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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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I feel really bad for her. She produces some genuinely novel insights into the workings of sex and relationships that I doubt academia could ever do. You have to have a thick skin to post on the internet, and that's doubly true for women who 1) tend to get attacks that are far more personal and nasty, and 2) tend to have higher neuroticism scores than men, so the attacks wound more deeply.

She produces some genuinely novel insights into the workings of sex and relationships that I doubt academia could ever do.

Such as?

I am sure there are things she is willing to be more honest about than the average academic, but there are also things she won't, and "genuinely novel" is not the same as Good, True, or Beautiful.

I found this to be an interesting chart.

It certainly is an interesting chart! I don't think any of the "not-cis top 10%" results are particularly surprising. Slightly surprised zombies are less taboo than blood but maybe that's because they're fictional. Slightly surprised executions are female-preferred but maybe that makes sense as an extreme fantasy-kink of submissiveness.

Freud is practically synonymous with BS these days, but repetition compulsion is deeply real. My prior assumption for anyone who had a horribly traumatic childhood and is now cruising on a "but I made a sudden dramatic escape and now things are so much better" trajectory with no extensive therapy/ monastic meditation step in between, is that either they will shortly get restless and blow everything up themselves, or that they will shortly find they're experiencing similar levels of abuse in their new context, having unconsciously gravitated toward familiar dynamics of exploitation.

Aella's dad beat her up, denigrated and aggressively dominated her; by some online accounts somebody raped her as a child. Then she escaped and, surprise! found a profession where smart men could aggressively dominate and rape her, but supposedly on her terms; then in time she found that once again, the men denigrating her were doing so less and less on her terms. If she flees again, I really worry about the next set of partners she winds up with, and I'd worry about escalating drug use. I worry about Lindsay Lohan's new dude and ostensibly new situation.

Memory-wipe technology for selected childhood baggage really would be an amazing development, such a shame we'll get the totalitarian Matrix brainwash version instead.