, and have a family structure which would seem unsurprising to a time-traveller from 1950s America; or
  • they do practise the ideas themselves, but their wealth insulates them from the consequences that would befall a poorer person who practised them (it's easy to be an advocate for defunding the police if you live in a gated community)

Regardless of what you think of the luxury beliefs concept (I know that @ymeskhout, formerly of these parts, vociferously disagrees with the entire framing), the discussion about polyamory has got me thinking of a related idea, the general case of which polyamory is a specific example. Essentially, it boils down to alternative social practices or lifestyle choices that share the following traits:

  • if practised by a person who is weird or abnormal,1 it will work better than adhering to the status quo
  • if practised by a person who is comparatively normal, it will be disastrous compared to adhering to the status quo
  • weird and abnormal people start doing the alternative lifestyle choice, find that it legitimately works great for them (much better than the “normal” thing they were doing before, or could have done instead), and become proselytizers for the cause, effusively telling everyone they know how much the alternative lifestyle choice has improved their lives and encouraging them to give it a try (optionally being a bit more cautious and responsible about this, admitting that it might come with downsides or acknowledging that it may not work for everybody)
  • the alternative lifestyle choice takes off in popularity, but some people quickly find that it isn’t improving their lives as much as they were promised, or may be actively ruining their lives
  • but because our society glorifies being weird and different, and scorns being conventional (using terms like “normie”, “basic” etc.), lots of people refuse to admit that the reason the alternative lifestyle choice isn’t working for them is because they’re a relatively conventional person, and keep trying to “push through” their initial discomfort in order to reach the point at which the lifestyle choice actually will improve their lives. This quickly leads to a sunk-cost fallacy, and by the time they realise they’re a normal person for whom the alternative lifestyle choice simply doesn’t work, the damage may be severe and irreparable.

Offhand, I can think of a few alternative lifestyle choices other than polyamory which I think meet this description:

  • Gender transition: In spite of my undisguised incredulity towards gender ideology and towards the hysterical claims about how medical transition is “lifesaving treatment” (and hence that denying it to someone who wants it is no different from denying chemotherapy to a cancer patient) – in spite of all that, I do believe that there may be rare cases in which certain people stand to benefit from medical transition, and may see an attenuation of mental distress and improved quality of life as a result. The operative word in that sentence being “rare”. In the West, the rates of people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria have skyrocketed over the past two decades, and even medics who work in this space are belatedly coming to recognise that, for many of their patients, medical transition isn’t the silver bullet they advertised and may even exacerbate their suffering (a realisation they are struggling to rationalise away). Eliza Mondegreen catalogues some of the mental gymnastics said medics will resort to, along with heartbreaking examples of people who’ve undergone some form of social and/or medical transition and found their dysphoria worsening and their psychic distress increasing – but when they turn to communities of like-minded individuals for help, they are inevitably gaslit about how it has to get worse before it gets better (and how detransitioners are traitors to the cause upon whom death is wished – you wouldn’t want to be one of those people, would you?). I am comfortable saying that, for the majority of people who have medically transitioned in the past two decades, their quality of life has probably disimproved, whether marginally or drastically; while a minority has seen their quality of life improve.
  • Sex-positive feminism: Closely related to the original polyamory example, there is a widespread set of cultural messages which present casual sex, kink, group sex, multiple concurrent sexual partners etc. as the path to female empowerment, and which encourage young women to experiment with them on that basis. While I have no objection to women engaging in these behaviours on moral grounds, and don't doubt that there are some women out there who derive just as much pleasure from casual sex as the modal man – nonetheless, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that such woman are atypical, and that the modal woman’s self-esteem takes a hit after a one-night stand, while the modal man sees a boost to his. But because so much of sex-positive feminism explicitly or implicitly tells young women that being uninterested in casual sex is indicative of prudery (a message reinforced by every horny young man in their vicinity) and that regretting a one-night stand is indicative of “internalised misogyny” or whatever, many women continue practising casual sex long past the point at which it’s obvious that it’s making them miserable, as sadly documented in this post by a young Arab-American woman who avoided losing her virginity in college, while all of her female friends were repeatedly used and cast aside by their male peers. As much as I might deride the silliness of the term “demisexual”, I do understand that it might be the only way in the current cultural climate that a woman can express her preferences without being accused of being a “bad feminist”, or of slut-shaming her peers by implication.2
  • Drug liberalisation: I believe this was one of Rob Henderson’s canonical examples of luxury beliefs, but it fits here just as well. There are some people who can experiment with psychoactive substances without becoming addicted or developing psychotic symptoms, but these people are rare, and addictive pathways for normal people are predictable and well understood. For most people, experimenting with psychoactive substances will be a net-negative, and you should not gamble on being one of the weird people who can take a lot of LSD and see no ill effects. Ergo, drug liberalisation is almost certainly a net-negative for most people and hence for society as a whole. But our society shamelessly glorifies drug use as exciting and transcendent, so lots of people who should know better keep doing drugs long past the point at which they know they’re in the normie camp (and it’s not just the usual physical and psychological addiction causing them to stick with it, but also a whole host of modern messages about how drug use is the way to open up your third eye, that people who aren’t “420 friendly” are squares etc.).
  • Therapy: A hobby horse Freddie deBoer has been beating for years. Ever since Freud, therapy was generally understood as medical treatment, and going to a therapist when you weren’t mentally ill would have seemed about as logical as going to a GP when you didn’t feel sick. But in recent years, the idea that everyone should go to therapy, regardless of whether or not they’re in acute mental distress, has been growing in popularity. Hand-in-hand with this idea is the more or less explicit denial that therapy can ever result in iatrogenic harm, a concept that everyone understands perfectly well in the context of any other kind of medical treatment: “either therapy will help you,” these people argue, “or at worst it will be ineffectual”. (I’m sure some people in the “everyone should go to therapy” camp would flatly deny that there exists a person, anywhere, who isn’t mentally ill: after all, if everyone has trauma, then by implication everyone experiences post-traumatic stress and in turn suffers from [complex] post-traumatic stress disorder. This may be a weakman but it is not a strawman.) In my opinion, we were right the first time around and therapy should be understood first and foremost as medical treatment for people suffering from mental illnesses (even being in mental distress isn’t in and of itself evidence of mental illness, as anyone recently bereaved can tell you, and the mental health industry’s casual conflation of the two is irresponsible and appalling). For those people, therapy may be hugely beneficial. Most people, however, do not suffer from mental illnesses as generally understood, and hence do not stand to benefit from therapy. If you’re one of the many people who doesn’t suffer from mental illness, therapy is likely to have either no impact on your life at all (aside from being a huge waste of time and money), or actively detrimental to your well-being (obsessively analysing and ruminating on all the things in your life that make you unhappy doesn’t sound a great recipe for happiness) and/or the well-being of people around you (e.g. narcissists who go to therapy and learn lots of handy tricks and terminology for how to manipulate the people around them and rationalise away their own bad behaviour). But because our culture shamelessly glorifies mental illness3 and heavily implies that people with mental illnesses are more exciting and interesting than people without (the new term for people with autistic traits is “neurospicy”, for fuck’s sake), lots of people keep going to therapy long past the point at which they should know full well that they’re not mentally ill and are just an ordinary person with ordinary problems.
  • “Follow your dreams”/do what you love: Sound advice, if you’re one of the tiny minority of people talented and/or attractive enough to make a living from acting/writing/music/sports/video game streaming/modelling/influencing etc., for whom working in a regular job would probably be a lot more frustrating and dissatisfying than it would be for a normal person. For most people pursuing careers in these areas, the erroneous belief that they are one of these rarefied individuals results in them neglecting to develop productive life skills which would serve them well in the event that they turn out to be a normal person with normal (i.e. unremarkable) levels of skill in one of the aforementioned domains. But because our culture glorifies working in the sports, fashion and entertainment industries, and scorns working in a normal job like a normal person (bullshit jobs,4 soul-crushing desk job etc.), lots of people keep pursuing their dream job long past the point at which it’s abundantly obvious that they’re not talented enough to make a living as a rapper or streamer. As documented in The Disaster Artist, there are few things more heartbreaking than a talentless wannabe actor still pursuing a career as a leading man well into his forties – and unlike Tommy Wiseau, most such people don’t have millions of dollars from real estate investments tucked away. This one is particularly interesting in that, unlike the previous examples, it has the appearance of a zero-sum game, and as such one would naively expect that successful actors, musicians etc. would be incentivised to discourage others from pursuing careers in their domain, or engage in rent-seeking behaviour like guilds and so on. But there may be an alternative dynamic at play, in which moderately talented actors etc. are savvy enough to know that flooding the market with talentless hacks will make the legitimately talented stand out all the more. For years I’ve been convinced that this may be a contributing factor to the recent “body positivity” trend, which I may write a separate post about.
    • OnlyFans: Sort of, but not exactly, a sub-point to the above – I doubt there are many women for whom making a living from amateur pornography is their first career preference, or who would say they love making a living from pornography – but certainly there are lots of women who’ve been sold a bill of goods about how making a living from amateur pornography is much easier and more lucrative than doing so via a more conventional vocation, and being able to say that you're attractive enough to make a living from your looks is certainly a bigger flex than making a living from working in accounts receivable. In the case of women who forgo developing real professional skills in favour of setting up an OnlyFans account under their own names, the outcomes can be particularly disastrous. Not only do they quickly realise it’s a much more labour-intensive job than they were led to believe; not only are they quickly subjected to the rude awakening that they’re nowhere near as attractive as they thought they were (and therefore that all of their friends telling them that they were 10/10 bad bitches were just yasslighting them); not only are they quickly made aware of the diminishing returns inherent in the fact that a woman’s attractiveness is heavily determined by her youthfulness; not only do they quickly learn that the more attractive women have the vanilla corner of the market stitched up, and hence that the only way to stay competitive is by appealing to the fantasies of the gross fetishistic perverts – but on top of all that, images of their rectum paired with their name are now splashed out across the entire Internet effectively forever, potentially curtailing both their professional and romantic opportunities for years to come. (To note: I’m not disputing that this latter point may also be true of women who succeed in making a living in pornography. Just because there are some women who make bank by so doing, doesn’t mean that it’s globally a good decision even for them. My point is only that there’s no way someone like Lily Phillips could hope to have made nearly as much money from a more conventional job as she did from her pornography career, and hence that, from the narrow perspective of remuneration alone, the alternative lifestyle choice was better than the conventional one for her.) But because almost everyone thinks of himself as above-average in attractiveness, women continue trying to make OnlyFans work for them long past the point that they ought to understand that they are rather mid in appearance, and hence earning somewhere near the middle of the OnlyFans monthly income distribution, hundreds of dollars below even the lowest US minimum wage.

Any other examples come to mind? The more I write about this, the more trite and obvious it sounds, making me wonder if I’ve put a foot wrong somewhere.

One point that occurred to me immediately after posting this: this framework is distinct from the luxury beliefs concept insofar as not everyone who stands to benefit from the alternative lifestyle practice is an elite, and not everyone who stands to suffer from it is a non-elite. There are many women from working-class backgrounds who could stand to make a great deal of money from pornography, and many women from wealthy backgrounds whose reputations would take a hit were they to do the same. There are many people from working-class backgrounds who might benefit from therapy, and many people from wealthy backgrounds for whom therapy would only serve to make them more neurotic than ever before.

1 Not intended as a criticism or insult: per the expansive definition I’m using here, it includes people who are unusually intelligent, talented, physically attractive, fiscally responsible etc. but also people who are diagnosably and severely mentally ill.
2 I must here mention a favourite anecdote from Holly Math Nerd, who learned the term “demisexual” in a university lecture and explained it to her therapist:

Me: “Today I learned that I am deeply and profoundly oppressed by my status as a sexual minority.”

Therapist: (raises an eyebrow).

Me: “I in fact fit under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. A is one of those extra letters, and I am in fact a type of Asexual.”

Therapist, laughing: “What?!”

Me: “I am, I’ll have you know, an oppressed demisexual.”

Therapist: “What does that mean?”

Me: “A demisexual is someone who only experiences sexual attraction when they have formed a close emotional bond.”

Therapist: (nods, several times, thinks for about thirty seconds.) “When I was a boy, we had a different word for people like that. We called them, ‘women’.”

3 No doubt there are many who come to believe that they are mentally ill in part because they are seduced by the idea that it relinquishes them of being held responsible for their bad behaviour, along with providing them with a convenient excuse for why their lives didn't turn out the way they hoped. Regrettably, I speak here from experience, certainly on the latter point if not the former.
4 Based on a study which, like everything else in the ideologically motivated social sciences, failed to replicate. One can only assume the notoriously scummy and dishonest David Graeber was putting his thumb on the scale somewhere.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, the gist is that Henderson thinks that the greater affordability of material goods and democratisation of fashion styles means that Veblen goods are no longer an effective signalling mechanism that a person is a member of the elite (when cars are so expensive that most people can't afford them, owning a car is a costly signal that you are rich; when they become so cheap that everyone can afford them, the only way you can stand out is by buying a really expensive one, and the visual difference between a Tesla and a used Honda isn't half as distinct as the difference between have and have-not).

So does the existence of beliefs that are Veblen Goods imply the existence of beliefs that are inferior goods in the economic sense? Beliefs that, like canned green beans, one consumes more of as one's income (or status otherwise for beliefs?) decreases. What do people believe more when they are poor than when they are rich?

This occurs to me because I was wondering to myself whether streaming platforms behave more like normal goods or inferior goods in a recession. I'm of two minds. If I had to cut my budget, Netflix seems like a pure luxury, I could cut the expense and still have more movies to watch on antenna, old DVDs floating around, or streaming free/illegally, than I could watch if I was unemployed and watching 8 hours a day. That's before one even gets into the free entertainment I can get from books and emulators etc. So it's an easy one to cut. On the other hand, if I were down on cash, I can save a lot more money by not going out to dinner, not going to concerts, not going on trips, so I might hang onto streaming as something to do at a relatively low per-hour entertainment cost.

So what beliefs resemble an Inferior Good? I can think of a few:

-- Cynical Suspicion of Salesmen; "Everybody's trying to screw me!" If you are objectively stupid, and lack the ability to distinguish a good sales pitch from a scam, the adaptive strategy becomes to assume everything is a scam, the false positives cost you less than false negatives in the short term. "It's all a scam!" because everything ends up being a scam if you screw it up: if you invest in the wrong things investing is a scam, if you pick the wrong insurance then insurance is a scam, if you handle your divorce poorly then divorce is a scam. This often lapses into racism against market dominant minorities or social classes...

-- Tribalism; "You can only trust your own kind..." If you are a low social capital person, you want your immutable traits to be what gives you value. No matter how many stupid mistakes you make, you never stop being black or white or Jewish.

But pretty quickly I find I can make the opposite argument, that each of these is an elite "luxury" belief as well. So I'm not sure what to do with all our just-so stories.

Richard Hanania is constantly beating the drum about "low human capital" people believing in conspiracy theories, which seems like the most obvious example. Working-class Dale Gribble voters believing in the New World Order, UN black helicopters, microchips in Covid vaccines etc. are so common as to be a cliché; the rare elites who believe in conspiracies are "dog bites man" stories.

I think some of it is how polyamory is crossing over to the mainstream. It's been written by/about the type of upper-middle to upper class people who in the past would have been having ménages-a-trois or discreet affairs or French-style "well of course you have a mistress and I have a lover" arrangements, or swinging, or acknowledged 'open' marriages, but all done within a specific framework of discretion, no bastards (or not acknowledged ones), and no divorces to go running off with the new model spouse. You might bring your mistress to certain events, but not in a style that could be seen as parading her about, and never humiliate publicly your spouse.

So, rather in the same spirit as the articles about "will gay marriage teach straight people new ways to handle relationships?" were written before it all became legal, with an air of "gays are not monogamous they're monogamish, will we finally get straight marriage that permits cheating?" about it, now we're getting the polyamory stories.

And for the upper-middle to upper class types, who have a rule book about discreet affairs, it works (until it doesn't). For the weird, the ones who set up all the definitions and sub-definitions and rules and diagrams around poly, it works (until it doesn't). These are the people who put the same effort into working out relationship statistics as other stattos put into sports.

The third set are the people who are fat, ugly, disabled, poor, queer, etc. and who can't get or have a traditional, stable, committed relationship so who put together some kind of support system for sex, love, domestic support and the likes that involves a group of people who can contribute bits and pieces of time, attention, money, space and energy but not a whole-time relationship (and again, that works until it doesn't).

The problem is trying to mainstream it, for the ordinary people who don't have the upper-class resources about managing an affair (or three), the people who aren't living in Park Slope and having glowing reviews of their memoirs in the NYT, who are going to run into the problems of jealousy, trying to juggle time and space between partners, and the fear of being replaced. Of being told that the cultural moment is ethical non-monogamy, and if they're not poly then they are missing out (on all this hot sex and fizzy new romance). You don't want to be boring, do you? Whitebread conventional cis het?

And those are the people who are going to blow up their lives, and who are maybe now starting the backlash about "this wasn't what I was promised and it didn't happen the way I expected".

I like Holly Math Nerd, but she's got... some issues (as she readily admits). She insists that the number of women who enjoy sex for sex's sake and will not be damaged by having sex without an emotional bond is nearly an empty set. I... have enough experience to believe that is not the case. I absolutely believe Women Are Different and that most women need/desire an emotional bond in a way men generally do not. But there totally are women who enjoy being sluts, and I don't think that number is so very small (though they may come to regret the physical and social costs of their behavior later).

"Demisexual" is a stupid term, and especially stupid to lump under the anything-but-boring-straight rainbow umbrella, but it's not a universal descriptor for a "normal" woman.

nonetheless, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that such woman are atypical, and that the modal woman’s self-esteem takes a hit after a one-night stand, while the modal man sees a boost to his.

Tangentially (and fitting my theme of Literary Snobbery), a while ago we had some Discourse about Tony Tulathimutte's The Feminist. I just got done reading his complete collection, Rejection. It's very good, though very Online and Of The Moment. The first story is The Feminist, but the second story is basically a gender-reversed version, with a female incel who goes completely off the rails after an ill-fated one-night stand with her best friend. I think the whole collection is fun reading, and rich Culture War fodder. Tulathimutte, being a Thai-American Stanford grad and feted Literary Author, both capitalizes on and leans into/satirizes every stereotype and assumption you are projecting onto him, in a much more clever and intellectual way than, say, Rebecca Kuang's entertaining but subtle-as-an-anvil-launched-by-catapult Yellowface.

Before everything had to be broken down into sixty-seven degrees of "this is the label for my set of special circumstances that fits me and only me", I think 'demisexual' was a useful term. There are asexuals who have no sexual attraction or arousal at all. There are those who generally are not interested in sex but who are interested in romance, and if they are in a romantic relationship may engage in sex (mostly as part of what you do to keep a relationship going, and to make their partner happy, and they may even enjoy it but not necessarily want sex or initiate it otherwise) once they have that close emotional bond and only after that close emotional bond is established.

Then like all somewhat useful terms it got over-used and flogged to death and now means "yeah I have sex like ordinary people but being straight isn't cool enough, you have to be some variety of queer nowadays, so labelling myself demisexual works for me".

(The irony being that I remember the fights over "are asexuals queer enough, or indeed queer at all? if you're not also trans or gay, you can go to hell straight invader of queer safe spaces" in the early days. Apparently we're all queer now, Father).

"Demisexual" is a stupid term, and especially stupid to lump under the anything-but-boring-straight rainbow umbrella, but it's not a universal descriptor for a "normal" woman.

"Demisexual" is a nearly perfect term for a "normal" woman to use, though; you just buried the lede as to why.

If it is in the interests of Most Women to assert a need for an emotional bond[1] before sex, but market conditions (where the marginal value of "seeing a woman naked" has dropped to zero, so it is simply an expectation that women offer sex to men up front rather than exchanging it for commitment as their biology and instincts are screaming at them to do) contradict that, then it is only natural that they'd seek to hide behind the framework of sexual identity as a bargaining tactic ("you should pay more because I'm Special, also other people will think you're lesser/bully you if you don't buy into my brand"[2]). Asexuality is used in the same way, by the same sorts of people, for much the same reason.

Furthermore, it is in Most Women's interest to deny that liberated women who aren't quite as encumbered exist, because from this socioeconomic standpoint, they function as strike-breakers in comparison to the emergent collective bargaining of Most Women (and it is beneficial at the margins since 'man's willingness to risk -> break pointless rules' is generally attractive to women in itself).

The first story is The Feminist

It occurs to me that in a recently-established environment of equality we should expect mothers to [not necessarily intentionally] sabotage their sons romantically by failing to explicitly point out how and why female sexuality works. Uniquely, men are evolved to do this with their daughters with respect to male sexuality because up until about 150 years ago the inequality tilted that way- since this is a new requirement for women, an outsized proportion of mothers will fail to do this (and will then hide behind "social justice" as a means to escape blame for that failure).

[1] More cynically, this is "before the man has offered the desired price [in commitment] for the sex; the emotional bond is instinctual after that".

[2] Pair-bonding/dating is inherently a market negotiation; "all marriage is just prostitution" is the correct framing so long as you give prostitution a neutral moral valence (furthermore I assert that when people don't, it's also just basic instinct- a company seeks to protect its trade secrets, and both Men, Inc. and Women, Inc. don't like it when you reveal relationships follow market dynamics and/or resent being a slave to them).

It occurs to me that in a recently-established environment of equality we should expect mothers to [not necessarily intentionally] sabotage their sons romantically by failing to explicitly point out how and why female sexuality works. Uniquely, men are evolved to do this with their daughters with respect to male sexuality because up until about 150 years ago the inequality tilted that way- since this is a new requirement for women, an outsized proportion of mothers will fail to do this (and will then hide behind "social justice" as a means to escape blame for that failure).

Why should we expect evolution to push for ‘getting your kids laid with as many partners as possible’? This is not an offspring maximizing strategy(for humans early and stable marriage is the fertility minmax).

I'd point out that a belief that "all women want sex, they just act coy about it" is going to get you straight into the old path of "no doesn't mean no, it just means she wants you to push harder to make her say yes" which will get you, and any young men you teach about 'what women really want', into trouble.

There are women who act coy about it. There are also women who genuinely don't want sex, or not casual sex, or who don't experience "oh my god I'm so horny right now I need to jump on the first guy I see" at all. Asexuality is a genuine thing for both men and woman. Agreed, not everybody who claims the label, but we can say that about autism and ADHD and the rest of such self-diagnoses, which does not mean that autism is not a real condition.

we should expect mothers to ...sabotage their sons romantically by failing to explicitly point out how and why female sexuality works.

Well, when you figure that one out, tell me because I've been a woman all my life and I'm damned if I can work out why some women do what they do when it comes to men. If you mean the simplistic model of "women want meat, men want sex, swap one for the other" good luck there honey. "Your meat is not good enough" - harsh truth or women just being bitches?

Asexuality is a genuine thing for both men and woman.

I suppose so, in the sense that both men and women can be paraplegic or born blind or whatever.

The ADHD comparison falls apart in that when someone claims to have ADHD they're trying to get the treatment for ADHD (meds, extra exam time) to get an advantage. People who claim to be asexual claim don't want to be treated for it at all.

"Your meat is not good enough" - harsh truth or women just being bitches?

No, it's just sellers being sellers (and yes, every seller does this- talk to some salespeople sometime, they'll have plenty of examples). Buyers can deal with that in constructive or destructive ways. I'm more interested in the dynamics between the two.

which will get you, and any young men you teach about 'what women really want', into trouble

Sellers have a vested interest in frustrating price discovery.

Sociobiologically/evolutionarily speaking, you are the seller (and were not only quick to claim yourself as such, but you also mocked/confuse me for being one of those damn low-ballers) so naturally, you'll tell me that price discovery is dangerous- you're simply following your incentives to do that.

I assert that treating your [hypothetical] sons the same way, and telling them that lie rather than the truth, is net-negative; both because "yeah, actually, prospective sellers really do work like that", and because by not doing so you choose to make your [child] sacrifice to the social religion of "seller good buyer bad" (or "capital good labor bad", or "woman good man bad") rather than the actual truth. Same thing with fathers and daughters, though the incidentals are slightly different.

And it's not like it's bad to follow those incentives, but my entire point is to use simple market conditions as the framing, not whether or not it be morally better to be a buyer or seller (or the moral questions of buying or selling); this is the point of disclaiming "but buying/selling sex is just prostitution" as morally neutral even though that is completely 100% descriptive of what happens.

Asexuality is a genuine thing for both men and woman.

Yes, it is; the problem with the label is that it once used to describe a real thing (and by the few people who actually speak both honestly and more self-awarely about it than others), but it has been appropriated by marketing/sellers to achieve a better negotiating position.

and I'm damned if I can work out why some women do what they do when it comes to men

Like what? The "battered housewife" is explained spectacularly; a seller who has priced themselves too low or has an overactive instinct to sell in this area. This is also why, as the price of women increased due to their economic situation improving through technology, wife-beating and spousal abuse has declined: husbands simply cannot afford women that will permit them to do that (and that's ignoring minimum-wage and employee protection laws, which age of consent and anti-marital rape/no-fault divorce/abortion laws serve as, respectively).

Oh yeah, and trophy wives are Veblen goods.

I'd point out that a belief that "all women want sex, they just act coy about it" is going to get you straight into the old path of "no doesn't mean no, it just means she wants you to push harder to make her say yes" which will get you, and any young men you teach about 'what women really want', into trouble.

There are women who act coy about it. There are also women who genuinely don't want sex, or not casual sex, or who don't experience "oh my god I'm so horny right now I need to jump on the first guy I see" at all.

Do you see what the problem is? If there are women who say no because they don't want to have sex, and there are also women who say no but are just acting coy about it, then the only way for a man to find out which is which is to keep pushing and see which ones give in and which ones put up real resistance. Any man who stops the second a women lets out a token "no" (or, worse, believes in affirmative consent) is never going to get laid, because that is simply not how women work. Modern notions of consent make a rapist out of every sexually successful man.

Seems to me like this is the fault of women, not of men.

I readily admit that there are women out there who enjoy casual sex (I've met plenty of them, including a handful who weren't French) and I'm sure Holly Math Nerd's therapist was exaggerating for comic effect, but I nonetheless think "demisexual" probably describes the modal female experience a lot more accurately than the sex-positive feminist tabula rasa account.

I read Rejection a few months ago ("Pics" was, in my view, the strongest story in the collection) and posted a mini-review here. Curious to see if you agree with any of my points.

Thanks for the link - missed it when you posted it before. I have added my own thoughts there.

I agree "demisexual" is probably a reasonable description for the modal woman, just that there is more variety in the female experience than a lot of men (and women like Holly) want to acknowledge.

I'm a man, I would consider myself having high libido, and still I have noticed more than once that a female acquaintance becomes more sexually attractive as I get to know her better as a person. And from what I've heard, men in general are attracted to women they love.

Perhaps "romantic/personal attraction enhances sexual attraction" is somewhat universal for humans, and a lower baseline libido just makes the effect more pronounced.

Demisexuality should really be confined to those instances where the usual sexual attraction/arousal/hormonal impulses are lacking or very muted, and only arise after the emotional bond is formed. Unlike the general run of sexuality for both men and women, where libido, desire and arousal are independent of being attached to any one particular individual and can be experienced before any attraction to a particular person is experienced (e.g. going out on the pull which both men and women engage in).

Rat Award 🏅

Is this irony or are we really this lost?

I would push back on therapy being grouped with the other things. Therapy, broadly speaking, covers an extreme range of practices and modalities. I mean sure, if you're going to stick with DSM-V definitions (which insurance surely requires), those are meant to be more clinical and cleanly defined. This is dysfunctional; that isn't dysfunctional.

But people seek therapy for lots of reasons. Do you consider a life coach a therapist? How about someone to help you get over your fear of public speaking or someone to help you better organize tasks? I'd wager just about everyone has something they wish they were better at, some lack that they feel in their life. It can be hard to match up someone with the right therapist, the right intervention, but when it's successful it's absolutely worth seeking out.

So yes, I would bite the bullet and say that absolutely everyone could benefit from therapy, in the sense that we need someone outside ourselves to encourage, validate, motivate us and point to helpful tools and resources. For many people this is religion. For many people this need can be filled by a close network of friends or family. Those people have a natural, organic source that meets this need, but many other people do not. The need for validation and accountability is nevertheless, I would say, nearly universal.

Therapy in general has done a lot of damage as it’s become more “normalized”. A big problem is that as the mental health industry has pushed itself forward, it’s convinced society that pretty much everything negative that happens to you is traumatic in some way. This is a huge problem as it creates glass brains that simply cannot handle normal life. When you raise several successive generations in this way: teach them that life is traumatic and that they need to ruminate on their feeling, you end up creating an entire culture that simply cannot handle normal life. I believe honestly that Gen Z and Gen α are the first generations raised completely by a culture that’s bought into therapeutic models of living. They’re also a complete wreck, needing support at every turn, unable to handle negative emotions or thoughts.

it’s convinced society that pretty much everything negative that happens to you is traumatic in some way.

This is not the fault of the "mental health industry." Ask any clinically practicing therapist, social worker, or psychiatrist what they think of "little t trauma" and they will BITCH.

The problem is some combination of wokeism/snowflakeism/safetyism/influencer culture etc.

You will find professionals supporting this kind of garbage but it is more often non-clinical/non-practicing people.

You will find that people in mental health find the current paradigms on these matters to be extremely deleterious to human development and flourishing.

Additionally, something that often gets missed when therapy is mentioned - the goal of therapy is to stop therapy. Competent therapists will emphasize this early and often and actually do it.

Most people don’t need to be validated. People need to be told how to fix themselves. And that’s part of the problem with therapy culture, is that it discourages actually trying to solve object level problems instead pushing just feel better about it.

It’s really quite narcissistic; don’t worry about it, you’re perfect. Yeah, sorry, no you aren’t.

I'd even go so far as to say - if you're seeing a therapist in hopes of receiving validation, therapy is almost certainly going to make your life or the lives of people around you worse.

The term "therapy" has its physiological parallel in "physical therapy." Physical therapy is universally understood to be a means getting part of the body back to a normally functioning state, or as close to possible. Something went real wrong, we gotta fix that.

Physical training is when the body is more or less functioning normally, but you want to improve performance in some dimension.

Your examples of public speaking, personal organization, etc. is much more in line with the "physical training" concept. You want to improve performance and you have a specific and measurable goal towards which to progress.

"Everyone should go to therapy", in my opinion, is literally implicitly stating "everyone has something mentally and/or emotionally wrong and not normal about them and, therefore, we should all commit to professional support for an indefinite period of time."

Perhaps more clarity is called for. I'm using "therapy" to refer specifically to psychotherapy. At least in Ireland, "psychotherapist" is a protected term. Life coaches are hence definitionally not therapists, as no qualifications are required to call oneself a life coach. Nor are public speaking coaches.

"Everyone could benefit from guidance and mentoring from a third party" and "everyone could benefit from psychotherapy" are two very different claims.

But because our culture glorifies working in the sports, fashion and entertainment industries, and scorns working in a normal job like a normal person (bullshit jobs,4 soul-crushing desk job etc.), lots of people keep pursuing their dream job long past the point at which it’s abundantly obvious that they’re not talented enough to make a living as a rapper or streamer.

Most people trying to make it as rappers and streamers probably don't actually have a powerful skill set that could be swapped out for a strong income elsewhere, so the people I feel really bad for are the postdocs plugging away in research labs well into their 30s, making a pittance and crossing their fingers that they'll finally get an academic offer. Academic research isn't quite as extreme of a rockstar profession as rapping, but it is actually a gamble with enormous opportunity cost relative to other options that high-IQ people that are willing to work long hours can take.

The biggest piece of advice I can give to talented young people is to stay flexible, that you don't actually know what your dream career is when you're choosing the starting path as a teenager.

Agreed, tenure-track professorship is a high-risk, high-reward strategy.

I agree that most of the people trying to make it as rappers or streamers would probably not be able to carve out an impressive income elsewhere, but I imagine most of them, if they really applied themselves, could probably work their way up to being a supervisor at a big box shop or similar, a far superior outcome than squandering your twenties on a futile quest to get your mixtape out there and still being an unemployed nobody with no assets at the end of it.

if practised by a person who is weird or abnormal,1 it will work better than adhering to the status quo

See here's the thing... I don't even think it works better than the status quo for almost anyone. I strongly believe if these poly people had good marriages, a tight knit community, and children, they would be happier and better off.

Scott, by his account, has a good marriage, a tightly knit community and a pair of twins. He still finds poly a net-positive to his life. I know poly isn't for me, but if someone says it works for them, who am I to argue? Maybe you'd argue they should give monogamy the old college try so they can make an informed decision on which suits them better, but follow that line of reasoning far enough and you'll find yourself arguing that every man should have sex with another man just so he can be absolutely sure that he's straight and not just a closeted gay/bi.

Scott, by his account, has a good marriage, a tightly knit community and a pair of twins.

Which is what he chose when he decided to settle down. He decided to get married before having kids, his wife converted to Judaism, they're raising their kids in his family faith/ethnic tradition, and whatever arrangements on the side they have (which is their own business) he very much did not go the "it takes a village to raise a child, my polycule are all co-parents, nobody is married except the metamours" route of the Bay Area bubble. So I think he's poly despite, not because, all that, if he's still poly at all.

As of February last year he is still poly.

Well, I don't feel comfortable speculating about the details of anyone's romantic life, so we'll leave it at that without going into "Does he have a harem?"

Maybe you'd argue they should give monogamy the old college try so they can make an informed decision on which suits them better

Given the predominant cultural messaging, it can be safely assumed that even among the Bay Areans they did give monogamy the old college try.

Scott, by his account, has a good marriage, a tightly knit community and a pair of twins. He still finds poly a net-positive to his life.

Difficult to separate? He has all of those because of poly, and being extremely high status (within a limited scale) he's going to have way above average success for a poly male (if he so desires). Not exactly someone I'm going to turn to as a replicable example.

@TheDag as well- Eons ago I commented on the phenomenon of a non-zero number of poly EAs claiming also to be asexual, and I continue to wonder the extent to which this is the Bay Arean egregore poisoning a population for a phenomenon that would otherwise be known as "having close friends," since for some noticeable fraction the addition of sex to the calculation does not play a major role.

I blame social media as well for putting the final nail in the meaning of "friend," but like marriage it was already down the slope of not meaning much.

I continue to wonder the extent to which this is the Bay Arean egregore poisoning a population for a phenomenon that would otherwise be known as "having close friends,"

Related.

I dunno, though. Everyone intuitively understands the concept of an emotional affair, and a lot of women (and probably a lot of men too) would see it as a betrayal if they found out that their spouse was sharing intensely intimate thoughts and feelings with another person of the opposite sex, even if their spouse hadn't yet fucked (or even kissed) the person. I don't know what Scott's love life is actually like, but to me it sounds like he has a wife and also a "harem" of other women with whom he has emotional affairs, achieving a degree of emotional intimacy greater than mere friendship, even if there's no fucking. I could be wrong, though: maybe what he calls his polycule is functionally indistinguishable from a dude who has a wife and a bunch of female friends, who treat him almost like their honorary "gay best friend".

I know poly isn't for me, but if someone says it works for them, who am I to argue?

Many people claim things are good for them that self-evidently aren't. Whether this is one of them or not isn't easily answerable, but you don't actually have to accept a junkie's claim that he just really enjoys the freedom of living in a tent.

Great post!

I don't have any problem with the idea of "luxury beliefs" in the sense that some beliefs appear to indeed be things that it is costly to believe, and that some people are able to bear the cost while others are not. I think that what makes them tricky is that the costs themselves are arguably grounded in what other people believe. Where "luxury beliefs" get controversial seems to be when it is a matter of controversy as to whether the costs are themselves a consequence of the belief, or a consequence of e.g. social norms.

Post-WWII, American culture underwent a radical shift. Progressivism to that point had mostly been about the perfectibility of mankind through social programs--public education, proper nutrition, clean water, etc. were things that many American communities still lacked circa 1920. In the century from 1870 to 1970, the percent of illiterate white Americans over the age of 14 dropped (PDF) from 20% to 1%; the percent of illiterate nonwhites dropped from 80% to around 4%--and those percentages went to about 0.5% and 2% in the ten years following. Similar strides were made in nutrition, hygiene, clean water, etc. and we were exporting these advances, too--engaging in imperialism modernization efforts around the world.

But today if you've "caught the vision" of progressivism, you needn't pursue it very long to discover that the low-hanging fruit is well and truly plucked. Of course new children are still being born (for now...) so there's always more work to be done, but the extent of visible progress achieved by the progressive project within living memory circa 1995 was unprecedented and jaw-dropping. We'd conquered nature so thoroughly that the only thing remaining to hinder our own progress was... other people!

Prototypical progressive thinkers--I'm thinking specifically of John Stuart Mill, here--were very interested in the idea that we should all have maximum liberty, constrained only by the compatibility of that liberty with everyone else enjoying liberty in similar quantities. "My right to swing my fist ends where your right to swing your fist begins," I suppose, though there is probably a more pithy version of that floating around somewhere. At the root of this is the idea that we are all the best judges of our own flourishing, provided we start from a place of adequate education.

So here in the 21st century, we have responses to your identified categories.

  • Gender transition is a way for people to flourish by breaking the bonds of restrictive social constructs. The only costs are those imposed by transphobes.
  • Sex positivity is a way for people to be honest and open about what actually brings them pleasure. The only costs are those imposed by slut-shaming.
  • Drugs are a way for people to pursue their interest in feeling certain ways. This is more complicated and may not apply to certain highly lethal drugs, but the costs imposed on e.g. marijuana or nootropic users are predominantly imposed by moralizing busybodies.
  • Psychotherapy is a way for people to flourish with the help of trained professionals. The only costs are those imposed by... psychophobes? Do we have a neat slur for people who think therapy is for the stupid and the weak?
  • "Do what you love" may be the single most obvious good that any human could choose. If you read Freddie deBoer's manifesto, his whole "imagine a world where..." is a story about people being free to just do what they want, when they want to, without any consequences being imposed on them by society--indeed, with all possible consequences being absorbed, costlessly and without a single judgmental comment, by society.

I think that some of the rising conservatism I see in today's young people--which of course the Cathedral has already tarred as right wing extremism--is a growing suspicion that these claims about the source of oppression being socially constructed, which it may have been understandable for people to believe as recently as 50 years ago, no longer plausibly hold water.

  • Gender is more than just a social construct, and a true sex change operation would involved extensive (impossible at current tech levels) brain surgery, to say nothing of the endocrine system. Sorry, you're going to have to wait for better tech.
  • Sexual feelings are more than just a social construct; pair bonding has biological roots and slut shaming is a defense mechanism against defections from the stable equilibrium of general monogamy.
  • Psychotherapy might be beneficial for the truly damaged, but most likely you're depressed (or whatever) as a result of trying to believe things your biology tells you that you shouldn't believe. Psychotherapy is a way to maintain in humans the view that their inability to thrive in the new progressive world is their problem, not the progressive world's problem.
  • If we all really did what we love all the time, we would all starve to death in short order. Or if we really did manage to make robots do everything for us, our antifragility would lead to widespread psychological breakdown due to a universal crisis of meaning. Humans are evolved to do the work of humans, not to perpetually enjoy only the enjoyment of humans. Loss of the latter means the extinction of the former.

I'm intrigued by the fact that these are all actually fairly empirical disputes--they're just not the kinds of questions it is easy to get clear answers on. Sociology is tricky even when you don't have political activists thumbing the scales, and these days the scales are so covered with thumbs as to render the payloads utterly invisible.

This all applies, I think, to polyamory as well. I can imagine a society in which humans were more like bonobos--where we had sexual interactions as part of all of our social interactions. The first step, I suspect, would have to be the eradication of sexually transmitted disease! But psychologically this would require a transformation that seems to run deeper than culture. Sexual jealousy is universally attested. There are apparently people who can make polyamory work, and for whom it arguably works very well (though a question arises--if you have to make it work...). But for those for whom it doesn't work, I don't think the problem is poly-shaming or other cultural roadblocks. The problems seem more biologically grounded than that. My question is whether the rationalists now doubting the viability of polyamory will realize that this has structural implications for some of their other beliefs.

(In particular--the sneer faction of the ratsphere has always been comparative conservatives about polyamory, and yet they are if anything more progressive than the modal rationalist when it comes to, say, transsexuality. I notice that I am confused.)

But today if you've "caught the vision" of progressivism, you needn't pursue it very long to discover that the low-hanging fruit is well and truly plucked.

One could argue that both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive moment falsely took credit for quality of living improvements that were actually just the result of the Industrial Revolution and the uncorking of more and more energetically concentrated fossil fuels. When the quality of the gas stopped getting better and better all the supposedly related social improvements suspiciously stopped.

One could argue that both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive moment falsely took credit for quality of living improvements that were actually just the result of the Industrial Revolution

I mean, this is pretty much Marx's whole schtick, isn't it?

My own view is that ideas and material reality are mutually intertwined, but I doubt "it's both, really" is a position that will raise anyone's eyebrows. The hard part is explaining exactly how each influences the other, and I've never encountered a fully satisfactory approach to that question. Clearly, sometimes people think new thoughts and do new things. Clearly, sometimes their success in doing so depends on the conditions of material reality. And equally clearly, sometimes the conditions of material reality are the result of people thinking new thoughts and doing new things.

But mostly, Nothing Ever Happens, which makes the fact that anything has ever Happened at all, all the more puzzling. This is at heart the same argument Parmenides ("change is an illusion") had with Heraclitus ("sameness is an illusion"), which Plato "resolved" by saying--of course--"it's both, really."

Isn't the "sneer faction" simply the faction of devout progressives, which has the moral foundation that the impulses and desires of men as traditionally conceived are bad? Polyamory is a way for men to have multiple women sexual partners simultaneously, which is understood to satisfy the masculine impulse - especially since the most salient cases of rationalist polyamory look like hypermasculine alpha nerds having a harem of impressionable and psychologically troubled groupies - and therefore bad. (I would be mildly surprised if the sneerclubbers took any issue with more progressive-coded free love communes, which are hardly different from poly group houses.) Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man, and makes others uncomfortable, and is therefore good.

You could counter that the moral foundation I impute to progressives above is uncharitable and most of them would dispute having it, but neither progressives nor their opponents respect the structural implications of their stated beliefs in other cases (Transsexualism vs. transracialism? Respect for merit, authority and tradition when those are on the side of the outgroup?) either. Taking anyone at their word is only a recipe to be confused more.

hypermasculine alpha nerds

Asking for a friend, can you steer me towards any pictures of these hot chad nerds? Because the photos* of real life guys in that scene I've seen, I'm sure they have lovely personalities 😁

*Such as the ones attached to dating docs, quite a few of which have made me draw in my breath and go "Oh dear, why did you pick this photo?"

Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man

Vaginoplasties are only undertaken by a tiny minority of MtF people. The vast majority of MtF people have fully intact penises.

I meant it in the figurative sense (a man turned transwoman does not present as traditionally masculine anymore), not in the sense of actual amputation.

The trans women you've met must pass a hell of a lot better than the ones I've met, or seen photos of.

Some of them do. I think the very online types we see are the ones who pass the worst, which is a whole other kettle of fish. I think some/many/a lot of the 'ordinary' MtF may not pass 100% but since they're not trying to look like an anime waif or an OnlyFans model, it's close enough to let pass without comment for the sake of peace and politeness.

The rather unfortunate case of the "It's Ma'am" person, which did blow up, or the person who deliberately goes around to restaurants and cafés so they can be misgendered by the ESL waitstaff and then make little TikToks about how this was a dagger through their heart are the ones who don't pass and who make the big deal out of it.

I suspect you may be letting your feelings about transwomen ("gross, obviously masculine"?) cloud your understanding of the word. If you search for combinations like "work emasculating", you will see an abundance of discussions where people consider as "emasculating" things that include being called "cute" by older female coworkers, doing any desk work at all, being involved in childcare and having your wife earn more than you. I have also seen discussions of children's propensity to insult less assertive peers as "gay" as emasculation. Surely putting on a dress and trying to speak in a high-pitched voice on a regular basis is more of whatever is common to all those scenarios; and if your understanding is that being considered cool and imposing by women, doing physical labor, leaving housekeeping tasks to women and being a dominant provider who is definitively not at all gay is bad, then being far removed from those ought to be a good thing.

Well actually my point is that there are plenty of self-identified trans women who don't even put on a dress or try to speak in a more high-pitched voice.

"Legalized prostitution is good"? For every independent escort charging rich businessmen $5000 for a dinner and a gentle romp there's multiple women turning tricks for their pimps in exchange for a small cut of the profits and a daily dose.

"Unions are evil"? For every successful independent contractor making big bucks there's multiple average guys who are only average at their jobs and need the union to maintain a living wage on a 9-5 job instead of being forced to participate in an Amazonian warehouse rat race.

I like meta behind the "unions are evil" example: It is the only example luxury belief that is right coded, and it's also the only belief that has a number of posters explaining why it's not actually a luxury belief but a "true fact about the world".

If the idea of luxury beliefs really has explanatory value as a model of the world, I would expect all political ideologies to have them in some capacity. So I would like to see more examples of these right-coded luxury beliefs.

I think this question came up before, and I suggested hard-line anti-abortion. It's easy for a wealthy conservative man to proclaim that no one should ever have an abortion, as by virtue of his wealth, he and his family are insulated from most of the "use cases" in which an abortion might be preferable to carrying a baby to term. Whereas a working-class woman who gets pregnant unexpectedly might find that carrying the baby to term is financially ruinous.

"Unions are evil"?

Unions came into being in a world where there were the typical industrial workplace had work rules that could, by virtue of the nature of the work, only be negotiated explicitly and collectively, and which were very visibly matters of life and death. That world is a better world if institutions exist such that work rules can be negotiated collectively. (Historically, there were a lot of small strikes over safety issues, but few large ones).

In the world of 2025, more people have jobs where individual negotiation (including the implicit kind) just works better than collective negotiation, because every worker and every task is different. Also most of the life-or-death workplace practices (and a good many that are not) are governed either by explicit regulation or by implicit regulation by lawsuit and insurance company. That is a world where there is no pro-social work for unions to do.

It is an interesting question whether the negative side effects of unions or health-and-safety regulation are worse (I favour putting it to the test by allowing union-negotiated, but not individually-negotiated, contracts of employment to contract out of employment law and most of workplace safety law). But the world where neither existed was not in a stable equilibrium.

"Legalized prostitution is good"? For every independent escort charging rich businessmen $5000 for a dinner and a gentle romp there's multiple women turning tricks for their pimps in exchange for a small cut of the profits and a daily dose.

This sounds like a strawman. What about the middle of the curve—the prostitutes who are neither desperate streetwalkers nor luxurious escorts, but merely work for reasonable wages in clean, legal brothels?

Oh gosh, years back I read something about a woman returning to prostitution because it was a good way for her to make a living, and she discussed working in one of the legal brothels in Utah Nevada (I think). She was one of the prostitutes who didn't mind taking black clients, so she was always able to get customers. I think she preferred to go independent if she could, because the brothel takes a cut of everything by charging for laundry, condoms, etc. on top of the cut they take from the transaction, so they nibble away at the fee the prostitute gets from the client. Which is why a lot of prostitutes try to arrange "and if you want, I'll do X for Y charge cheaper" with a client without the house knowing, so they can make more money.

she discussed working in one of the legal brothels in Utah Nevada (I think)

But the situation in Nevada, where prostitution is restricted to sparsely-populated areas and is largely drowned out by the illegal trade in Las Vegas, presumably is a far cry from the situation in the metropolises of Melbourne and Brisbane.

She was one of the prostitutes who didn't mind taking black clients, so she was always able to get customers.

According to forum discussions that I've seen, many Australian prostitutes refuse to serve Indians.

presumably is a far cry from the situation in the metropolises of Melbourne and Brisbane.

Possibly. This was years back and I'm nowhere near familiar enough with how legal prostitution works. But the impression I carried away was that brothels will nickel and dime the prostitutes, because it's a business and it's all about making the maximum profit for the owners (same with strip clubs where the dancers are encouraged to get the marks to buy overpriced watered-down alcohol and to spend on buying lap dances etc. because if you're not turning over as much money for the owners as possible, you're out and a new dancer gets her chance).

I have never understood why some women go on about how sex work is empowering for women. The real money and profit and power accrue to the owners and operators of such businesses, who generally are men not women. Sure, the strippers and prostitutes get to manipulate the johns for money, but the pimps/madams/owners get to manipulate the prostitutes.

I have never understood why some women go on about how sex work is empowering for women.

Presumably, as a luxury belief.

some women go on about how sex work is empowering for women

Perhaps the most obvious conclusion is that they're genuinely asexual (or just uncritically repeating asexual talking points), so sex work to them is legitimately not meaningfully distinguishable from any other work.

This doesn't prevent them from responding to other incentives, of course- for instance, a prostitute might prefer prefer porn be banned if they believe it would lead to greater demand for their services. Whether or not they're aware they're prostitutes is another matter.

How can we determine what the modal prostitute is like?

I don't have any statistics in front of me.

Wikipedia cites studies showing that 90 percent of the prostitution in Nevada (including Las Vegas), USA, is illegal, and presumably most of that is streetwalkers. But on the other end we have Victoria (including Melbourne), Australia, where there are zillions of legal brothels that even are allowed to advertise their services online. Is it reasonable to say that the typical prostitute in those locations is a streetwalker? I don't know, but I feel doubtful.

Most US prostitution is not streetwalker (estimates range from 10-20% streetwalkers). The dominant forms of prostitution are call-girls/escorts and pseudo-brothels (e.g. massage parlors, etc.). Both claim the fig leaf (with varying seriousness/success) that the payment is nominally for other legal services and any sex is just happenstance.

The first example is spot on, and it's pretty much the same as the OnlyFans one (very attractive women stand to gain, others less so).

My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether the modal worker stands to benefit by joining one or not.

My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy, and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime.

But how much of that is intrinsic to unions, and how much is a result of a specific implementation of unions, under which they are immune to antitrust laws while companies are not (1 2)?

The Motte doesn’t like unions because most of the Motte works in Sillicon Valley where until recently individual employees had an unusually large amount of leverage. In five years when they’ve all been fired they will probably feel differently about the idea.

I've seen proposals for tech worker unions. It's mostly bullshit about social justice and workers refusing work due to ethical concerns. As though a union could block a corporate contract with the Israeli government or the US military. As though less work is good for us.

Another main issue is making it harder to fire tech workers. It being easy to fire tech workers is a good thing. Driving out weaklings is obviously good. It makes the rest of us more valuable.

The one defensible point they make is regarding number of hours worked. I understand why some people don't want long hours. I'm still against the proposals since hiring more people to do the same amount of work would probably result in a decrease in compensation per person.

The above points are pushing for more people and person-hours with less work. That should result in a decrease in total compensation per worker. My entire concern is total compensation. Their concern is progressive culture warring and an understanding of workers' rights that amounts to encouraging mediocrity. Our values are incompatible and I don't want a union forced onto me. They would be taking my dues and spending them on progressive political lobbying while working on goals that would decrease my total compensation. In every way bad for me and opposed to my values. And then people act like "techbros" are fools working against their own interests.

most of the Motte works in Sillicon Valley

Citation needed.

Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.

I, @FarNearEverywhere and @Tollund_Man4 are Irish and live in Ireland. @self_made_human and @mrvanillasky are both Indian, with the former residing in the UK.

As for the claim that the only people who care about those topics are people who live in Silicon Valley: have you not noticed that the entire world has been talking about AI nonstop for the past two years? Have you not noticed what a hot-button issue the trans stuff is in every Western nation, to the point that Trump signed an executive order banning men from competing in women's sports, and the UK Supreme Court recently had to rule on the definition of the word "woman"? Indian caste dynamics are of profound import to the 1.5 billion people who live in India, never mind the diaspora. There's been a nationwide campaign of arson against Tesla because of the outsized power Musk wields (wielded?) as part of DOGE.

Of the items on your list, polyamory and Aella sound like the only ones to me which are uniquely Silicon Valley-coded.

I'm pretty sure some of the Indian caste dynamics people are in actual India.

Best I can do you is to say that I don’t live in Silicon Valley.

The fact that similar patterns are visible in other countries with a strong union tradition (e.g. France, UK) but without legal analogues to the American antitrust legislation you cite.

I suspect most countries now have some form of anti-trust legislation. Wikipedia has some details on the price fixing page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing However, there may have been periods of time where countries had strong unions but no anti-cartel legislation. I think Australia only cracked down on price fixing after 1974.

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