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Notes -
Got an interesting article to share, with a goofy-ass twist.
https://farhakhalidi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-male-centered-women?triedRedirect=true
So, my first thought is that it is rare to see a writer lay out so explicitly their hang-ups with sex positivity. She makes the case that heterosexual men exploit the “unwritten rules” of the dating game to string along women for sex, and in doing so, traumatize them through sheer carelessness.
I don’t completely disagree with her assessment of the situation, although I’m confused as to what her policy prescriptions are, and I think she’s in a “Be Careful What You Wish For” scenario.
If you’ll indulge me as I put on my over-analysis hat, the heterosexual dating marketplace can be viewed through an economic lens, with men and women modeled as agents within the marketplace.
The author is making the case that the current status quo privileges men’s interests at the expense of women’s. Even if women would prefer a longer “runway” towards consummating a relationship, it’s the men who get to set the timetable, with their implicit threat of walking away otherwise.
The optimal behavior for women, operating collectively as a self-interested guild within the heterosexual marketplace is to coordinate to demand maximal investment from men in exchange for romantic/sexual relationships. In other words, to collude, act as a monopolistic cartel and engage in price-fixing schemes.
Like every cartel ever, this is hard to enforce because every individual member’s incentive is to undercut the group-set price. It becomes especially hard to enforce in cases of romantic relationships, where people are not fungible economic actors with identical goals of maximizing profits, but flesh-and-blood human beings with radically different goals, desires, and libidos.
The solution that allows women to set a “price floor” for relationships, in spite of both those factors, is to use social technology to align their interests. In this case, that technology would be “slut-shaming”. Any woman who engages in behavior that undermines the interests of Women as a Collective (like being willing to be Chad’s booty call) is declared persona non grata at Mimosa Mondays and banished from the bookclub.
None of this will be new to the average Mottizen, although God knows we never get tired of re-hashing the gender wars. What I find especially interesting in this salvo is the delivery source. In another essay, the author explicitly rejects the patriarchal norms of the conservative community that she grew up in. Despite that, she still converges on advocating for basically traditional conservative sexual morality in women’s dating life.
My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality; the only places that successfully curtail premarital sex do so explicitly through a religious point of view. The Taliban has successfully prevented Afghan women from traumatizing themselves from Hookup Culture, but whether this is better for Women As A Class is left as an exercise for the reader.
The punch line to all this? The author, Farha Khalidi, is an Onlyfans star! She is the bête noire of conservative patriarchs across the globe, and every social system (that I’ve ever heard of) that frowns on premarital sex would consider what she does to be much worse.
So it begs the question: what, exactly, is she advocating for? Quite frankly, I’m not sure. If I had to guess, I think she wants a secular, sexually conservative sororiarchy, where women watch out for their gender’s collective interests and stop each other from undercutting their bids. Either way, an interesting point of view.
It was bad enough when people would speak disdainfully of "catching feelings", as if romantic infatuation was a bacterial infection. We have now reached the point at which we're clinically pathologising the experience of falling in love.
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Having now read the article in full, two points:
When someone scrupulously provides citations for some of the factual assertions they make, it makes me doubly suspicious when they neglect to provide citations for others, especially when that factual assertion is phrased in a weaselly way (e.g. "how many women compromise their health by letting men use no contraception, to which 1 in 4 women have turned to emergency contraception – women are taxed with pregnancy scares for the premium of male sexual pleasure."; "a significant portion of women who undergo abortions do it as a result of pressure from their male partner")
If her claims to being a virgin and voluntary female celibate (volfemcel?) are true, I believe that Khalidi's obsessive fixation on the worst exemplars of the male sex are a cope to rationalise her own emotional avoidance. She's not really scared about getting pumped-and-dumped, or being coerced into anal sex, or having her nudes leaked - she's scared of being emotionally vulnerable with someone and getting rejected. But she's too proud to admit that, so instead she insists that the reason she doesn't date men is because they're all pigs. It's a fig leaf.
AFAI remember, this statistic is basically true- roughly a third of women seeking abortions will list as the reason they want one ‘my boyfriend/husband wants me to do it’. This is a significant portion and more or less pressure from a male partner.
She’s probably not citing sources because the sources are unlikely to be progressive-feminist approved.
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Every society everywhere on Earth for all history up to the 20th century exerted sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice or else it collapsed. Religious language framed what they already knew, now we don't know and today it's framed purely religiously. Christianity has kept record of its inspired line on biotruths and their peculiarities -- non-consanguineous marriage for life with many children -- you'll see certain lifestyles were discussed from frame of their harms being known in common wisdom. The lecher or the whore were already seen as contemptible, moral lessons weren't "It's bad to be a whore," everybody knew that, so they were "Divorcing your wife makes whores of both of you."
Our connection with this common wisdom withered and died in the age of rapid modernization and individualization, so some Christians, already on the fool's errand of attempting to reconcile their faith with society, could only present their opposition in heavily religiously connoting or outright religious terms. It's bad because God says it's bad, true, but that's at the top. At the bottom is "You'll sleep around in your 20s, get married in your thirties, have one kid, maybe two if you're really lucky, not deeply love your husband, divorce him when your kids are out of the house, and every cold night in your lonely bed be unwarmed by the memories of the dalliances of your youth." It will ruin your fucking life, that's why you don't do it.
Secular society moving past these doesn't come from science. If anything the scientific paradigm should be hyperfixated on healthy, responsible human sexuality. Creatures have reproduced sexually for a billion years, mammals diverged 300 million years ago, 100 years of sexual insouciance might as well not exist on the epochal timeframe yet here we are. Looking down from a period of .0000003% of the history of our biological class and with absolute sincerity and absolute lack of any awareness these people say "Yeah sex doesn't mean anything, it can just be for fun." We feel this dissonance cognitively and viscerally, it's part of the constant psychic background radiation driving everyone crazy, we engage in behavior we know instinctively as destructive and then throw cash at our best so they target their tremendous mental faculties at justifying what we can conclude from intuition and pure reason as wrong. I can only wonder what sort of writing Scott would be putting out if he'd moved to a small Jewish community in New England and married a sensible reformed girl who wanted lots of kids. I can only wonder how much of his tremendous brainpower is sequestered in its quiet battle against a billion years of evolution screaming NO NO NO NO NO!
But it's not about science, it's about greed. It's about the money and power drawn from a destabilized society, and you bet your ass it's about top-% men being able to have sex with whichever beautiful commoners they want, using them up and discarding them. I'll use the socialist's most apt phrasing, it's history's true and greatest transfer of wealth, a self-sustaining fire consuming each new generation.
You know, I see this argument quite often: "Every society ever did things in the traditional (read: my preferred) way, because the Ancient Wisdom of Our Ancestors told us this was how things should be. Societies that failed to do this collapsed!"
Can you actually point to any societies that collapsed as a result of, say, not exerting "sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice"?
Most "collapsing societies" either did so over a long period of stagnation (Rome, several Chinese dynasties, the Soviet Union) or they did so very abruptly as a result of war or invasion. I can't think of any that did so because they were too libertine and failed to control their menfolk and womenfolk.
This is a just so story.
Your other arguments, about "deep biotruths," are likewise just so stories. Now it is possible (and likely, to my mind) that our current social mores are detrimental to human happiness, that the much-discussed imbalance in sexual relationships in the modern world is harmful to society and putting additional stresses on it (though if we do "collapse," I maintain that "women being whores and alpha-widows and a few chads forcing other men into inceldom" will be like reason #57 on the list), and you can certainly make a good argument that, as you say, "sex doesn't mean anything, it can be just for fun" is not true and not a good principle to encourage.
But whenever I see someone pull out the "Societies collapse if they don't control their females!" argument, I never see any actual evidence of this, just vague handwaving (and the waving is never in the direction of actual societies that do "control" their females - I mean, most Muslim societies are not collapsing right now, but they are not exactly what I'd consider a healthy model in any way, least of all in their sexual relations). Reminds me very much of KulakRevolt's current schtick where he argues that the deep wisdom of his ancestors tells him that worshipping Odin was the best way to ensure the survival of his race and Christianity is a destructive pussification cult. It's entertaining to read, but does anyone not just looking for a reason to dump on Christians (and pussy concepts like mercy and forgiveness and coexistence) actually take it seriously or think it's based on research or even actual inductive reasoning? So it is with arguments about how the Sexual Revolution was a revolt against "deep biotruth" and/or the ancient knowledge of our ancestors (who believed in humors, nature gods, ghosts, aether, a four or five element model of the universe, and so on-this is not a flippant reference to superstition, but pointing out that they made up just so stories to justify their own preferences and to explain things they didn't actually have the ability to investigate or test).
Rome is the example. It failed to exert sufficient control on male avarice and turned empire. It failed to exert sufficient control on female caprice and its birthrates collapsed. When birthrates decline in an otherwise prosperous nation the cause is always the same: multiple avenues for intrasexual competition where women attain status aside from wifehood and motherhood. This started before Caesar was born as changing laws on land ownership and divorce gave women significant privilege. Come Augustus, he attempted to correct their declining population by laws that incentivized having children, but the target was wrong and the incentives were wrong. Women aren't incentivized to become mothers through extra rights, money, or praise; they're incentivized to become mothers when that's the only thing they can do.
I'm not saying this is good, because it's not, it's terrible, unfortunately it's the truth. If women didn't work, if they couldn't go to college and it was legal to discriminate against them in employment, they would be getting married and having children as soon as they could. They wouldn't have avenues for status in what university they attended and where they worked, but only in their household, in their husband and their children. Again I am not remotely saying "WE MVST RETVRN." I'm observing the facts, women are every bit as competitive as men, and every bit as good at it in their domains of competition. Add to that the broader incentive, good alma mater, good career, husband with a better career, lots of money, of course they'll put off having kids, for the individual it follows a line of perfect reason. They are acting entirely logically, for themselves. Society suffers.
Rome's collapse wasn't even that bad though, at least not compared to Weimar Germany. There, wanton greed and profligacy triple threating with Bolshevism precipitated the Nazis. But you don't need to look at them, either, you can look right now to the American black community. Relative to America as a whole, the black community has enclaves that have all but collapsed, only holding on as ample taxpayer assistance keeps them afloat. Were the assistance citizens of Baltimore received limited to what the city could extract as taxes, it would be a wasteland. What characteristics define the American black community? Male avarice and female caprice.
But even if there were no examples, it's enough to say "This was the practice of every successful group of people in history." When the most contentious and bloodthirsty, divided by mountains and jungles, arrive at a uniform conclusion on one a given subject, it's not "just-so" to point out their practice. Uniform agreement makes it the implicit paradigm and means challengers are presumed false. They didn't agree on their gods, they didn't agree on worship, they didn't agree on how they should go about ruling themselves and what should be done with foreigners, but all of them agreed about women. Note, I also didn't use it to justify the metaphysics of "they all said the gods said so," I said they used religious framing for what they already knew.
What they didn't know was how to perfect it, which Christianity did and does for its inspired understanding of biological realities, of those biotruths. You look back from the top of history and think of the chain of progress as inevitable and so you say I'm post-hoc justifying Christianity as integral, but I'm not because I also am looking at history and I can see all the instances of what happened when it was discarded. The French tried, their streets ran red with blood, and created the pinnacle of hubris Directorate, thus Napoleon. Germany tried, thus Hitler. Russia tried, thus Stalin. China never had it, thus the worst of them all in Mao. The healthiest societies are Christian because Christianity is unique in its ability to produce the greatest share of societal buy-in. Without it, assuming Muhammad still exists, either Islam conquers Europe or we get another Attila or a European Temujin and practically all of Europe is ethnically Norman, or it's German, or it's Anglo.
The Japanese have to be mentioned. They are not as healthy as the healthiest Christian civilizations, but they have the highest buy-in, they're secular and they exert sufficient controls on avarice and caprice. I've said I think they're in the perfect position by temperament and population for the coming age of simulacra, so their low birthrates may prove ideal. This is one group, or maybe almost two given how closely related they are the Koreans, and therein the interesting quality of the Koreans having those occasionally flamboyant moments of personal instability (one presidential crisis after another; also, the DPRK). Thing is, Japan would be on the precipice of a crisis if it weren't for that coming automation, but that crisis would be less than nothing to the Weimar's comparative nothing to what might come in America. White America is holding on by its bleeding fingernails, the scenario I've posted about here twice of us making it through this turmoil specifically requires the appearance and ubiquity of the relation surrogate wife-bot.
You can't have civilization without buy-in and we've pissed it away. Buy-in is the same thing for most men, the everyman who comprises the actual society. It's not money, land, fame or praise; it's children. Us wordcels can jerk ourselves into upholding civilization from pure reason, the normies think about their kids, or the kids they will have, or the kids they wish they could have. That's what makes them care, but the family is at its hardest to obtain for at least the last thousand years, and not for actual economic reasons, not for conflict or disease or famine, but because of the profit that was made in doubling the work force and because of the insatiable lusts of the "elites." We can't unfuck this. The laws and social changes that would be required can't happen without cataclysm, because we rightly don't want to enact such laws and make such changes and would only from existential necessity. That cataclysm is what's looming. If I'm wrong about the timeframe and it would take another 50 years to develop the wifebot, we won't get that far, because given another 25 years of the status quo and America will give rise to a figure who makes Mao look like a reasonable man.
You can't have young men who have no hope for the future. It is the terminal condition for civilization. You can have rampant, gross greed in the acquisition of material wealth. If young men were all still getting married, if they had to grind hard in life, but they had a reasonable domicile and they could provide for their wife and children, that would be enough for their buy-in. They don't even have that. It's what people need to understand, especially the righties who do have superior faculties at assessing danger and keep saying "one of these days, man" while the lefties correctly mock them, just for the wrong reasons. Violence will come if this isn't addressed, but it's not from us, we're not the generations who turn violent, we still have enough buy-in. We're the gap, we are the harbingers, it's the boys being born today who will reach adulthood and see a barren wasteland waiting ahead of them and they will be ready to follow anyone who says "Get your guns, we're burning everything down."
You want evidence of the inevitable end of societies that don't control avarice and caprice. You are living in it.
If this is true, you have a nasty problem where you're running civilization off of restricting otherwise-capable women from competing for jobs or niches like 'surgeon' when they can do the job just as well as any other man. It's arguable that a civilization that doesn't have enough people willing to voluntarily contribute should just go belly up.
40% of women physicians leave the field or go part time within six years of finishing residency. Our civilization insisting it can't discriminate against women for spots in medical school — let alone its encouraging more women to get there via affirmative action — is utter insanity.
Why not have a gender neutral way to discriminate somehow? Debt payments tied to years of practice or something.
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That was an impressive screed, but you haven't connected a single thing to "male avarice" and female emancipation. And you're doing exactly what you claimed you aren't, telling a just so story about how Christianity is the only ideology that somehow avoids the failure mode of every other civilization.
Are we in the End Times? I've been hearing that in one form or another since I was a kid. A pity that we (or at least I) am too old to see it through or I would put up money on you being wrong.
"Now, sure, every time in the last 200 years that a nation declared itself as enlightened atheists guided by pure reason they immediately proceeded with the worst atrocities yet visited upon man, but hey, what's religion got to do with anything?"
You're better than this response, not least of all because your challenges were answered and you missed it in your haste to throw down the "tl;dr lol."
Avarice is self-evidently ruinous. Caprice was explained at the top:
Left to their own devices, the majority will choose serial fleeting satisfactions rather than the long-term happiness that comes in continuing the human race by creating more people. This is capriciousness.
I do agree my jab at the end was hyperbole, but it's because my timeframe is right. Simulacra will reach ubiquity before "Generation Supercritical" reaches the age of majority and adopts them in mass. As for you calling this doomsaying, I'm deathly serious about my concerns, I don't see the flaw and I think about this constantly. If you do, if you think you have a superior understanding, if you see how we get out of this mess of young people seeing no purpose in life, especially when automation comes for everything, I'm all ears. I want to be wrong, I would want you to be right, because then all posterity doesn't hinge on this one achievement.
Which non-communist countries would these be? Because I think the single unifying trait you are ignoring here is communism.
My response was not "tl;dr lol." You did not answer my challenges, you just keep insisting that Rome and China and the Weimar republic all fell for reasons they did not.
Sure, but I could name a bunch of other ruinous traits also easily found in most countries in decline. This argument is specifically about whether it's control of women (or lack thereof) that is a unifying thread. You mentioned automation. I could mention that and a host of other economic, technological, and tribal concerns that probably figure much more prominently in any potential societal collapse than the "mistake" of letting women have sexual agency.
France.
Definitionally atheist communism, yes. I observed nothing about China's fall, I said the worst of them all was the nation that never had Christianity to discard. This is a fact. Weimar, and especially Rome, you can't just say "Wrong." Not here.
What do I make of every one of your responses being a mix of snide quips and "Nuh-uh"? I would make that you have personal and significant emotional investment in my assessment being wrong.
Same, mostly. I would be happy to be wrong. I don't care about these things. I want my mental model of the world to align with with the world. I have no personal investment in the actual "why" of the fall of Rome or Weimar Germany or even the decline of America. I'm American, so it affects me and I am personally invested in it stopping, but I don't attach moral significance to any particular interpretation of the decline. If it turned out the problem was in fact women's liberation not going far enough, then that's the truth. It's what I'd want it to be, mostly, I would have an ethical problem with any attempt to empirically justify abortions, but if "sexual agency" is not just a euphemism for the freedom to make terrible decisions and can actually be quantified as beneficial, then once again, that's the truth, and I'll heed it. I dislike being incorrect, if my paradigm is wrong and my interpretation for why we're in decline is wrong, then I will change them, but you gotta show me why.
I'll go a little more on this in the next paragraph but I want to take a moment to be clear. I'd resent any implication of misogyny, and you haven't done that one bit, but for anyone else reading. I truly love women and I don't mean this as the cad. I'm a guy and there are big expectations on me but none of them will ever be as important as giving birth. The woman has immediate existential value, but in that, she is predefined. She has an easier time of it because, as with almost all of them, the only mark she'll leave on the world is her children. This is true for men but not true in the same way. It's not our bodies getting pregnant, it's not our certainty of pain and risk of injury and death. It's not that the reason we exist might be exactly what kills us. The angst and the implicit body horror must be profound, especially in this paradox of it being bound with the most wonderful and beautiful thing; the maybe singular yet perfect example of something a person can't understand in theory but only if they face it. The ideal would be that sex could just be for fun, that permanent bonding was voluntary, that pregnancies were always safe and could only occur when they were wanted. The ideal would be liberation--what we've done isn't that. What we've done is pretty God-damned far from liberation.
Rome. I may be overemphasizing in saying it was the singular cause, but I am not wrong that it was a major contributing factor. Between the work of Walter Scheidel, Mary Beard, and Kyle Harper the declining birthrate can be concluded as a ranking culprit. Scheidel has the numbers of how high the mortality rates were and how women had to have a lot of children just to keep the population static. Beard, and what I said above I return to here, talks about what it meant to be a woman in Rome, what it meant to become pregnant. Every time she was risking death, and the risk was high. 1 in 50 births overall, for an individual woman, about a 1 in 10 chance she dies during childbirth. Is there any wonder she would want things different?
Harper talks about birth rates, his work is seminal, all future study should incorporate it, as he considers disease and weather. What happens when a population with underdeveloped immune systems gets hit with plague? They die. What happened in Roman history? Plague at three key junctures, or perhaps plague that made three key junctures. Except we know stable societies not only tolerate plagues, they bounce back and flourish. Assuming it doesn't wipe them out as it did in South America, but it didn't in Rome. Unoccupied land there for the taking, the demand for laborers rising and their pay and treatment improving, the political structures weakened and allowing reforms. Renaissance followed the Black Death. Rome wasn't ended by plagues because they were that bad, Rome was already weak and plagues finished them off. What made them weak? Not enough people. Even the authors who know how many mothers died in childbirth fail to observe "Well they had the choice not to, of course they took it; thus went Rome."
I condemn Weimar Germany for their last depravities. I assign no moral condemnation to Rome. Caprice is a charged word so I can't claim I've spoken on this with clinical detachment, but I've tried, and maybe failed anyway, to use language that indicates my slant. I hate the conditions that cause these choices, not the individuals who make them.
A Roman woman who had just one child and didn't want to risk death by having a second, who could find blame in her? Of the civilizations that allow women to make that choice, yes maybe they fall, but isn't that a worthy reason? Said another way, if I'm right about how societies that don't control women -- that don't force women to have babies over and over until they have enough or die -- will inevitably collapse, those societies would be completely right to refuse that control, and noble if they did so knowing what it would cost. Today, today, what do we do about the pandemic today of bastard and layabout men? Who could say today it's worth forcing women to stay with and give a half-dozen kids to men who treat them right at first only to become monsters 5 or 10 years into marriage? It's important to say this is not the rule, it's important to say this is presented as commonplace in no small reason because fearmongering is politically useful, when most men, most people, are good, or good enough. But America alone has more than 350 million people, and a percent of a percent is an unacceptable number. What do we do? The woman can divorce him, then what? Take her kids and carry on with their life-sized baggage? Does she risk that, or does she live the only way she knows, the way society today encourages, periodically coupling, while hoping to find the love of her life, eventually. Of course she'd choose the second! When those are the choices? Shit sucks, it's that simple, it just sucks.
I want this to be the better way, not being cavalier about sex, but at least not rushing to marriage, having several relationships so you can learn, or nowadays, so men and women have enough time to learn the qualities of their partners and what's best for each before they commit to each other for life so they can make more humans. I want it to be, because for the most part, this is the better way. But I can't disregard the facts in front of me just because they would mean the world is a darker place. Whatever kind of world we live in, that is the world, it doesn't change by how we feel about it, it changes when we know the truth, because it's only from the truth that we can do something about it.
Okay, initially I wrote a rather harsher response, because the combination of projection ("You are being snide! You are responding with Nuh-uhs!") and the old "emotional investment" gambit (a low class tactic usually seen in forums where going to straight to ad hominems is the norm - "Huh huh you are arguing with me, you must be emotional about this! Like a woman!") annoyed me. However, from your lengthier reply I think you are arguing in good faith and deserve a kinder response. So, just to make a few points in order:
If you are referring to Revolutionary France, that was more than 200 years ago. 200 years was your criteria, hence my confusion.
A common tactic I see, usually from Christians, is to accuse atheism of being responsible for the mass atrocities of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al, when the defining feature of communist dictatorships was communism. State enforced prohibitions or control of religion are just one aspect of communism. It's not the atheism that is their ideological driving force, it's the Marxism. (Indeed, I would argue China never really became "atheist" in a real sense. They just replaced Confucianism with Maoism.)
I still disagree about Rome and the Weimar Republic, and I think you haven't really brought much evidence to bear that "control of women" was the defining or even most significant failure leading to their collapse. Even you back down a bit from that proposition, merely citing it as a contributing factor.
Yes, I am kind of personally invested in my society not collapsing, but I don't think I am just ignoring evidence that it is. I just think we are on a long slow decline for a lot of reasons, not a rapid collapse that is happening because of modern hypergamy and male avarice.
To address your broader meta point: no, I am not going to accuse you of being personally misogynistic. But anyone proposing something like "Women must be controlled or their sexuality will destroy society" has to grapple with the essential misogyny of that position. You can bite the bullet and say "Yes, for the good of the species, women must be treated as property." You can propose social guardrails (like Christianity) that hopefully will constrain them in a less brutal fashion. You can argue against the premise (I am far from sold on it). Or you can go full blackpill and say "Who cares what women feel, they aren't even people." (Not hyperbole, that is more or less the position we have actually seen a handful of people take here over the years.) But a lot of this talk about how women being able to choose and the feminization of society seems to just complete lack any empathy at all for the position of a (female) person being told to accept a society where she has little or no say in who gets to fuck her and when and whether she will be impregnated. That's stating it in its bluntest terms, but it's hard to dismiss the hysteria of of women wearing Handmaid's Tale cosplay at protests when they can actually see men who really are proposing what they fear. For those who are honest and say "Yes chad" to that, okay, points for being forthright about it, but you don't get to sneer at feminist arguments anymore, because they are actually right about your intentions.
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I think you can point to a lot of societies that absolutely failed to flourish because they didn't do this. I remembering reading the goofy book "Sex at Dawn" some years ago. It purported to show that monogamy and marriage was unnatural and that, akshually, tons of totally fine societies had practiced various forms of poly-like relationships.
Except all of its examples were undeveloped hunter-gatherer tribes that are still mostly existing in the stone age. Lots of sub-saharan examples and even a few from Papua New Guinea, aka the actual murder capital of the world.
When life is a constant battle against starvation, you don't have the luxury of resources to have to think long term. You live that beautiful, simple, horrifyingly savage life of "one day at a time." Once you figure our larger scale agriculture, you start to have more stuff and then you upgrade to the perennial problem of how to organize society. Every society that's flourished has settled on long-term pair bonding and marriage-til-death. Some have carve outs for lawful divorce, but the intent is clear.
The causality is backwards. Once you develop marriage to guarantee men exclusive sexual access to a woman and thereby produce children of assured paternity, men have an actual incentive to work hard and create wealth in order to support their spouse and offspring. Civilization is a built as a byproduct of men seeking to provide for their wife and kids.
With no marriage, you get sluts in mud huts. Men compete for women by being the biggest thug, not by being the best provider. Women compete for men by being the biggest whore, not by being the best possible wife and mother.
What happens when welfare and child support replace marriage is left as an exercise for the reader.
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We are three generations into the liberal experiment of the emancipation of women and the resulting sexual revolution and birth rates are already in the terminal phase. If you want an example of societies that are collapsing because of it, you just have to look out of the window.
Societies do not have to be healthy by liberal standards to be self replicating: see, all of history.
You think the Somali Muslims and Amish that will replace us will share our egalitarian ideals?
The birth rate declining to replacement already happened 150-100 years ago- women were emancipated at the very tail end of that period. And note that that was when countries were far more rural than they are now, which skews the results significantly... if we assume 50% rural and those families are all having 3 kids, then 50% of the country is only having one kid.
Industrialization caused a significant decline in [real or perceived] socioeconomic opportunity per capita compared to the 1800s, which is why SK's birthrates are as bad as they were in the [urban] US in the 20s and 30s [combined with them being a country where the benefits of industrialization were more captured at the top; Japan is a case with a similar culture where that was less true and they're doing a bit better as a result]- it's just that, because the US won WW2, it got a temporary reprieve from having to solve the actual issue for a while. But we never solved the issue, and now it rears its ugly head again.
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"This is a just so story." It isn't, and I propose a moratorium on this type of argumentation. The community loves replying to complicated arguments by pointing at a handy buzzword* and dismissing them accordingly, and it obstructs good-faith debate. Note how the poster actually references how societies gave concrete examples of why their strictures were necessary, yet you reply with dismissive references to superstition, as though you didn't even read the post you're replying to deep enough to see that societies provided concrete arguments for sexual control, not myths.
*see also the love of "informal" fallacies, a categorically invalid concept, created entirely because "I respectfully disagree" doesn't carry as much weight as getting to claim an argument is logically flawed.
If you think my post broke any rules you are free to report it, and I will as usual let another mod adjudicate it. But no, we will not be declaring a moratorium on "types of argumentation" someone dislikes. For example, a type of argumentation I dislike is the "Nuh uh" (e.g. "It isn't").
"Societies" did no such thing. The poster gave examples of why he thinks such strictures evolved. Some of which I don't even disagree with. (Speaking of not even reading the post you're replying to.)
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He did the Bay Area version of that, which is even more miraculous when you put it in context. He decided to GET MARRIED, like FORMALLY LEGALLY CONTRACTUAL MARRIAGE AND STUFF, CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT??? to a nice girl who CONVERTED TO JUDAISM IN ORDER TO MARRY HIM and they HAD KIDS TOGETHER. Yeah, they went the IVF route, but reading his post on that it seems to be less the "well of course before you even consider reproducing you will plan it out like you're von Clausewitz going up against Napoleon, including - naturally, who would be so irresponsible as to leave this up to nature? - embryonic selection for the bestest of the bunch based on all the shiny metrics these companies promise to deliver on" attitude and more "yeah it wasn't working the old-fashioned way so we needed help". No kids outside of marriage, no "the lesbian throuple wanted to have their own theyby so they asked me to donate sperm on the basis of proven IQ attainment", not even "we decided to live together in a polycule and if we got pregnant then maybe get married on paper for the legal provisions like tax and stuff". Nope, get married first to one woman and have kids after marriage like the most knuckle-dragging unenlightened redneck out there. And the kids are not alone assigned gender at birth but treated like they are on the binary gender spectrum of boy and girl! I am gasping with shock, I tell you!
Maybe they'll have more kids later, who knows. I don't know and don't want to know if either/both are still in the poly lifestyle, but even so - by comparison with the bubble of rationalist attitudes around reproduction and personal romantic life choices, this is damn near the equivalent of moving to New England and marrying a nice traditional girl. I think evolution is doing just fine in the battle there 😀
My understanding is that Scott is still polyamorous even after getting married.
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Have to snort if THAT is how this is phrased.
The guy gets to "set the timetable" with their "implicit threat of walking away."
That's generally not how negotiations are framed. A woman has just as much power to walk away, and just as much power to define/set a timetable... assuming she's capable of keeping to her own commitments. "Look, I'll have sex with you by the 5th date if and only if we are exclusive and you've spent ~$400 on me by then" is a valid way to filter out fuckboys... if the guy can reasonably expect that she will keep such a promise.
And a guy is going to walk away only when he doesn't value the sex that highly and/or has multiple other women he can try to hook up with, which devalues sex with any given one of them. There really ISN'T an imbalance in bargaining power here! There's just women who aren't able to state their position and then enforce it, so they don't even attempt to bargain.
From the perspective of virtually every guy who ISN'T trying to solely extract sex, the woman is the one setting EVERY timetable, and even if he does have the power to walk away, he knows he can't/won't cajole her into sex unless and until SHE really wants it, he wouldn't even dream of trying to force the issue.
There was a time in my life when I figured that religious rules against premarital sex were at worst arbitrary and at best outdated given modern contraceptives.
Now, I have to accept that they're an ingenious way to create a Schelling Point where both men and women can be truly sure that they'll be getting the thing they're hoping for, and, much like closing on a house, every material part of the transaction will occur at approximately the same time so nobody can duck out of the bargain before coughing up their side of it.
That is, since it is clear many women are susceptible to being manipulated, and some large subset of men are hardcore manipulators, don't set up a complex set of unwritten rules that can be exploited and that women barely understand. Just tell everyone "no sex until marriage" and don't allow any bend whatsoever. That's a rule that everyone CAN follow and can be policed more directly. Men who want sex... get married. Women who want commitment... get married. Don't agonize over how many dates or how long you have to be with them before giving it up, and don't let guys make implicit promises they fully intend to break.
Maybe it is arbitrary, but no less arbitrary than any other boundary you could set, and a hell of a lot easier/more intuitive to enforce.
In a slightly saner world, Willy would probably be dead. One of these girls' fathers or brothers would have confronted him by now and beaten some sense into him or just put him out of our misery.
But noooooooooo instead the sociopaths are allowed free reign so long as they don't run completely afoul of the law because we've left the sexual marketplace to be regulated solely by social shame and rumor-mongering and removed any implicit threat of violence. And Sociopaths aren't effected by social shame.
This was a long time ago when I was a teenager, and of course Modern Times means attitudes have accelerated considerably since then, but the agony aunt pages of the teen magazines were full of queries about "my boyfriend says if I don't have sex with him he's going to break up with me but I don't feel ready for sex yet" (unlike our happy times when the teen magazine advice is about 'here's how to have anal sex without pain or ripping yourself open, you are having anal sex aren't you, you're not some dumb prude?')
Many people are not sufficiently hard-hearted enough to tell the bastard that there's the door, goodbye, he can go pay a whore if he wants it that badly, if they feel pressured into moving too fast because they do want to stay with the person that they are having feelings for. Who can judge the vagaries of the human heart?
EDIT: To be even-handed, there are also men in the same trap who are emotionally involved with women who jerk them around like this - threaten to break up, do break up and then get back with them, and so on. And they too can't tell the bitch to hit the bricks because feelings are involved.
Yes, this is my point here:
Emotional connection has a major impact on how one negotiates with the counterparty (since you implicitly expect an iterated game), yes. But this is not the same as someone being able to set all the terms of the bargain because the other has no power or leverage whatsoever. If your emotional side renders you incapable of stating demands and enforcing boundaries, then you're just bad at negotiating, it's not the same as being coerced.
I'm already granting that sociopaths can exploit emotional connection to extract the benefits they want, mind.
Hence a workable solution was that the woman could go to her parents and get the necessary guidance and confidence to steel herself to stand her ground and demand marriage, with there being at least the implicit threat of patriarchal violence if the BF inflicts unneeded harm on her.
Yeah, but society backed that up. Today, social attitudes are "waiting for sex until after marriage? what kind of sex-negative repressed loser weirdo are you?"
Yeah.
Although I think I'd couch it as "Wait until you're actually committed to each other in truly demonstrable ways, OR wait until marriage."
There was some real idiocy in thinking we could separate out the emotional components of sex from the act itself.
I can understand why the free love guys back in the 60s thought this was a compelling idea, but what I will never understand is how huge numbers of women were convinced by it.
My understanding is that "Science" telling them so was a big part of it.
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What's so hard to understand? The promise of sex is something women can use to exploit men. Many women wanted to be able to more freely exploit men in this way without realizing men would also be more free to exploit them in return.
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Society doesn't back up men who are so lacking in confidence, so why should it back up women? They are supposedly our equals. Why can't they be expected to stand up for themselves or suffer the consequences the way we are?
EDIT: Grammar.
Because they’re not really our equals in the sense of ability(although they are in dignity). That’s a lie society tells.
Seconding @thrownaway24e89172's response below. I see this kind of disclaimer for HBD-based arguments all the time (e.g. "there are no inferior or superior races, but...") even though the conclusion they dismiss is usually an obvious extrapolation from the forwarded premises. You might justify the "unequal but equal" mindset by pointing to the special role of women in childbearing, but nevertheless men are still universally regarded as the primary sex, with woman defined in relation to him; Eve was made of Adam, after all. I hate that it's the case and wish it weren't so, but women are definitely seen as intrinsically lesser (in the "great chain of being" sense) compared to men.
With that said, what's your justification for the equal worth/dignity of the sexes despite their unequal ability?
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What does it even mean to be "equals in dignity" though if inequality at the group level justifies disparate treatment of equals at the individual level?
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A young woman may go to college in a town other than the one she grew up in. And later graduate and get a job in some third town. No reason to think she has a local brother or father ready to punish you for not committing in the way she prefers.
Without the sexual revolution, there are expectations put on her too.
I agree that trying to roll back the sexual revolution by constraining men without constraining women is insane and unjust. Any workable attempt to do so would have to involve both sexes, unlike the “yes means yes” push.
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Its not the not-committing per se, its the exploitation of her naivete and trust, as clearly put on display in Willy's case.
If he really is a serial philanderer, eventually he'd hit someone who had a male with some investment in her wellbeing who could course correct him.
He likely avoids these women.
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Yes, routinely separating people from their family and other support structures is slightly insane.
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/r/deadbedrooms would like a word. It's interesting you brought up closing on a home, and said marriage makes it so that neither party can get what they want without coughing up what they were offering it. It just doesn't hold up under scrutiny though. Virtually the only way to make the arrangement fair like you claim it is would be, is to make it so that you can have as much sex with your wife as you want, consent be damned, legally. But I doubt anyone has the heart to go through with that. So you are left with one side that can defect at will, and the other losing most of their assets and income.
Thé traditional arrangement is that spouses don’t have the right to say no to each others’s sexual requests absent extenuating circumstances.
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That was part of the religious rules, yes. Before the modern concept of martial "rape", a man was entitled to take his marital rights from his wife. Consent didn't enter into it; she gave consent when she agreed to marry him, and such was irrevocable.
This is an absolutely essential part of the marriage bargain. Sex is the payment that a man receives for supporting and protecting his wife. Saying that a wife has the right to, at any time, stop providing that payment because she does not feel like it, is ridiculous. Doubly so because the typical man disgusts the typical woman, which means any society where the majority of men get married is a society where the wives are laying back and thinking of England, and will stop performing this unpleasant chore at the first opportunity.
To help conceptualize the absurdity, imagine a pro-worker's rights party in government passing a law that an employee is at any time entitled to stop doing useful tasks for a company, but that the company is legally obligated to continue paying that employee his full salary. Oh, and at any time the employee can decide to quit and receive half of the company's assets. What happens to the employment market in such an scenario? Solve for the equilibrium.
Societies which abide by the zeroth commandment cannot survive. Either we get our heads out of our asses about this, or, more likely, we get replaced by a culture that still understands how marriage works, like Muslims (or, more likely still, AI makes all of this irrelevant, but I have never liked "run for the singularity" as an exit strategy).
We are just rushing ahead to make a prophet of C.S. Lewis. 1945, "That Hideous Strength":
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I agree on inter-society competition favoring cultures that can actually reproduce, with a small caveat that if your low-fertility society can siphon off kids from high-fertility societies fast enough AND assimilate them properly, then it can persist even without breeding the next generation on its own. But that's a theoretical construct that the west at best imagines itself to be like.
But I'd also like to point out that
Reducing marriage to the provision of sex alone may not be entirely off the mark, but it ignores a large part of what makes it important.
It’s interesting to note when reading through the New Testament how much of the Pauline epistles is about being good husbands/wives- and we know from Roman moralists that Roman men(the feelings of women were not recorded) often felt this way, that marriage just kinda sucked. The church fathers also go on about the same topic- being a good husband or wife.
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Small reminder that the marital debt worked both ways; men also gave consent to women about having sex when they married, because now being one flesh the wife's body belongs to the husband and the husband's body belongs to the wife. And there were cases of women complaining that their husbands were not having sex with them (sometimes men are incapable, or not in the mood either, imagine!). And the religious viewpoint (from Catholic church rules) was that ideally you were not having sex because you were so goddamned horny, you were not to treat your wife lustfully. Sex was for procreation and as part of marriage, it wasn't about getting your rocks off for selfish pleasure. And there were rules (though very much probably not followed tightly) about not having sex around important holy days.
So there was a lot of rules around sex within marriage, not simply "okay your husband is horny, lie back and let him at it". Besides, forcing an unwilling partner to let you fuck them can be no fun too, see the complaints from guys about "she just lies there and lets me do all the work, and waits for it to be over".
Well, yes; the husband is also supposed to screw the wife on a regular basis, and is in breach of his marital duties if he doesn't. But, for obvious reasons, this is a much less common problem than the opposite; the man bites dog to the dog bites man.
Now, in this, I actually agree that the husbands are being unreasonable, like a boss who demands that you smile at the costumers and ask how their day is going. Bad enough that the job has to be done; being forced to pretend to enjoy it is just adding insult to injury.
That is so, but I think it helps to remind everyone on here that sometimes the man does bite the dog, just so this place doesn't sound like Rapez'R'Uz when it comes to marital duties. It's supposed to be reciprocal! Indeed, it is "better to marry than to burn", but phrasing it like "the only purpose of marriage is so that the guy has a flesh-and-blood fuckdoll" is not making marriage sound more attractive to young women.
I think it's also important to remember that marital rape as a crime came about because it wasn't simply cases of "she says she's not in the mood and we haven't had sex for six months so I insisted and she gave in", but "he gets drunk and/or is angry and violent, so several times he beat me bloody then had sex so violently that yes, it inflicted physical pain and damage". We have to remember that laws get made not because of reasonable people trying to reconcile opposing views but because assholes took advantage of "well there isn't a law against it, now is there?"
All this is different to trying to reconcile differing levels of libido and interest in sex, which is often a problem too. I genuinely do think sexual desire in women is linked to the hormonal cycle so it ebbs and flows in a way that sexual desire in men does not, and that's a large part of the problem for guys who do honestly feel "if I don't get laid soon I'll explode" (blue balls) versus women who are "honestly, I'd prefer a bar of chocolate and a romance movie".
And I have to end with the anecdote, which I read in the notes to the Hollander translation of the "Divine Comedy", about a guy in Dante's time who claimed that the reason he slept with men was because his wife wouldn't have sex with him so look, he wasn't one of those sodomites really. To which I can only say, because of the social tolerance of having affairs so he could have kept a mistress, the availability of prostitutes, and the fact that he could have engaged in casual sex (paid for or unpaid) with working-class women such as the servant girls in his house, dude. Come on. You sleep with guys because you like sex with guys, and your wife has nothing to do with it.
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Every time you DreadJimmers bring this up, I wonder what your model of a marital relationship is like. It's obviously not one where you and your wife actually love one another. So if your wife is not in the mood, or she's injured or sick, or you've just had a raging fight, or you're drunk and stinking and gross her out, you believe in the Good Old Days she'd just have to spread 'em anyway, no recourse, and if she resists, you could beat her until she stops resisting, and that is the past you want to return to?
You can look up traditional Catholic teachings on ‘the marital debt’ if you’d like, quite a bit more nuance than Jim portrays. Pre-Vatican II seminary textbooks are mostly in the library of congress.
That’s probably the closest to how this was supposed to work in practice.
I think the Orthodox churches also had/have similar rules, because they tend to be even less relaxed than pre- and post-Vatican II Catholicism (e.g. rules around fasting, where the Western church leaves a lot more wiggle room and is much less stringent on what counts as fasting).
For a fun historical look on the history of marriage, according to the American 1903 Catholic Encyclopedia, see here:
The USA does seem to have been unusual in both the rate and in the sex of the parties seeking divorce; up until the end of the 19th century, it was generally men who divorced their wives as it was very difficult both to get a divorce and for women to prove grounds for divorce if the husband was unwilling (hence in cases of mutual agreement about divorce, the husband would arrange a fake 'adultery' that could be 'proven' in court so as to provide grounds for divorce).
This explains to me the jokes about the frequency and ease of divorces in America in British late 19th/early to mid 20th century detective fiction, and the attitude in American crime fiction of the same period (e.g. one story had a dissolute wastrel husband openly engaging in an affair with a stage starlet, who was impatiently awaiting his divorce so she could marry him, and the attitudes expressed were that the wife was being unreasonable in refusing to get with the plan, there was little or no hint of social sanction about this). Of course, the excuse there was 'she's Catholic so she won't divorce him' and it's surprising how often this becomes a plot point: murder happens because X wants a divorce but Y is Catholic so won't grant it.
Anyway, on to low marriage rates in 1903!
And if we're getting into sex within marriage, see the thorny questions in the Summa:
So sorry, gentlemen, the fact alone that you're horny and so want to fuck your wife is not good enough, and no, she's not property or at least you are property, too 😁
On the other hand, St Thomas Aquinas is less strict than St Jerome (not a high bar to cross, admittedly):
So, see the reply to objection 1. You must respect your wife, so "lie back bitch and open your legs, it's my right as your husband and you have no right whatsoever to refuse" is - surprise, surprise! - a sinful attitude.
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I am reminded of the classics. The key word is learn to love, and there's no doubt in my mind that this is a learned skill for lots of people, maybe all of them, to some degree. Some more than others, some never do. There's growth potential- I think someone else mentioned "people who think in terms of pathological bargaining in marriage are all insane, those who see it as an investment opportunity prosper", which gets at this- if there was nothing to be learned it wouldn't be growth, would it?
As opposed to today, where he'd just have to spread 'em anyway (the folds of the wallet, in this case), no recourse, and if he resists, she can beat him (with another man's fists/State power) until he stops resisting?
Surely there must be some sort of compromise (we did have one in the past, but the problem is that men and women do not, in fact, have equal biological constraints)- a new paradigm is needed to account for a seismic technological shift where women have near-total control over conception and marriage is worth less and less in the face of better alternatives (at least, from a hedonistic perspective).
DreadJimming is just as destructive when women do it.
Yes, but I disagree with his framing (and yours) that women are just tee-hee frivorce-raping hapless men with the power of the state.
It's harder than MRAs would have you believe for a wife to just casually strip-mine an ex, even with no-fault divorce.
If you want to restore a stable equilibrium between the sexes, it's not by listening to people who, frankly, hate the other sex.
Starting from egalitarianism, I would expect there's likely the same amount of abuse of both processes by their respective bad actors when each was/is the dominant mode of abuse.
And then there's the illegibility of what that being a possible outcome actually does to the average citizen's behavior under that law; men talk about it all the time, so do women. (So do responsible parents when the topic of CPS comes up- same kind of chilling effect.)
I don't think one or other gender holds a monopoly on that evil (and am not really willing to consider it, because DreadJimming/DreadJilling is inevitably where that ends up). If both are permitted, each can check the other, but more total abuse then occurs at the margins.
Yeah, but arbitration and spending hours trying to pass the Turing Test for the interested parties is boring, I'd much rather complain about how cokes that have had 40 penises inside them are spiritually degraded or whatever instead.
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It does seem to me like there is a whole lot of room between "not when she is injured, or right after a fight, or when you need a bath" and /r/deadbeadrooms. Your examples all seem to assume a pretty high, or at least medium, baseline of sex and then declare that there should be a non-zero number of limits on when a man can assume his marital rights, but what is being discussed is a level which is low to non-existent so your comment seems non-responsive tbh. Real "all debates are bravery debates" energy IMO, where you are saying there must be SOME limits on how often the husband can expect a yes and erwgv3g34 saying there must be SOME limits on how often she can refuse.
There may be room between those positions but there's no stable position between them. The center cannot hold, and has not, and we have reached the stable equilibrium of "she may withhold sex for any reason at any time and his only permissible recourse is a divorce in which he loses most of his assets and future income".
Do you actually know anything about the circumstances under which a man can "lose most of his assets and future income" in a divorce? It is not common. In fact alimony is pretty rare nowadays (and almost never close to "most" of his assets and future income), child support is to support the children, and the number of men paying "unreasonable" child support (however you define that) is exceeded by the number of men not actually paying their child support. The worse case scenario you will usually see is an equal distribution state where a spouse can claim 50% of marital assets, even those he or she didn't bring into the marriage. (This can and sometimes is the man who benefits, though usually it's the woman.) And not all states do a 50/50 split like that.
You guys seriously need to update your notions of how divorce works from the 1960s, or the 19th century.
I've had this argument about a hundred times, so I'm going to experiment with a new track:
What about "child support", as currently practiced in the liberal west and particularly the United States, evidences that it is about supporting children—without referencing its name in any way, shape, or form? If I gave you a sheet describing the terms, functions, and conditions of C.S. with the name at the top blacked out, what elements would lead you to suspect ah ha, the primary function of this policy is to support children! What elements would you point to in order to refute the competing hypothesis that the primary function of the policy is actually mother support?
This is an open challenge. Anyone reading should feel free to answer.
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Yes, he gets divorced.
Spousal support is rare but not non-existent (my father paid it, and he was divorced far later than the 1960s), but child support is very high and doesn't have to be spent on the children. If his income goes up he has to pay more; if it goes down he still has to pay the same.
Which is irrelevant, as they were still demanded to have been paying it. And if they get caught, they have their wages garnished down to subsistence or less, they lose their driver's licenses, professional licenses, go to jail for contempt for indefinite periods, etc.
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I agree that a dead bedroom is a problem, and no one should be expected to live with that. But the "sex is an obligation and marital rape doesn't exist" guys don't seem to acknowledge a wife's right to say no ever.
If I were to put it from the point of view of someone who does not hate women, it would be: a woman who says no, rather than not right now, is a woman who has no right to her marriage.
It sounds like the rape enthusiasts have something else going on, but I think the above description is a pretty reasonable standard for marriage, leaving out the man’s parallel duties.
Agreed, but I'd also say, unless you are having some other severe marital dysfunction going on, if your wife is saying no all the time, wouldn't you want to... have a conversation about this? Figure out what's going on? As opposed to just "asserting your rights."
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To give without restraint does not warrant taking without restraint; that should be obvious to anyone without terminal legalism of the brain. Retvrnist rightwingers don't get this when they harp on about marital rights this and women are property that. You sound like women who think that just because their husband has pledged his provision and protection, they can drain his savings on stupid shit or pick a fight with 15 thugs on his behalf just so she can feel protected. Now, you haven't said you want to fuck your wife literally whenever, regardless of sickness/pain/sleep/unwashedness of dick, and maybe you don't. The hyperfocus on muh marital rights certainly gives that impression off.
If you want to be Muslims then I don't see any difference between being replaced by Muslims and becoming like them. I prefer us being better or perish trying.
That isn't what @WhiningCoil and @erwgv3g34 are saying, though. They're saying that a contract which allows one side to take without restraint but does not allow the other to do so is a pure means to extort fools rather than something that is mutually beneficial. The specifics are that one can defect on providing sex within a marriage, due to marital rape, but one can't defect on providing resources, because of alimony/child support and because of divorce splitting assets.
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Which is why this was the historical norm in the first place.
Divorce meaning the man loses most of their assets is, quite literally, a pension plan for when a sex worker has had enough of the job. That this means they're grossly overpaid and encouraged to retire that way is a problem not unique to sex workers, but it does come from the same philosophical place as other pension systems do.
Let's dig in to the history of divorce to see how we got to where we are today. The alimony and property division subjects seem to be different from state to state, so it's not automatically "she will take half your stuff and your future income". Historically, divorce was obtained solely, largely, and more easily by the wealthy; men were the major earners, work opportunities for women were much more limited; a divorced woman (especially one with children) would often be socially ostracised and would find it difficult to impossible to remarry and marriage was the main form of maintaining/obtaining income and status (widows were also often in reduced circumstances); men might/would remarry more easily and form new families. Therefore there was an expectation (for the better-off) of maintaining a similar standard of living to what they had enjoyed, and the duty to provide for the abandoned wife and children so they would not be destitute. Men of high status might disinherit children of a former marriage when contracting a new (and better, trading up) marriage for reasons of inheritance rights (see Henry VIII legally changing the status of his daughters Mary and Elizabeth to that of bastards so they had no claims on the throne), so this was important to provide for such children.
So the power in divorces swung gradually, over time and with the fights for rights of women, from men (who could more easily divorce their wives and often used the threat of "I'll take custody of the children and you will never see them again", as legal custody used to be automatically granted to the father, to force their wives into either remaining in the legal marriage or to accept worse settlements in the case of divorce) towards women - automatic or nearly so granting of custody to the mother rather than the father, 'palimony' cases and the likes.
Was this abused? Sure. Just as the previous state of affairs had been abused when the power lay with men. 'No fault' divorce came about because the old procedure was long-drawn out and often difficult to prove (hence the fake adultery cases). It was supposed to be quicker, easier and cheaper when the marriage had irretrievably broken down and both parties agreed they wanted to end it. Of course, the social views at the time (divorce will be last resort) then eroded over time as divorce became more and more acceptable and commonplace, to now where one party can get a divorce even if the other party doesn't want to end the marriage.
This is, after all, the point of the slippery slope argument: you can't fossilise attitudes to be the same forever as at the time you make the changes in the name of compassion or inclusivity or whatever. You start off with the hard cases and the view that "of course this will always be last resort, we just want to help those genuinely suffering" and as the 'last resort' moves from "socially unacceptable" to "tolerated" to "accepted" to "the new normal", or course it will no longer be the 'last resort'.
And that's in England, the USA has gone its own way and introduced, state by state, its own laws. Take the Nevada divorces, where the state purposely made it as easy as possible for people to come to Nevada, fulfil the six month residency requirement, and get a divorce - all in the name of money-spinning for the local economy. That's got little to nothing to do with the rights of women or helping men get divorce-raped because they believed Women Are Wonderful. In this particular case, if you look at the formal notice issued, you have to admit it's some cheek to claim the wife deserted the husband, as he took up with a married woman and they fecked off to America where he then deliberately contracted a bigamous (under British law) marriage with her so his English wife could divorce him at home:
Unhappy marriages were (and are) often complex tangles. Men taking advantage of their wives' beauty, social position, and often connection with high status lovers to advance their own careers were not uncommon (take the (in)famous mistresses, later in the century, of the Prince of Wales, later to be Edward VII, whose complaisant husbands were often rewarded for their discretion and tact). Unsuccessful men living off the earnings of their wives (often the women wrote for a living, hence the increase in women novelists so that now novels are nearly primarily a female art form) also happened. Take famous 19th divorce cases such as that of Caroline Norton:
For an Irish example, there's Charles Parnell and Kitty O'Shea, where a prominent Anglo-Irish politician had a long-running affair, her husband was aware but, as long as he gained advantage from it, didn't rock the boat (the O'Sheas were waiting for Kitty's wealthy aunt to die and leave her an inheritance, which would not have happened if she was involved in a public scandal, and there's some evidence that Parnell tried to help advance O'Shea's career in politics). Although the O'Sheas were separated, the husband did not seek a divorce (and the accompanying scandal which blew up and wrecked Parnell's career) until much later:
Who's in the right? Who's in the wrong?
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Women used to provide much, much more in terms of money, back when spinning was a thing, and “wife-selling” was a well-known Anglo practice of soft divorce for when things really weren’t working out.
Plus, consider that the law back then was basically decided on a village-by-village basis, and you can see that for a woman to straight-up defect would not be to her benefit.
EDIT: reading back, you didn’t mention historical aspects. So take this as color as opposed to rebuttal.
wat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_(English_custom)
It feels very highly British that the article brings up a crime of "criminal conversation" and a "peculiar court".
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Huh. Never would have guessed that.
I was aware of the more common colonial practice of a man skipping town on his wife and her later getting a legal divorce due to abandonment.
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It should be noted that wife sales were often the idea of the wife, and an escape plan that provided her an out she wouldn't otherwise have had.
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I will go on record as saying that there should both be a pretty high social expectation on women to keep providing regular sex to her husband... AND that a husband should have a little leeway when it comes to extracting that commitment.
And my point is mostly that the guy has been waiting for sex will get some on his wedding night and honeymoon, and if the woman doesn't give it to him in short order I'd say that's grounds for annulment.
Years down the road, well, that's a different situation. But we don't want men to conclude that the only way they can expect regular sex is to keep leading women along for a few months at a time and swap them whenever they get too attached.
Not really looking to reinstate the rule of thumb but if a guy is otherwise upholding his end, he should indeed have some 'remedies' available if the sex dries up.
I'll be careful how I say this, but I've found that womens' desires are often finicky in the sense that they will be completely uninterested on a basic desire level right up until the act is in motion, then it flips like a switch. So a guy should probably be allowed to toss his wife over his shoulder and carry her to the bedroom and engage in some active foreplay, even if he has to stop before penetration.
Yes, its more complex than that, wife stops taking care of herself, guy gets schlubby, kids come in the mix, so not going to pretend there's a panacea, but yes, there should absolutely be a socially acceptable expectation that a wife is having sex with her husband on some regular interval.
On the more wacky front, I've wondered if we should be dosing married couples with Oxytocin since pretty much all the literature available shows that it makes couples more interested in each other (although I'd not be surprised if this would fail to replicate.)
Couple shows up at the doctor's office saying they've not had sex in months, he hands them a spray bottle: "Take two snorts each and call me in the morning."
Inconveniently, babies are one of the big things that leads women to not want sex over long periods of time.
Oxytocin comes up medically in the context of childbirth and lactation, and is heavily involved in breast feeding. So, if you stimulate a breast feeding mother's nipples, her body will produce oxytocin... and milk. She will likely then think of the baby. Doctors give oxytocin during delivery to make contractions stronger (or, if they only need them a bit stronger, can use a breast pump).
That right there is the time I think the Husbands should be willing to sacrifice their libido on the altar of fertility.
If she carries your kid for 9 months and is now willing to commit to raising it with you, then you can either abstain for a few more months, or do self help for a while.
But yeah, the addition of kids leads to a lot of biological, economic, and just pure scheduling issues, and the guy's desires probably don't reduce at all, so somebody is likely going to compromise.
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‘We never had sex’ is grounds for an annulment in the RCC. Famously came up in king Henry VIII’s case, where it had been used to posthumously annul Catherine of Aragon’s marriage to his older brother, which otherwise would have made the marriage invalid on incest grounds. The original annulment remained valid and thus Henry didn’t get his.
Yes, but Catherine was obviously lying. The kings of England and Aragon had scholars go through her first marriage with a fine-toothed comb looking for a reason to annul it so that Catherine could marry Henry and maintain the alliance. When they came back saying that the only way to annul the marriage was if it hadn’t been consummated, Catherine said that she had never slept with her husband. That’s not terribly plausible under the circumstances, and if it were true all of the canon lawyers would have been unnecessary in the first place.
The pope actually refused to annul her second marriage for political and military reasons.
Yeah the Papacy allowing the annulment of the already married King of France Louis XII to marry the widow Duchess of Brittany of the previous king (the kings were cousins) just a few years before looks nakedly political. If Catherine been any other woman and not been related so closely to the Holy Roman Emperor I suspect the annulment would have granted, and her forced into a convent. The king's great matter had the unfortunate affect of no betrothals turning into marriage for Mary I, if she had married earlier we could have seen Hapsburg England! So only one of Henry VIII's children inclined to procreate never got the opportunity.
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Why do you believe Henry over Catherine? I have a lot more reason to trust her word than his, and that of Anne Boleyn whose own ambition and that of her family had led her to work towards this marriage over a long period.
Arthur, heir to the throne, Henry's elder brother and Catherine's husband, was married at the age of fifteen and died six months later of (presumed to be) the sweating sickness. There are allegations that he had been growing weaker and more sickly since the wedding in the period leading up to his death. Doubts about the consummation of the marriage are therefore not unreasonable. Evidence as to its being consummated relied on third-party hearsay by those highly incentivised to please the king in his trial over "I'm right and this bitch is wrong, force her to do what I say":
So an attempt at consummation, ending in premature ejaculation but no full penetration, on the part of inexperienced and over-excited teenagers is entirely possible.
Remember, they were both only fifteen. Catherine certainly would have been raised strictly and come to the marriage a virgin, and it is unlikely (though not impossible) that Arthur had much if any opportunity for sexual experimentation before his marriage. Henry VII's household seems to have been run strictly and on moral lines, and besides that, the risk of bastards or entanglements with prior claims for marriage by the daughters of noble houses on the grounds of "your son had sex with me" were way too much of a risk for the very shaky House of Tudor whose grasp on the throne had not been well-established and was, even in the times of Henry VIII, vulnerable to rival counter-claims by the likes of the Pole family whose own ancestry was every bit as royal or even better. Henry VIII was, in the wake of his brother's early death, very closely monitored, even smothered, by his father who oversaw his upbringing.
Henry VII did not want to lose the alliance he had worked for so hard, nor the dowry he had been promised (his frugal, not to say penny-pinching, attitude to the royal finances enabled him to leave behind at his death a full treasury, massive public resentment at the tax regime he had inflicted on them, very unpopular scapegoats in the form of his tax collectors who were then promptly executed by his son in order to placate the public, and that same full treasury was then blown through by Henry VIII who lived extravagantly beyond the means of the English economy of the time).
Henry wasn't about to lose that Spanish princess nor pay back what dowry he had received, so he put pressure on to have the marriage annulled in order to enable his second son, and now only male heir, to marry her when he came of age. It was Henry VIII who later had the scruples about "oh I must have inadvertently married my brother's widow, which is incest, and the Old Testament says God punishes that, this is why I have no living male heirs and must annul this illegal marriage so I can marry my current mistress", and put the pressure on the pope of the time to do so.
I agree about the political and military reasons for the pope to reject this (who wants to offend the Holy Roman Emperor?) but it also put him in the difficult position of countermanding the dispensation provided by a previous pope, just on the whims of English kings: "yeah we know we previously asked your predecessor to grant us a dispensation to say this marriage was valid and licit, now we want you to grant a dispensation to say it's invalid and illicit". This wasn't just a matter of a legal quibble or overturning a previous court decision, this touches on the Power of the Keys. If we're talking about "why get canon lawyers involved?", the King's Great Matter involved Henry sending scholars all over Europe to get canon law and theological opinions in his favour, a resounding lack of same, leading to him having to heavily rely on his pet theologians in the universities at home, and even the likes of Luther going "well uh no he's properly married, just copy the Biblical patriarchs and take a second wife you muppet". The failure to push through the divorce caused the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey, up till then the most powerful man in England next to the king, and later on that of St Thomas More for his efforts to avoid being pressured into "hey, everyone in Europe respects Tom and he agrees with me, so this new marriage must be kosher, yeah?"
Catherine was a devout Catholic (not in the modern term of the phrase which seems to just mean "Catholic who agrees with the Democratic party agenda on everything") and would have been very aware of the moral implications of committing perjury. It would have been a lot easier for her to go along with Henry's demands (as Anne of Cleves did in her own situation at a later time) and would have made her daughter, Mary's, position more secure - but she did not.
You can believe she was lying because she was a jealous, spiteful woman - or you can believe she was telling the truth and an impatient king brought pressure to bear in order to get his own way at the behest of an ambitious woman who, ironically, then failed to provide the son she had promised Henry, a promise which had strung him along for years and kept his wandering attention fixed on her, and then boomeranged when this same spiteful man had her trial brought forward for displeasing and embarrassing him. Catherine was left to die of cancer, Anne got a public execution and her replacement installed as wife and queen on the very same day.
I know who I find more credible, and it ain't Henry, the guy who had mistresses throughout his marriages, over his faithful wife.
That is a fair point.
Well, yeah. It was a misreading of Leviticus – if it were correct then levirate marriage, commanded to Jews in the same book, would make no sense. But it was a misreading that underlay canon law. And you can see why the issue would obsess him.
She'd certainly have understandable reasons for jealousy. And if she had originally felt that lying was a minor offense made as much for Henry's sake as for hers, it wouldn't be at all shocking if she refused to come clean so that he could look justified in betraying her.
Or, on the other hand, if she wasn't lying, neither would it be shocking if she refused to lie just to make it convenient for Henry to dump her for his long-term mistress. Henry (and those he had charged with getting this done) had little scruples about bending the truth; there was a lot of ground to be cleared before the second marriage could take place, and it wasn't all down to an inconvenient wife.
Anne Boleyn had at one time attempted to contract a marriage with Henry Percy, son of the Earl of Northumberland, and they were secretly betrothed. This didn't suit either of their families, or Cardinal Wolsey, so whatever arrangement they had was broken up and Percy was married off to another woman. When the king's marriage with Anne was to go forward, Percy was pressured to claim there had been nothing between them. Then later on, when it was incumbent to get rid of her, he was pressured to admit there had been a pre-contract before them. This was treated as legally akin to marriage, so she was allegedly not free to marry Henry.
Did the men accused of being Anne's lovers lie or tell the truth when they denied this? Was Anne lying in her letter to Henry denying that she had ever committed adultery? We are really in "he said/she said" territory now.
As well as Anne's past romantic/sexual history, there was the problem that Henry had taken Anne's elder sister, Mary, as a mistress before he met Anne. If Catherine was guilty of having consummated a sexual relationship with Henry's brother, thus making their marriage illicit, then the boot was on the other foot here as well: a sexual relationship between Henry and Mary would have created a pseudo-kinship making Anne his sister-in-law, as it were, and thus rendering his marriage with her equally sinful, incestuous, and invalid as Catherine's marriage with Henry was claimed to be.
So in the tangled matter of Henry's marriages, we can't know what was the truth, as apart from "what was the 'truth' the king wanted declared at the time?"
This is why I tend to believe Catherine. She was put under oath, and I don't think she would have been prepared to commit perjury just to get back at Anne. Nowadays we think of perjury as a technical legal offence and indeed trivial (unless you're caught out), but people used to believe that swearing false oaths would indeed damn you to Hell. So there wouldn't have been the attitude that "lying was a minor offense made as much for Henry's sake as for hers". Catherine could have admitted a consummated marriage with Arthur, claimed that she had relied on the papal dispensation and the advice of her elders that the marriage with Henry was permissible, and made things easier for her. Henry had had mistresses during their marriage and she had accepted that, because that was the way of things. (Something Henry later allegedly reproached Anne about, when she was said to have confronted him about taking a replacement mistress, that greater ladies than her - a reference to Queen Catherine - had had to accept this). It would have made things easier and more secure for both her and her daughter, Mary (and Henry was not above being spiteful to his own child, with alleged threats later of executing her if she continued to be obstinate about accepting Anne as queen), as it went for Anne of Cleves who was more complaisant or better able to play the game, agreeing to all Henry's demands and being well treated in return when he wanted to get rid of her.
We'll never know the exact truth, without getting a time machine to go back and see if Catherine remained a virgin after her first marriage. All we can do is judge the characters of those involved as to how they strike us, and Henry strikes me as a liar - or at least someone able to persuade himself that he was acting from the purest motives and not just out of personal whim, and that all those opposed to him were in fact not alone wrong but wicked and evil.
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Practically speaking, what I’ve found works is pretty simple: make sure she gets enough rest, provide ordinary and regular affection, and (this is the big one) start warming her up WELL in advance. Get a little more touchy, flirty, make it obvious what you want, and that it’s her, but don’t demand it right then.
Later on, when it’s a better time, she’ll remember.
Agreed, although its frustrating to do all that prep work and then have some random outside circumstances occur that sours her again.
Building anticipation over text all day then letting her know you're 15 minutes from home and she better be ready is a great way to confirm that it is or isn't happening so as to avoid last second dissappointment.
As with many projects, the last mile is usually the hardest one.
That’s hard, man. I’m sorry to hear it.
If I have one real qualm with women these days, it’d be a certain lack of fortitude or resilience. Something goes wrong? Obviously that sucks, but it’s critical to find a way to get yourself back on the right path. Nobody’s emotions are so important that the world is gonna stop for them - and it’s incredibly callous to let them undermine the people you’re close to. Sure, there are genuinely awful things that take precedence, like a death in the family, but most of life’s little insults aren’t a big deal. Some women get it, but a lot don’t.
Same category as bringing your work home. Yelling at the wife or kids because the boss is a dick. Just not right.
Yeah I was going to say, a lot of men don't get this these days either, it just manifests differently. I didn't for a long time. Society really wants people to be narcissists.
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I feel like Aella unleashed a sort of Rule 34 for gimmicks: there is no niche so stupid that some e-thot won't try to exploit it.
She's advocating for money, from men, who will be charmed by her pretensions of intellectualism and pay to see her tits.
In a weird way I kind of respect it. Blogging while being an e-thot is an argument from ethos-- it's the opposite of self-censorship, and presents you as someone with no need to tell reputation-preserving lies. Call it the Milo Yiannopoulos phenomenon: being visibly and openly a member of the "outgroup" of a particular ideology makes you that much more credible when speaking about it.
I'd call it very similar to Milo: grifting for cash by playing the hypocrite.
Blogging while being an e-thot is an attempt to make the tits you're selling more meaningful to your audience. They're not just tits, they're so-and-so's tits. It's just another way to distinguish yourself in the market.
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So much of this reminds me of Jugaad Ethics.
Great essay, thanks for the link
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Can I say the line? I kinda want to say the line. Ok, I'm going to try saying the line now.
What did you think 'let's destroy marriage and the family' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
"The" is an incorrect use of the definite article. There is another solution, another technology. Even Beyoncé knows of this technology, though she, like the author you cite, clearly lacks comprehension of what it's for and how it is to be used. It is the humble ring. It goes on a finger. There are many others which superficially look like it, but one is a special piece of social technology.
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From the substack:
While this is probably true in some statistical sense, I would argue that this is mainly selection bias. Dark triad traits are (I think) hot in men.
As a man who dropped out of the dating market because the only relationships I might get are with women who are too neurotic to be net positive, and who is not going to organize his life around maximizing his SMV, let me say booo-fucking-hoooo.
The sex ratios in the sub-50 age brackets are balanced, so for every chad who manages to string five women along, there are four men who are not getting any. Society is not going to listen to them whine about that very much, because at the end of the day, nobody is entitled to sex. I find porn can substitute for sex and video gaming can substitute for the social interactions of having a relationship. It is not perfect, but so much better than being in a bad relationship.
I think that for evolutionary reasons, being sexually successful is hot in men. I am not kinkshaming anyone, if you are into men who can find a date and get laid every weekend, by all means go for it.
But just as low SMV men are not entitled to sex, women are not entitled to having a chad go exclusive with them. For evolutionary reasons again, most men have some inclination to take the harem route. The hot men who are inclined to a monogamous relationship likely are in a monogamous relationship, so the hot men in the dating market are mostly not interested in that.
Put frankly, if a woman prefers to date the hottest men who are willing to invest a few hours on dating for having sex with her, then she is actively selecting for men who have no incentive to go exclusive with her. If hookups are all she wants, that is fine, but if she is interested in an exclusive relationship, I would advise she lowers her SMV standards and compensate by requiring a longer runway before she engages in sex, thus making pursuing her more costly for men who are just looking for casual sex.
Also, there is no shame in being without a partner. IMO, anyone who can not function without being in a sexual relationship is definitely not relationship material. Looking at the romantic market and saying "the incentives are badly aligned, I am not going to try to participate in this" is something which women can do just as much as men. Just substitute porn with ao4 or something.
Unfortunately, I don't think they can, since they're generally less likely to make that sort of move unless they already believe it to be the consensus position amongst their peers.
Probably true, most women I know are STEM-adjacent. In these circles, not having a boyfriend or husband and not being on the lookout for one either is well within the spectrum of accepted behavior, certainly more so than constantly getting your heart broken by hot men interested in sex.
It might be different for, I dunno, the typical social circles of someone working for a nail studio?
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I agree with your solution, but I’m going to push back a little- sex creates the expectation of romantic exclusivity, so these ladies are entitled to Chad’s undivided attention. And statistically, most average women are in a relationship with average men.
Now, it does seem true that the floor beneath which most pick ‘pass’ is lower for women(or should I say higher, considering how much of it is driven by BMI). But 80% of women competing for 60% of men isn’t what you’re describing.
I think that both Chad and the women would agree on that, they just differ on the time frame. In most cases, the women are not starry-eyed virgins who believe that sleeping with a man they just met will create a relationship which will last until death doth part them. They likely had some previous sexual relationships which did not last, so they have enough data to establish a baseline. They might also have been wooed by a PUA before, in which case they would have excellent real world data on the long term prospects of a relationship beginning with sex on the first date. Chad's idea of the time horizon might be more like refraining from swiping on tinder until the post-coital cuddling.
The problem here is selection bias. You might be correct that the average case is an average man and an average woman happily forever (or until the man replaces his wife with a younger model 15 years down the road, or the woman dumps her husband after he gets burnout). But this majority is unlikely to star in the drama described above very often.
My ad-hoc model of partner selection would have two scales. One is a rather absolute scale, e.g. "Would your evolutionary programming tell you to forgo sex for years if this one was the only possible partner?"
The other is relative. "How does sleeping with that person affect your status in your group?"
Unsurprisingly, I think that men are mostly filtering on the absolute scale and women are mostly filtering on a relative scale.
As a thought experiment, consider a group of people of one gender partying. One of them is hitting it off with a person of the opposite gender who has a much lower SMV than the group, say overweight, and they leave the party together. The next day, they meet with their group, and are teased about the night. The group member says "oh yeah, we ended up banging, turns they are really great at oral sex".
If the group is male, my expectation of the response would be something like "congrats on getting laid, bro", with some more mild teasing.
If the group was female, my expectation of the response would be "that bottom-feeder will literally fuck any man with a pulse".
As a corollary, I think that giving all the overweight incels GLP-1 antagonists and bringing them to normal weight will not help them much getting into relationships. Their SMV is a result of their relative status, and while some fraction of women prefer (as in "revealed preference") to share a smaller group of hotter men, there will be an imbalance.
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Sex used to create the expectation of romantic exclusivity, but we kind of bulldozed those expectations. If you want that, make it a condition of having sex with the guy (and if he doesn’t want that, move on).
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I've seen enough of ao3, what great sin have we committed? Would a just deity unleash ao4 on the world?
More seriously though, it's bad for society if people aren't in stable, happy relationships. What is shame for? Why do we have it? To bully people into doing things that are pro-social. There's a reason why fat people are shamed and it's not just because of cruelty for cruelty's sake, there's value in it as well.
Some people just aren't relationship material and have qualities in other domains. Montgomery would doubtless be bullied for rizzing up the baddies with how he'd lay out his tanks in future wars.
Nixon told girls about his autistic alt-history scenarios where the Persians conquered the Greeks and this impeded his love life somewhat.
But society was structured in such a way that these men didn't end up loners because they were weird or gave women the ick, they married and had kids. What are we doing if the most erudite and civilized men are devoting their lives to B2B SAAS and not having kids?
But the value is vastly less than the cost, even before one takes into account the low effectiveness.
The cost of obesity is enormously high economically, medically and aesthetically. Investing in shaming might well pay great dividends. Japan has quite strong shaming of the fat and the country is very thin. Diet also plays a part in this but the shaming likely has a strong effect.
Personally, I think at this point, it is easier to just wait until the patents of the GLP-1 drugs run out.
Generally, shame is a double-edged sword, because it can enforce norms which are pro-social just as well as norms which are net-negative.
I mean, sure, Japan has very low obesity rates, because most kids would rather kill themselves than being the fat kid in the class, and their shame culture might prevent casual sex, but it is not much use with the TFR, for example.
Shame sure can enforce anti-social norms but the problem then is the norms, not the shaming. Every society does shaming in one way or another.
For instance, consider the complex built up in Britain that it was racist to look too closely into Pakistani grooming gangs or consider what exactly was going on with these naked, drunk 12-13 year old girl 'prostitutes' spending all this time with much older men, despite an otherwise powerful feminist apparatus. Shame works both ways. It can support cover-ups and abuse just as it can produce clean, cities full of orderly and considerate people.
Easy paths are all well and good but sometimes one has to do things that are hard, that's where shame comes in. 'Hard' can be doing very good or very bad deeds.
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The cost of fat-shaming, in human suffering, is higher.
I refuse to believe that the human suffering cost of being fat-shamed, over and above just being unnecessarily ugly and physically weak, is worse than millions and millions of deaths.
But realistically we shouldn't weigh it against the total suffering that obesity creates; we should weigh it against the amount of obesity-caused suffering that shaming can alleviate. Shaming isn't completely ineffective, but it's not very effective.
It seems fairly effective in East Asia, France, and Sweden.
It’s not perfectly effective, as it is fighting significant headwinds, but it is effective.
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Not when you include fatness-related suffering. Obesity is essentially a disability, after all.
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I don't think you could possibly insult a fat person enough to make it worse than them being fat in the first place, and I say this as a lifelong fatty who found Jesus (ozempic) and slimmed down enormously.
You have to have ironically thin skin to be more upset people call you fat than you are at being fat.
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I'm not yet convinced.
But, even if we grant it, there's also a motte-and-bailey here. Fat people are not just actively shamed, they're ashamed because they know being fat means they lack of some virtue or competence.
It may be that actively shaming them is not that useful, but it never stops there. The next demand is to dismantle or obscure anything that rightfully makes fat people notice their position on the grounds that society, and not their own understanding of reality, is shaming them. Then we start actively lying or excusing bad behavior which is probably even less effective.
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I mean it's all well and good to notice that we've gone and done a stupid thing and destroyed Something Great.
But so long as it remains impossible to undo it, it's collapse that we're doing. Hopefully spectacular enough to warn people of the consequences of taking the most sacred of all traditions lightly.
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I had a feeling this was going to end up here when I first saw it. Really, this is just ‘gender black pill’ stuff from a vaguely femcel-adjacent perspective, but not structurally different to the male equivalents (Tony Tulathimutte etc). I think it would be a mistake to read into it too deeply. You can always find good reasons not to trust people. It’s no real surprise that someone who resents men in this way would embrace the transactional nature of ‘sex work’; this may be an advertising strategy, but it is probably not insincere.
Can you elaborate on someone who resents men embracing sex work? I don’t know any sex workers and assume the vast majority of them are simply unfortunates, whoring because they don’t have other options.
Wanting attention and desiring to be seen but also feeling revulsion at the disgusting old men seems to be the go-to outward facing stance for any girl in Japan who's asked off the clock. Any cursory browsing of reddit will reveal people who hate their jobs and everyone at their jobs and all their customers, but they still want that paycheck.
There's a twisted logic to it. Or per @Sloot 's thesis, substitute imaginary for twisted.
That said, I am not sure there's more logic in imagining a call girl who just loves men to pieces.
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N=1, but the only prostitute I’ve ever known in person was a friend of a friend who whored herself out essentially because she watched too much porn and Internet goon-brained herself into a female coomer. No economic privation or tragic backstory needed.
As four decades of Doomsday Argument arguments show, there are legitimate difficulties on inferring the shape of a distribution from a single sample, but there you go.
She didn’t hate men though, so this does not support the whole of the thesis.
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This, I don't think is confusing at all. Shes advocating for feminism with only the benefits. It is a common occurrence. Its not outside the realm of fantasy. Imagine a world where men could just point at a woman and say "I want" and she has to have sex with him 7 days a week and bear him 15 children. That is the reality that many think used to exist. It never did, of course, which is why the counter to it is so deranged, but here we are.
One of the greatest mistakes many progressives such as feminists make is using what they want as a starting point instead of thinking what incentive structures they are creating. The thinking easily becomes I want x while completely ignoring what incentive structures they are creating.
The reasoning becomes "I want to wear whatever I want". There is not enough thought put into that women are competitive and that the end result is going to be thongs becoming standard swimwear for women and that the hyper sexualization caused by a race to the bottom of who can get the most attention will be harmful.
I think that this generalizes to many progressive causes. For example, minimum wages are great until you solve for equilibrium. Or take affirmative action: in a world of strict meritocracy, I would be indifferent between going to a Black or Non-Black physician. In a world where it is public knowledge that the standard for enrolling in medicine depends on your race, I suddenly have to update on the race of the doctor.
For a non-progressive example, consider Israel-Hamas hostage swaps. They create terrible incentives, but why should you care about the hundreds of citizens which might get killed in the future due to your actions when you can score a political victory by bringing home a soldier right now?
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Not to personally attack you for this line, but every time I see this type of reasoning or worldview hypothesized I always think to my work partner who wore clothes she was 60 pounds and 30 years over to wear. People free to wear whatever they want face social sanction for visual pollution as much as for social defection, and visual pollution is often worse because it has concrete quality of life (and often hygiene) disadvantages. If what trannies wanted to wear was just normal dresses or blouses no one would give a shit, but they insist on wearing garish crap like its a deliberate exercise in hostile signalling.
I also agree about the incentive structures, and it is telling that the incentive structures for progressives brute-force the outcomes to fit the mechanism they create rather than adjusting to realities feedback. Body positivity was shoved down all our throats for 6 years, and while men are irrelevant to the Victorias Secret Fashion Show, women are the net buyers of that stuff and shoving trannies and fatties hardly brought in new customers. Women ultimately have working eyes and brains as well and they can tell that the products being pushed aren't actually going to make them happier. Whether its a function of the socialization matrix forcing bad behaviors onto society (the famous internalized misogyny) is a different issue, but women can tell that trigglypuff wasn't something they themselves wanted to be associated with, much less men.
Honestly though it could be a better society if people were socially incentivized to develop the beach body or an approximation therein. Being unashamed of your bikini bod (man or woman) is great, better if it came as a result of hard work put into achieving some level of healthiness. 8% body fat dehydrated veinpops are bad, but not worse than lard monsters rolling through the sands.
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Bastiat is cursed to be forever relevant.
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Even more than in her previous essay, she doesn't seem to actually like any of her "friends." The men are all cads, the women all fools, and she feels like talking to her female friends about their lives is "emotional labor." Is she also suffering from "dark triad" behavior, and honest, emotionally stable people keep their distance?
I feel like "emotional labor" is among the most toxic memes to come out of feminism, in the actual near-Lovecraftian sense that it insinuates itself into your world model and begs you to cleave reality at that particular joint to your permanent detriment as a human being. I'm not even in the target group, but every time I get even a little frustrated dealing with someone else's mental state (like, say, listening to a friend complain about how they were avoiding their advisor even though they and I had gone through the "I'm having [unfounded anxiety] and rationally I just need to psyche myself up to send that email already" conversation path many times already) the idea floats up and wants me to start keeping score.
I've always found it weird that that concept came out of feminism when women are the more neurotic sex. It's like someone took a bad comedy skit from the 50s about the husband complaining his wife is a battleaxe and just flipped it around.
But yeah it's a terrible idea that saps the fellowship between all humans. Treating the duties of a friend or lover as a form of labor is yet more unwholesome commodification of basic decency. It's evil, there's little else to call it.
One could argue that, if anything, men perform more emotional labor than women, since putting up and dealing with women’s shit-tests and coffee moments is a price men pay for being in heterosexual relationships.
There could be epic_handshake.jpg potential here between boomers and zoomers—boomers with “does this dress make me look fat?” and zoomers with “would you still love me if I were a worm?”
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"Emotional Labor" is just a buzzword people with "Emotional Intelligence" use to abuse you. I'm increasingly certain that "Emotional Intelligence" is just a measure of how good you are at emotionally terrorizing, gaslighting and lying. It's a measure of your capacity for toxicity in relationships. And somehow the same type of person who complains at having to be their spouse's "therapist" will also launch into a 3 hour free roaming tirade leaping between islands of seething negativity triggered by their salad not having adequate cranberries on it. She isn't paying $25 for a salad with only, what, 12 cranberries on it? And another thing...
And after not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise, she walks away from the interaction confident in all the "emotional labor" she did for you.
The fact that we only control the capacity for destruction/abuse in men, but not in women, is closer to the root of the problem. Men are normally attracted to women with a high capacity for destruction: social popularity is a direct measure/expression of that capacity (and conversely, creates "nice girls finish last" problems if they can't secure a boyfriend powerful enough to resist hers when she sends him through that social pressure to take your resources).
Punishing women for doing that is harder, which is why it's normally (and traditionally) imposed by men-as-collective at a group level by default. Which makes things harder for the women who are responsible with that power, and something the ones who aren't interested in using it that way will (rightly) complain about being assumed guilty of wanting to abuse it by default.
The woke are once again more correct than the mainstream- gendered violence is a sex crime- it's just that most of the problems in society arise because the female gender isn't punished for its violence (and because feminists are all about encouraging its use...).
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In my Lived Experience from years of performing the Emotional Labor of mostly-consensually consuming content such as online discussions and mainstream media publications, my Emotional Intelligence has led me to conclude that replacing the adjective in female- and left-coded “adjective + noun” buzzphrases with “imaginary” usually causes the phrases to make more sense in the contexts in which they’re found. For example, mentally substituting in “imaginary” for the first word in the following phrases:
Maybe the term gets "abused", so to speak, but "emotional abuse" seems like a perfectly reasonable way to characterise a pattern in which e.g. one partner in a romantic relationship routinely insults the other, calls them names, accuses them of infidelity for no good reason, belittles them, lies to them etc.
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I strongly disagree. Emotional Intelligence is like any skill - it can be used for good, and evil. I would say my priest, who is able to look at me and bring me to tears with a few well meaning questions, has strong Emotional Intelligence (in addition to the Holy Spirit.)
Just because you mostly see negative examples, doesn't mean positive examples aren't out there.
I think "pathos" is a better and more neutral term for this concept.
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The concept was originally applied to job, if I remember correctly. Ex: the flight attendant whose father passed away yesterday but still serves snacks and drinks on the flight with a smile and pleasantries is performing emotional labor.
I don't mind it as an idea in that context, honestly, but the people applying it to personal relationships are insane.
I always found it strange for activists to complain about emotional labour (rather than simply describing it neutrally). I mean sure, most emotional-labour heavy jobs are predominantly female, but that's because those are the jobs women want. A woman doesn't become a nurse because she likes changing bedpans, she becomes a nurse because she likes caring for people. The emotional labour is the main appeal of the job.
Emotional labour for someone that appreciates it can definitely be one of the appeals of the job. Emotional labor for someone that's screaming obscenities at you is crap and probably the worst part of the job.
Activists complain about the latter and don't talk about the former because they're activists. If they thought "yeah, everything's okay actually" they wouldn't be activists. People tend to complain when their jobs are bad and not say anything when it's good anyways, so I'm not surprised you don't see much talk about good emotional labor.
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Uh, I’m pretty sure women go into nursing because it pays very well and is female gendered:
This study suggests its appeal lies in it being a caring profession. This one too. I don't know how things are in every country but in the UK, nursing doesn't really pay well. The average nursing wage is only slightly above the average wage for the country as a whole. Also, we see in other jobs that higher salaries attract more men than women, relative to the pleasantness of the job. High salaries should make nursing more male, not more female.
That's tautological, surely? I'm asking why is it female gendered.
Because of conditions on the ground in ~1950 when it was one of the few acceptable female jobs?
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At some point, no, it just reinforces itself.
If you want the historical root cause: Because women have always been predisposed towards care work on acount of remaining at home with the young, sick and elderly while men went out and abroad.
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The purpose of inventing the term "emotional labor" is to justify why nurses etc. deserve more wages or more status. It would be strange for them not to be complaining about it
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Is it ever strange for activists to complain about anything? That seems to be a fundamental part of the job description.
Less pithily and more specifically to your point, the types of activists you're talking about, i.e. feminists of a certain stripe, tend to buy into the idea of the patriarchy which has literal brainwashing powers that falsify preferences, and they tend to genuinely believe that but for the patriarchy, women would have exactly the same set of interests as men. As such, women being more into jobs like nursing because they like the "caring for people" aspect of the job is considered merely yet another way in which women are victimized by the patriarchy.
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Remember the name of this forum. That's the motte. The common meaning is the bailey.
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The people who treat romantic relationships as jobs are just generally insane.
Women who treat romantic relationships as jobs end up with richer husbands, and therefore a higher material standard of living, than comparably hot women who treat romantic relationships as a source of emotional validation. Taking advantage of this fact is frequently not insane - and was in fact "just common sense" for most of human history.
Or in other words, more proficient [sex] workers tend to end up with more lucrative exclusivity agreements.
Which is why it's understandable that a generation of people who just take being well-off/stable for granted will deny this dynamic exists.
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Women who treat them as jobs are otherwise known as gold diggers(barely more positive connotation than the word it rhymes with) or trophy wives(neutral connotation), and most of these women have a high but not above a normal upper class standard of living because rich husbands put their much younger wives on allowances and make them sign prenups and all that.
Women who treat them as investments are the ones who come out ahead, and this is the historical attitude you’re referencing.
Maybe “vocation” would be a suitable term here?
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Confucianism. You could ad-hoc define it as a religion along with communism, liberalism, etc., but then the statement is tautologically true.
Confucianism as not-a-religion is a pretty modern frame; while westerners have been confused about it for a while it does include substantial ritual/preternatural commitments as traditionally practiced. See 'Chinese rites controversy' for further information.
Also look up the "triple tradition." Confucianism, much like modern humanist atheism, succeeded because it was deeply embedded in the Buddhist and Taoist religious frameworks.
While the word 'religion' isn't indigenous to this context, there is definitely a Chinese sense that the Confucian school, so to speak, is the same sort of thing as Daoism or Buddhism. This is depicted allegorically, and indeed forms the 'three traditions', as you term them.
Speaking of language, the Chinese term for Confucianism is 儒教 (rújiào) - the former character means 'scholar', and the latter means 'teaching', 'school', or sometimes 'religion'. Confucianism is the teaching of the scholars. I bring this up because it's similar to the names of schools that are uncontestedly considered 'religions' in the West. Daoism is 道教 (dàojiào, 'teaching of the way'), Buddhism is 佛教 (fójiào, 'teaching of the Buddha'), Christianity is 基督教 (jīdūjiào, 'teaching of Jesus', this term tends to have a more Protestant connotation), Catholicism is 天主教 (tiānzhujiào, 'teaching of the lord of heaven'), Protestantism specifically is 新教 (xīnjiào, 'new teaching'), Islam is 伊斯蘭教 (yīsīlánjiào, 'teaching of Islam', they just transliterated the name directly; 回, huí, is also common for Chinese Muslims as an ethnicity), and so on.
The point is that linguistically these all seem to be treated like different species of the one family - they are all types of jiào. Not all ideologies or systems of belief are jiào. For instance, communism, liberalism, and fascism, in Chinese, are all called 主義 (zhuyì, which means 'position' or 'doctrine'). The word jiào suggests something roughly similar to our word 'religion'.
The historical context, as hydroacetylene alludes to, is that Matteo Ricci and some of the early Jesuits in China really didn't want Confucianism to be a religion, because they liked Confucianism. If Confucianism is not a religion then Chinese people don't have to give it up in order to become Christians, which is obviously very helpful if you want to convert a bunch of elite Confucians, as Ricci did. (This is also why the name for Catholicism is so bizarre - Ricci tried to equate God with ancient Chinese belief in Heaven or some kind of Lord of Heaven, in order to make the case to the Chinese that embracing Christianity would be consistent with the ways of their ancestors. Interestingly, some modern Chinese Christians try to make a similar move - people like Yuan Zhiming preach pseudohistorical theories whereby ancient Chinese were prophetically proto-Christian. For instance, Zhiming argues that the Chinese character for 'greed', 婪 (lán), depicts a woman standing beneath two trees, suggesting some ancient lost knowledge of the Eden narrative.)
If you ask me, I'm not totally without sympathy for Ricci's approach - a Chinese convert to Christianity is not obligated to abandon everything taught by Confucius, but only those things incompatible with the gospel. Everything else may be retained, and that may well end up being an awful lot. But "Confucianism is a different religion, therefore it must all be thrown out" and "Confucianism is not a religion, therefore it's all fine" are both lazy shortcuts. They're attempts to shortcut past real discernment of the content of a teaching with the cheap label 'religion'.
Even so, if we have to use the label for convenience, I'd say Confucianism is more like a religion than it is not.
I think I'd be more wary about calling Confucianism a religion or religion-like without bounding what is meant by religion and Confucianism respectively.
It is true that Confucius has a temple, and he was himself strict about the preservation of the rites of Zhou and other traditional religious institutions, and many aspects of Confucian thought has seeped into Chinese folk religion; the Classic of Changes literally originates from treatises on divination...
But when I read most works in the Confucian school I get a different sense -- that it is "religious" to the extent that all political systems and philosophies in classical antiquity are religious, and it is less overtly religious than many of its contemporaries!
On the other hand, many of the Socratic dialogues reference gods and the divine much more directly than the Confucian classics do, but I think we would still consider Euthyphro more of a philosophical work than a religious one, right?
Regardless the ancients would have drawn less stark a divide than we would regarding the secular and the religious, if they did so at all.
And Confucianism is also -- I think more commonly -- referred to as 儒家 rujia (家 jia, lit. family/home, in this case meaning "school of thought"). Other contemporary examples of this usage include 法家 fajia (the Legalists) and 墨家 mojia (the Mohists), part of the Hundred Schools of Thought which we identify nowadays as primarily political or philosophical schools rather than religious ones, even if these philosophical schools were bound at the time to various superstitions and religions as well.
This is not to obfuscate the mystical parts of Confucianism, of course. The Classics referencing rites implies a certain belief in the validity of those rites, and we have further developments (e.g. 理學 lixue, often translated as neo-Confucianism) that have a more explicit focus on the metaphysical. But I would still put it as that Confucian thought is a largely humanistic school of moral philosophy that was nevertheless grounded in a superstitious and religious society, and thus utilises the assumptions and language of that society.
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Thanks for the more detailed explanation. Yeah I remember reading some about this in my World Religions class way back in the day. Also, the book Christ the Eternal Dao goes into some of this proto-Christian theory which I find quite interesting.
@AlexanderTurok great writeup here!
Also side note, I appreciate your refreshingly different viewpoints on here. Don't let the haters get you down.
(This is a long tangent, please forgive me.)
There are different versions of that theory, some of which are obviously nonsense. You can find more of Yuan Zhiming's version here. (His whole book is here if you can read Chinese.) Much of it is nonsense and some of it is just obviously falsehood. For instance, dào does not actually mean the same thing as Greek logos. It's true that logos in John 1:1 is translated as dào in some translations, but this is a somewhat free translation. In their more natural senses, dào means 'path' and logos means 'word'. Translating "in the beginning the dào was with God and the dào was God" is not being terribly literal with the words, but is an attempt to convey some of the same meaning in a different cultural context.
However, there are some attempts to inculturate Christianity in Asian cultures by looking for pre-Christian or proto-Christian resonances that I'm much more sympathetic to. Arguably the same thing happened in Europe - they found points of connection or resonance with pre-Christian philosophy, in order to reconcile Christianity with existing cultural and intellectual heritages. Plato or Aristotle or Homer didn't get thrown out entirely, and where there were commonalities, as with Greek conceptions of virtue, or philosophers verging on quasi-monotheistic ideas, they emphasised those.
One example I'm a little fond of is from Inazo Nitobe's infamous Bushido: The Soul of Japan. While this book is often disliked for being the source of a lot of romanticised, historically inaccurate information about samurai, I think it's fascinating because Nitobe himself was a convert to Christianity who was educated in the West, and indeed the book shows an erudite understanding of the Western canon. What Nitobe wanted to do was find some way to reconcile his Christian faith with a strong affirmation of Japanese tradition and nationhood. He does this by asserting, if not quite a proto-Christianity, at least ways in which God made himself known to the ancient Japanese, which would prepare them for the fullness of revelation later. Thus he writes:
To Nitobe's credit, he does not present some nonsensical theory of historical origins - rather, he thinks that God has, in each culture prepared the ground in certain ways, and that the gospel must be planted in that native soil.
We may not want to go the full way with him, and we may not want to automatically or thoughtlessly proclaim every culture a repository of divine revelation, but in broad strokes, I have a lot of sympathy for this approach. Start by looking for whatever elements of grace or truth are found in the pre-Christian culture, because God is very unlikely to have left that culture with nothing - and then look to the gospel to redeem and perfect the rest, rather than obliterate it.
(I'm fond of of "logic-choppers with half a soul" as a criticism of utilitarians. Ha! Forgive my pettiness.)
And "Stimme" means voice, and "Pravda" means truth, and "Rta" mean order, and yet their derived terms overlap strongly with its and each other. In this case the concepts, if not the words, seem to be by shared descent, but I wouldnt be surprised if the chinese have something like it as well.
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I like this! I'm definitely a big fan of the idea that there is a separate "old" testament sent to all nations, that Christ fulfills. IMO it's a huge shame that the Western Church hasn't embraced that more.
Without getting too biographical, I work in a Christian field with a heavily Chinese population, and I find there's something very clarifying in the way people born and raised in non-Christian cultures receive the gospel. It forces you to think a lot about culture, nationality, Christianity, and the interactions between them all. Nowhere does the gospel obliterate or destroy the base culture - instead, I prefer to think of it in similar terms to C. S. Lewis, where the gospel refines and enhances whatever praiseworthy, God-given elements exist in the base.
In Mere Christianity he uses metaphors of light and salt for the way that the gospel enhances individual personalities:
And then in That Hideous Strength he applies something like this to nations. He has the idea that every nation or culture has what he calls a 'haunting', the hint of its redeemed self, and these hauntings are naturally all different. The only one he names is Britain's, which he calls 'Logres', but he goes on:
Now we might quibble the specific details, or go back and forth about what the real essence of Britain or France or China is, but I wouldn't want to get bogged down on that. Probably Lewis and his characters are struggling to express something very rich and complicated. But I have found this idea helpful in the past.
And in that light I interpret people like Inazo Nitobe, or Yuan Zhiming, however clumsily or even incompetently, as trying to articulate the divine haunting of Japan or of China, and in that way find not only themselves, but also their entire peoples in God's plan of salvation.
(And it should probably be noted that the latter quit his ministry and asked forgiveness after a rape accusation, so I'm including moral as well as intellectual incompetence.)
In Revelation 21:24-26, we are told, of the New Jerusalem, that "the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it", and that "people will bring into it the glory and honour of the nations". I'd like to believe that every nation has its own particular glory, its own particular honour, and that as part of the world's salvation, all of these will be brought to the altar before God.
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Didn't we have a previous article from this lady? A couple of points-
Serious mohammedanism seems worse for women than serious Christianity at any equivalent point along the fundy vs liberalism spectrum. Of course I would say that, but I suggest this woman talk to some ladies living in conservative Christianity.
It comes as no surprise to me that women are not by and large fans of low commitment sexual activities, nor that many women value the attention they get more than anything.
This is not a new problem. The age old refrain of the cad is 'I swear I'll marry you, I just can't wait'. This is just the modern iteration. Of course, when you reject men having the authority to protect women from this, you also reject them having the responsibility to do so.
There is, in fact, a middle ground between 'women are virgins until their wedding night' and 'sex then have a date if the man liked it'. I reject it entirely but it clearly exists. I don't consider any point on this continuum a stable equilibrium but lots of people wind up there.
As to what this woman's solution is, might I suggest that an onlyfans star writing about this on her substack might have motives other than sincerely seeking a solution to a problem?
Regarding 1: i think a missing bit of historical context of both Progressivism and Rationalism's origins as rejection of/reaction against traditional western moral philosophy which due to 2,000+ years of history is inextricably entwined with Christianity. The affinity for Islam and and Orietalism amongst the chattering class is a combination of the natural human attraction to novelty and a naive assumption that the enemy of my enemy must be a friend.
OnlyFans stars for Mohammed (PBH) is just a redressed Queers for Palestine.
I don’t disagree- but note that she isn’t particularly mohammedan, herself. In fact she rejects her ‘conservative, patriarchal upbringing’. I don’t know if she makes the salat or whatever, I think she’s having trouble keeping different religions straight in her head. This appeals to a part of her audience, obviously, but treating Islam and Christianity as interchangeable is not, here, due to her affinity for Islam.
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So that's now two onlyfans performers who determined that a substack is a good way to advertise to some potential clients. Aella and this one.
I find your ad hominem disgusting. While I do not have a paid subscription for either Aella's substack or OF, I read her free substack articles sometimes, and find them interesting in a way which does not make me want to subscribe to her OF.
If you really think Aella wrote Chattel Childhood because she thought "oh, my onlyfans subscriptions are stagnating, so I will just talk about child torture" then you are out of your fucking mind.
You can pretty much dismiss anything if you can gesture vaguely at a potential conflict of interest. When Scott wrote SSC, he was very much part of the medical establishment, so we can safely disregard all his articles on mental health medication. When NATO suggested that Putin might invade Ukraine, they were clearly in a partisan position, no need to pay attention to them. Whenever Anthropic produces AI alignment research, we should ignore this, because they are also building AI systems. When Ford claims that an engine has a certain displacement volume, they should not be trusted, because they just want to sell you the car.
The farhakhalidi article is not OF bait. If you want to attract men to your OnlyFans, the obvious thing would be to do is to put a hot but SFW picture of yourself into substack and mention that you are on OF. She does none of that.
Or you could say it is all part of a 5d-chess move: dissuade women from dating, so more men will end up not getting laid and going to OF, where they might subscribe to the author. This might make sense if you had a world with 10k people in it. She persuades five women to drop out of dating, which increases the number of sexually frustrated men by two, who will randomly subscribe to one of the two OF accounts which exist in the world, so she gets a new subscription, profit. It does not work in a world where there are millions of OF accounts, and a ton of alternative sources of porn besides. She is literally increase her OF subscriptions more by posting a picture of her elbow there than by trying to dissuade people from hookups.
Ad hominem? You severely misread my comment and are angrily arguing against claims I never made and don't hold.
Okay, you did not say that one can thus safely disregard opinions publicized for ulterior motives. I am sorry for for misrepresenting your views.
You did claim though that Aella decided to blog on substack with the motive to promote her OF.
I am arguing that saying "Aella performs on OF, therefore every decision she makes is with her subscriber number in mind" is overly reductionist. You might as well say "@quiet_NaN is a man (true), so he wants to get laid (probably also true). Him writing this post is obviously an attempt to gain status on The Motte to boost his attractiveness (false as far as I can tell)."
If getting people to subscribe to her on OF (rather than substack) was her motive, then she is not doing a very good job of streamlining the process. In her non-paywalled substack, she does not even mention that she is on OF, per a quick web search. But you can figure it out easily enough:
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I think you're projecting Bulverism onto your interlocutor where none was implied. "Aella writes Substack articles (in part) to promote her OnlyFans page" and "Aella's Substack articles contain no valuable insights" are not synonymous.
Her Substack profile picture is literally her lying on a bed, wearing a négligée, with her cleavage on full display.
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Has there been an exhaustive deep dive on this board on why the fuck Aella has so much traction in 'rationalist' spaces? Its like nerd porn except it reduces actual sexual activity to shit even Sheldon Cooper would find autistic. That there exists a client base of horny nerds who can afford any dubai portapotty slattern but instead choose to go for a mid tier data analyst who feeds her cock counter into excel spreadsheets and orgasms to the graphs instead of the act.
(adds to motteword list)
The claim as I understand it:
You have social media models, women who are making a living squarely in the "model" category of posting pictures of themselves in skimpy clothes or bikinis or whatever, but are not selling nudes or selling actual sex, don't have an Onlyfans, aren't advertising availability as a sugar-baby, etc. Super-rich guys from Dubai (or presumably elsewhere, but Dubai is the usual claim) DM them soliciting straightforward prostitution, offering to fly them to the guy's location in a private jet, pay them an absurd sum for a considerable amount of degeneracy, maybe let them have a mini-vacation afterward, and then fly them home, and the women find this offer acceptable. To the super-rich Dubai guys, this is essentially ordering takeout as the money involved is insignificant. For the women, the money is very significant, and it turns out that they do indeed have a price. It is claimed that this happens often enough that it is A Thing, an element of the social media ecosystem of which common knowledge more or less exists. It's sort of the difference between people looking for work and people willing to be headhunted.
The quoted phrase is the above, framed maximally-uncharitably.
This is not at all unbelievable to me, though it mounts, frames, and hangs the idea that the modern era is as corrupt and depraved as any that has come before it, just in different ways. I wonder how common it is.
Anecdotally I know at least one extremely (to me at least) physically attractive girl (a dancer) who has had similar offers (though not from Arabs, or not to my knowledge) but has refused them (so far.) Once her currency as a burlesque "star" begins to go down as her age goes up, I wonder how it will all play out. She's a lovely person, actually, in her way. At one point in my life I would have been quite taken with her. I suspect large swaths of girls in Japan at least would be reluctant to be flown to wherever simply because of the language barrier. Very wealthy men in Japan aren't as desperate for sex as someone in a more sexually repressed culture such as those in the mid-East, but I suppose they could be training their kept-women up to Tokyo.
Tangentially related, but have you or anyone else heard the term "misyar marriage"? I hit the trending button and possibly because I am in Asia I was bombarded by a lot of tweets in Arabic. Because why not I had them translated by my phone, and they were mostly masked women advertising themselves for these arrangements.
Yeah, with it supposedly being a smokescreen for prostitution.
Interesting. It certainly seemed to be something like this, but it was in Arabic and right there on Twitter so I assumed it had to be less tawdry somehow.
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Is she Japanese?
As far as I know, yes. Certainly culturally.
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Some types of people are so used to deriving their self worth from their (real or imagined) intellect that they can no longer admit to being influenced by their base human drives. They are Prometheus unbound! ‘Twas their mind that was seduced, not their PP! Aellla provides just enough of a fig leaf to allow her fans to maintain this ruse. It’s a bit hilarious and sad to anyone outside of the bit, its obviously no more intellectual or advanced than a Midwestern boomer AWWOOOOOOOGAA-ing over the local Hooters waitress.
"Sapiosexual" must be the single most self-aggrandising adjective in the English language.
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True cultured men know the mark of being an intellectual gentleman is to only be attracted to obvious signs of intelligence like girls wearing glasses. Everything else is just window dressing.
I see some of the above replies and while I do acknowledge that there is an attraction to data presented beautifully for its own sake, Aellas entire dataset is just her own experiences. Its a personal journal arranged in the style of a corporate presentation. My personal objection to Aella isn't some slut shaming crusade, rather its the extremely obvious nerd parasitism that she feeds upon which clearly can't exist outside of some specific spaces like rationalist forums and hence my opening about the paraphilias common in rat spaces.
Her largest survey had over half a million respondents.
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Counterpoint: being attracted to women for stereotypically-masculine traits is childish and gay.
[Note that by "childish and gay", that's "this is how attraction works when your age is only measured in single digits" and "not confident/socially capable enough to trust you can dominate a more feminine woman", respectively. It's also preferring more "universal" traits than specifically masculine ones, if you prefer that framing.]
I won't deny the 'gay' bit (though I like my men with a bit more meat on them), but as much fun as homersoc_ style 'tomboy breaking' can be, a sizable part of the interest for me at least is finding someone who's interested in domming me. I can dom and trust myself to do so; it's just not really my favorite. That's not universally connected to masculine traits -- lipstick doms do exist -- but I'll point to scottieman's Anthology of Rat Bullying as an example of what would otherwise be 'normally' traditionally feminine top (uh, barring the last image, cw: m/f and one m/m/f) framework that becomes tomboyish as much by having the character act as a dom as by any overlapping or shared interest with the subs.
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But then how do you explain tomboys, who are obviously the patrician choice for any straight man?
By noting that "childish" isn't "immature" and "gay" isn't "faggotry".
As the post demonstrates, things are just simpler when you're inherently on the same page, but it's also [weirdly] a conservative thing; either of you could have had a more conventionally attractive relationship, but instead you chose this.
It's why the childhood friend never wins in coming-of-age stories.
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Pun intended?
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Have you considered that ‘there’s a woman just like me, but a girl’ is a very common male fantasy? See tomboys as well.
It's not even clear to me how that fantasy is supposed to work. If I'm a pro football player, who is the female equivalent? If I'm a programmer, who is the female equivalent? If I'm scrawny, who is the female equivalent?
I didn’t say it was realistic.
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A female football player (perhaps not literally in a pro league), a female programmer, and a female scrawny person, of course. I don't see the problem.
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Why can't you accept that people might find the excel spreadsheet posting interesting even if they are uninterested in her Onlyfans presence/career choices? The wider community has plenty of $.02-a-word substackers who maintain an audience peddling more boring theories backed by less data on more boring and commonplace topics, and those don't seem to inspire this sort of permanent rent-free mental residency that compels people to start raging about her in a thread about someone else whose only commonalities are blogging and being on Onlyfans. This is as if dozens of people complained about Jake from Putanumonit under every discussing of an article about dating by someone in fintech.
Aella is an outrage baiter extraordinaire, yes.
Is there really that much overlap between Substack and Onlyfans? The two nickels connections shouldn't be that surprising.
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Nerds/Geeks used to have the term 'Queen Bee' to describe a woman whom would intrude on a social setting typically outside her venue with the intent of socially dominating it because it was safe for her to do so(no social competition, so men could exclusively focus on her).
As the gate has been lowered, and the activists intruded, said term was actively shamed and harassed - 'Girls can be gamers to!' they cried, refusing to engage with the idea that woman could be socially manipulative in such a manner.
So it's not exactly something unique to the Rationalist social sphere. Aella just has an advantage in that she's honestly, well, nuerodivergent? on top of being hypersexual due to her childhood abuse. But I think the social dynamics are similar.
That seems like the wrong metaphor, given that a Queen Bee will primarily be attended to by a full hive of female worker bees (that the males don't even get to stay in).
Seems like a perfect metaphor to me.
In what way is a beehive "male-created"?
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There's not that much need for an exhaustive deep dive, as it is a question you asked and answered in the same post.
To put it in other words, the nerd is titillated, but is also still unconsciously ashamed of his titillation, so appreciates the fact that there is a smokescreen justifying his titillation.
"She's not like other girls" means "I'm not like other guys"
Any man who must say "I am the king" is no true king.
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I mean, of course she's wrong about this point. An unregulated sexual marketplace (assuming all individuals are as free as possible from physical and economic coercion) privileges women over men for much the same reason that an unregulated free market privileges large corporations over workers. I assume that most of the commentariat here is already familiar with this analysis.
But the thing is that you can know she's wrong without even doing a full analysis of why she's wrong, because you can see that she fundamentally doesn't understand why people around her act the way that they do. She admits that she's confused by the actions of both men and women around her and she doesn't have a comprehensive theory to explain their behavior, so she resorts to mystifying explanations that are grounded in morality and "mental illness" (a synonym for throwing your hands up and saying "idk"), instead of seeing the people around her as rational actors who are doing the best they can within the constraints laid out for them by biology and decision theory.
Also I have to comment on this:
because it's just so wild that she would use this phrase without even a hint of irony or reflection. Thanks to "J. Allen" for mentioning it in the comments under her post. ("Men don't worry about whether we're centering women--most of us are in some form or fashion." -- lol, exactly). She talks about the "male centered woman" like it's a unique affliction that only burdens women, but her friend from New York whose entire social life revolves around setting up and going on dates with women isn't a "female centered man" because...?
If this were a free market, people would be able to sign marriage agreements that don't lie within the specific boundaries set by the State, and in particular have vastly different conditions for divorce.
Moreover, one wouldn't be forced at gunpoint to subsidize singles.
But this is not a free market.
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Familiar sure. And also understanding it is false.
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I’m not sure the author wants anything at all. I remember her from a while back, and get the same feeling of simple hatred from what she writes. She hates men for being wicked, she hates women for being stupid, and yet she’s still friends with them? Even though her darling mother is right, she frames it in a stupid religious way, and thus is not really worth closeness.
I don’t find a single piece of her writing that betrays an actual appreciation of a single other human being. Hell, she doesn’t even seem to like anything in the abstract. She’s happy enough to look data up, but only insofar as it justifies hate. And then there’s the OnlyFans deal on top of it. I suspect that the reason she’s still a virgin is less that there is something she is reserving it for, or out of a sense of chastity or self-denial, but instead that it’s a helpful way of hurting others by refusing herself to them. This, I’m guessing, is why she also is friends with the kind of men she explicitly hates. She has to understand they’re a very particular subculture, right? She could find men who aren’t like that. So why is she staying around lecherous men who only see value in having sex with women and then denying them - if not so that she can take her satisfaction by denying them first? In that light, this piece seems more a justification for why she enjoys staying friends with women who destroy themselves. It’s for a good cause, so it can’t be because she hates them. Right?
Enough amateur psychoanalysis. It suffices to say that I dislike this woman quite a lot. She’s not totally wrong on the specifics, but this bitter poison is better not tasted.
For the actual question: how does a woman avoid this? I think it’s much simpler than you let on. The men who get away with this nonsense only do because they get a truly disproportionate amount of female attention. A man who gets even modestly less attention will struggle to achieve the same feats. So: go for less popular men, more trustworthy men, or both. Less popular is sufficient to avoid this kind of behavior. More trustworthy gets what a woman actually wants.
One word that has more or less dropped out of common parlance is seducer. It means, roughly, a man who lures women in on false pretenses. What are those pretenses? In the olden days, it was marriage. Dickens’ Pickwick Papers has, as one of its droll episodes, the somewhat aged and unattractive landlady of the titular and rotund Pickwick misunderstanding a totally unrelated announcement of his to be a discussion of marriage. So far, so irrelevant: what matters is that the next chapter (issue) is her bringing him to court over the affair, on the grounds that he was leading her on, and as he did not intend to marry her, she was owed damages.
While the fictional event was intentionally absurd, we could not even write such a scenario today. There is no law that a woman can enforce on the basis that her seducer had promised marriage. The idea is nonsensical: sex is just sex, right? Love is free, so why tie it to marriage? And yet women still want commitment. But “boyfriend” is not something that can be legally enforced, and so a disappointed woman has no recourse.
It’s easy to forget, however, that the explicit law was far from the only protection against seducers. The first line of defense was the woman’s friends and family. There’s a rather enlightening scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace - spoilers, by the way - where the delightful, young, and severely naive Natasha is seduced by a ne’er-do-well from another noble family. He plans on eloping out of country with her, which will bring him entirely out of the grasp of the law. Natasha’s bosom friend finds out, informs the powerful matron who has lately been exercising godmother-like authority over them, and the whole thing falls apart. The would-be seducer goes to the site of their destined meeting and finds the huge manservant of the house cornering him, deeply rumbling “My mistress would like to speak with you,” manages to slip away and elopes rather more individually than initially planned. I believe “hell for leather” is how we describe that sort of ride. Nowhere in this equation is Natasha having sex, finding out he only wanted sex, and trying to get recompense after the fact. In reality, her friends and family were deeply involved with her and protected her from her worst mistakes. True, the law which made them matriarchal guardians of her made coercion possible, but the mechanism was preventative.
So if women want to stop being disappointed, they need people to help protect them from seducers: people who can sniff them out, stop a dalliance going too far without commitment, and stand up for and to them. And I suspect where this starts is, in fact, recognizing that women have a reasonable demand in commitment and that the man who leads her on and gets what he wants while giving nothing in return is a waste of time. I suppose the Facebook “are we dating the same guy” groups are an awkward attempt at this, but frankly they’re sunk because it’s all women of the roughly same age, and the dynamics devolve to the usual gossipy mess of women’s worst elements unrestrained. What you actually need is a connection to older, married women and good men. They aren’t competing for men’s attention and can give some real advice. And probably, the women who wind up happy will be the ones who manage this in one way or another.
Anyway, things like this make me glad I ain’t a dame. Seems hard!
For years I was under the impression that the term "fuckboy" was the spear counterpart to "slut": a highly promiscuous man. Last year I was talking with a female friend of mine who was single at the time, and who'd recently had some sub-optimal experiences on dating apps which she was feeling bitter about. (Thankfully she's now in a serious relationship with a wonderful man who I like very much.) She linked this article to me, which explained that a "fuckboy" isn't just a slutty man, but rather a man who leads a woman to believe that he's interested in pursuing a serious committed relationship with her and essentially treats her as his girlfriend for the duration of their casual dating stage, only to abruptly drop her without warning as soon as he gets bored.
All, I could think was - man, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Some components of gender politics really are evergreen.
I've seen it used to refer to both a hot Chad whose romantic interest in women extends no further than the tip of his dick and to a pretty boy that a woman keeps hooked on simping for her by using him for her sexual gratification (the female equivalent of a slampig - I haven't watched it but I think the toyboy fantasy film Babygirl with Nicole Kidman probably depicts something like this model), and also to any unappealing men who are more motivated to pursue sex than sitting at home watching porn and complaining online about Stacies.
Is he a boy and is fucking any significant part of the motivation for his actions? He's a fuckboy.
Reading that article though it reads like an attempt to build a stick for hitting men... but I don't see many men who would be particularly offended by the label. Low stakes defensive maybe, but not sincerely offended. What I can see being offensive is calling another woman's boyfriend a fuckboy. In that sense perhaps the fuckboy label is a tool for women to reassert the sort of social policing they're so adept at and that some here in this forum say could alleviate the ills of current day dating culture. Can you imagine if someone told a woman that the new guy she's excited to be dating is a fuckboy? It's a hit at her value - she's giving him her value and not getting compensated (she does it free!). Call a man a fuckboy and internally he'll probably shrug and think DM;HS. It's labelling him as someone who got what he wanted. Beats being an incel or a simp. Tell a woman her bf is a fuckboy and in short order he'll be put on notice that it's time to man up or he won't be getting what he wants any more. You don't need to tell her directly, posting it to the audience of young women reading a fashion blog will probably suffice to start the thought process.
Sure, but then fuckboys are everywhere. Given a broad enough understanding of "significant part of the motivation", most men are.
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I would resent being called a fuckboy (under the definition we're discussing here), as I don't like the implication that the only way I can get women into bed is by lying to them or deceiving them.
The fb-word is a slur and offensive to the community of men experiencing relationship expectation mismatches with women, demeaning the challenges they face in their lived experiences and further entrenching casual misandry. *crosses arms and turns away*
There’s a motte-and-bailey. If asked to define fuckboy, I suspect chicks would say something along the lines of what you described: A guy who obtained or obtains sex by lies and/or deception. However, in practice they extend it to any guy who merely banged them without unilaterally preregistering a guarantee of commitment and no commitment ensuing thereafter (shocked pikachu).
Thus resulting in ex-post hoe maddening. principal_skinner.jpg: “Is it possible I have some accountability in the matter? No, it’s the men who are evil.”
Fair enough. If I'm accused of seducing women via lies and deception, it's a charge I'd strongly rebut. If I'm accused of having had sex with women I had no interest in pursuing a serious romantic relationship with - guilty as charged.
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The irony is that this age of sexual liberation has convinced many women that risky sex is more about getting involved with a needy long term stalker than having a no strings fling with a hot himbo. To be entirely fair I think thats actually a good risk reward proposition, but it also overstates the utility of a romp with a himbo. The emotional satisfaction of notching a himbo is downplayed by the fact he has a billion conquests for his name, and for all the professed sexual skills of whatever seducer exists I don't think anyone has ever matched Hitachi for total female satisfaction, let alone effort efficacy.
I do also think that men need to be more honest with their male friends about their deficiencies that stop them from successfully pairing, but honesty only goes so far. My own male peers are all hitched up, and the ones who aren't are genuinely addled in some form that makes introducing females to them a dead proposition for both parties even if successful. Shit, I just explained why girls introduce their single gals to the himbos instead of the Nice Guy. They can sniff out neediness and incompetence as well.
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There are laws still on the books in a few(mainly deep southern)states. But more to the point, statutory laws seem to get used as an implied threat behind this sometimes.
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Big problem with this analysis and those like it: these men don't seem to be promising anything, like at all, and these women are still laying with them.
A large part of modern seduction theory involves redirecting any conversations about commitment during the early stages. This is so no promises need to be made while dangling an implied possibility of a relationship at least until after sex. No lying except perhaps by omission.
Not all men put the above into practice however. Some genuinely aren't sure if they want a relationship with the woman until things progress.
That's not even getting to the women that are very willing to (or even prefer to) have sex without commitment.
I think this is a decent amount of it. There's plenty of people who are just cruising for casual sex, but on the other hand if you're expecting to fuck by the 3rd date and within about 10 hours of meeting there's gonna be a ton of situations where the match was good enough to get that far but isn't going to work longterm.
Still the broad tragedy of the matter is that the average man could likely solve the online dating woes of the average woman within about 30 minutes if placed into their body by simply adjusting their expectations and being more willing to fight through the Ick. The average woman if placed in to the body of the average unsuccessful male will have to, at bare minimum, go on the normal journey of self improvement in most cases. I had to do it myself a couple years ago, and have the vivid lived experience of going from a 4 as a guy to a 7.5 over the course of a year or two and it's insane how night and day the two experiences are.
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That's a pretty naive take. What is "it feels like we're falling in love" followed by "I did say that. But that’s also how all my good first dates feel. Like we could fall in love!" if not clear and obvious duplicity? That's straight from the top-level link. Haven't you heard of lying with implications before? You don't have to spout literal falsehoods to deceive someone as to your intentions. And intentions are what romance is about.
I mean, sure, you could overindex in on the worst example on offer. But the average between the men she's describing seems to offer little more than a shrug when it comes to commitment.
I'm assured that this is enough to completely befuddle the average woman, as though she were being promised lifelong marriage. I'm not sure what to make of this.
Oh, the women are idiots, rest assured. They've presumably been raised on low-quality romance literature and misinterpret the least effort towards a pleasant date from an attractive man to be a sign of deep and abiding love. So when some socially adept and quite rapacious men figure out that there's an ample supply of idiots out there who just need a meager offering of romance-lit aesthetics and who can't initiate or sustain a real romance from their own abilities, said idiots have no idea of how to approach romance from... well, not exactly an adversarial stance, but at least an active one, where you accept the base fact that life between man and woman (possibly man and man or woman and woman, not much personal insight there) is always a negotiation and you need to stake out your own ground to get what you want. And a relationship without disagreements or fights is either a temporary anomaly or an active con. But I won't say the men are acting in any way reasonable or just in this case. I can get a young idiot screwing up and breaking the heart of a woman, but doing it repeatedly shows that he doesn't care about them at all.
I don't think these are representatives of the average woman, either. At least, I really hope not. Although the simple fact that I haven't run into women like this is not any evidence of anything in particular.
This is a really long sentence — can you clarify who doesn’t know how to approach a relationship from an adversarial stance?
Apologies, friend - I switched out the pronoun for a noun. Does that read better?
Thanks for the reminder to not let these posts get too stream-of-consciousness.
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Sure, at the ELO we're listening in on, it's trash treating trash like trash and vice versa. I fail to see why I should be feeling bad for the women specifically. In fact, I see no reason to believe that the women who stick around to replay this arrangement aren't themselves fucking around. We know the men in this league aren't being completely forthcoming, why believe the women?
In all of this, is there any standard of duty, even to herself, that a woman could fail? Or is she always the one failed? Is there any point it makes sense to ridicule her for being book-porn-brained, or outright write her off as a player in the game herself? Only when she starts an OnlyFans and not a moment sooner?
Of course - it's the duty to understand these dynamics and rise above them. Pretty similar to the duty on incels in that regard. Nobody can ever really help you but yourself. And in both cases, the fact remains that the typical support structures that defend adolescents as they try to work this out have been undermined.
There's one particularly salient fact for women, though, which is that they suffer increasingly severe setbacks as they fail to work this particular issue out. Your average man who can't work out appropriate sexual practice has a long runway. There's no real consequence, long-term, of virginity qua virginity. I was a late bloomer myself. It wasn't really a problem - I wound up coming into my own in my mid-twenties with no harm done. Women, on the other hand, are running down the clock of their fertility and the visceral attraction of youth, alongside the concrete health risks of sex and the severe consequence of an unintended pregnancy. A woman in her mid-twenties who only just starts to figure romance out is on a very tight clock, and has to get up to speed on the actual elements of romance, find a good partner, marry said partner, and then start having kids. This has to be a very matter-of-fact business for her to be able to start before 30. Any further errors, like getting stuck with a sweet but unambitious boyfriend and not knowing when/how to pull the plug, will potentially set her further years back. And if she's stuck with a kid, good luck; if she's had an abortion, then it may be easier to date, but it's a concretely bad thing that will stick with her.
And women get cast into this sphere much more aggressively than men, just by virtue of biology. A woman is sexually grown, to a great extent, somewhere in the realm of 18-22. At that point she receives full sexual attention and has to "debut," as it were, whether she's willing or not. Men aren't grown in the same way for several years past that point, when they start to get their careers in order. But wisdom comes at a year-over-year rate regardless of physical growth, and so women are thrown out into the open with some four or five less years of material experience compared to their developmental male peers. Compare how pretty much every woman has some sort of story of going through puberty in her early teens and immediately starting to receive open sexual attention from men, which they are nowhere near ready to handle at that phase. It's the same sort of problem, just at a different stage of life.
So I think it makes sense to say that, given the plain and simple disadvantage women have here, that society can stand to adjust itself a little to buffer women against the worst harms here. I recognize the typical term for this is patriarchy, or possibly paternalism, but it seems to me quite fair to say that people ought to go out of their way to stop men from obviously preying on women in the vulnerable range. The women from the story above are NOT in that vulnerable range - hence losers - but many women are, and do not benefit from getting tossed into the shark tank. For what it's worth, I'd say that men need a parallel kind of deference in childhood, mostly focused on their much delayed organizational skills. A boy who struggles with the rote elements of schoolwork is not necessarily delayed or misbehaving, and comparing him to a girl his age on those merits is quite cruel - and probably why college is getting so lopsided these days (which, in turn, feeds back into the ladies' problem from the start). Or for romance, boys tend to need a lot more mentoring and structure - the few outliers who "get it" tend to really overperform, or you get older men who swoop down to eat the boys' lunch, which is both problems rolled into one.
Maybe my view of the world is more strongly sexed than yours. But I hope I've laid it out fairly clearly, and shown that it isn't all a one-sided affair. On the individual scale, everyone always has nobody but themselves to blame. But on the larger scale, it makes sense to talk about the larger pressures, because those are what determine where the line between success and failure falls.
Have you just considered scaring the ever-loving shit out of them, coupled with describing organization and neatness as a moral virtue - and the opposite as a MORAL failing? I am reasonably sure that a sufficiently extreme level of shame, fear, and valorization of neatness and organization could make most boys well-organized. If we see a teenage boy's messy room as an indicator of moral failure and potential evil, rather than a common peccadillo? Teenage boys will have cleaner rooms.
I mean - I successfully applied Cold War-era deterrence theory at 11 to a family argument that I was highly motivated to win and perceived as an existential danger; Westerners in the middle class are generally uncomfortable with threatening this level of consequence to preteens except in extremis.
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It's clearly possible to dangle a relationship in front of a girl who likes you without referring to the possibility directly, men do it on accident all the time.
I was responding to what this poster said, what was discussed in the article, and what you yourself said above:
Is there something between the lines here that I'm missing? Do you consider a man promising nothing and promising marriage to be basically the same thing? Where does women's personhood enter in to this equation?
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Women laying with popular men is the feminine form of the 'nice guy' who orbits, hoping to transform a sexual relationship into an emotional one. Some of them do understand, eventually, that the sexual appeal is the stronger card they have to play (which is why they suddenly become frigid after a girlhood of being a slag) but a lifetime of using their strongest card has inflated their sense of self worth, and neglecting the other aspects of their personal lives hits home all at once.
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There is a middle ground here that's implicitly excluded. But as usual people are arguing about endpoints rather than about the frontier.
By all means, lay out this excluded middle ground. What's the answer to the problem? What's the difference between an endpoint and a frontier?
I'm not sure what constitutes "an answer" here -- there isn't some magical answer that ends the human drama over sex. And if there was one, it might not even be a good thing.
But the middle is a rather anodyne thing: acknowledge that excessive sex-positively drives behavior that makes neither men nor women satisfied, while at the same time acknowledging that total abstinence outside of marriage is neither desirable nor achievable.
I'll agree that total abstinence outside of marriage isn't achievable at the population level; humans will inevitably human. In what way is it not desirable or achievable at the individual level? If a guy and a girl abstain from sex outside of marriage, get married, and so cease to abstain from sex inside marriage, what has this cost them?
I was talking at the population level and the social pressure/opprobrium level (so I think we agree?).
For individuals that make that decision, that's on them. But I don't see it becoming a social or culture norm.
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Women could be pleasant.
If all you have to offer is what's between your legs, and men flee as soon as they get it, I mean, sure one option to create a pussy cartel. The other is women would just be pleasant. Be nice, be warm, be loving, create a positive atmosphere. And maybe change your preferences in men too.
But that codes too "Stepford Wives", and women have rejected it for the political prospect of being a boss bitch and unchecked neuroticism.
Have you actually encountered these women who approach relationships by being boss bitches with unchecked neuroticism yourself, or are you reciting a culture war catechism or something you have seen others claim on the internet? I have been through and seen plenty of failure modes of relationships, but nothing like "the woman refuses to be nice, warm, loving or create a positive atmosphere for the sake of political LARPing" has been among them.
Such modern women do exist but it's generally not that they refuse to act like that. It's that it never even occurs to them that they should act like that in certain contexts, have no concept of it at all in the first place, and don't know how to do it even if they consciously want to. It's generally something nobody ever explained to them, never talked with them about, and had no woman in their lives whom they ever had a chance to emulate in that regard.
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Oh they exist alright. They become more noticeable 30s and onwards as all the loving people slowly select themselves into relationships.
Good news is that it's curable, I've seen people grow out of it. But not everyone does.
Yep. And I've fallen into the trap of staying with someone on the HOPE they grow out of it and try to facilitate that and... nope.
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The preferences are, I think, the big part. And the main of that is understanding what the desired end-goal relationship is, how that can be founded, how it can be maintained... and so on. Then the natural partner becomes more clear, and the virtues that a woman can cultivate beyond sexual attractiveness. But if you don't know what you want in the end, how can you tell the difference between a good partner and a bad partner, rather than simply an attractive or unattractive partner? And that in turn requires a vision or model for a stable romance, and considerations of old age, and so on and so forth. But it sounds like the women in question are, at best, thinking of the early phases of a romance. I'm not sure they're even looking ahead to something as minimal as moving in together, much less marriage or children. And if that's the case... yeah, I guess it tracks that when the author talks about how much effort her girlies are putting in, it's about getting the right outfit and putting makeup on, not figuring out ways to show off a loving and nurturing spirit (e.g. cookies, not that hard to make but very pleasing).
But on the other hand, I don't think it would matter to the guys they're currently dating how nice or not they are. Sounds like they'd tolerate a mean or dull woman just so long as she puts out, which is a pretty sad place to be. If those women are losers, then just imagine the guy who spends all his time trying to sleep with losers...
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The middle ground is probably something like 'have sex after he meets your parents and they don't pitch a fit about him'. I don't think it's either a stable equilibrium or feminism compatible.
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My guess is he (and others?) consider 'traditional conservative sexual morality' to be the female-biased opposite of Hookup Culture. They would describe it as men giving commitment to women for a long time and the woman not putting out. Presumably, this is what the substack author would want.
Of course, you and I both know that's a secular perversion of the Christian sexual morality. Isn't the actual Christian sexual morality the middle ground where couples move from "no commitment, no sex" into "commitment and sex" in one fell swoop?
The RCC's moral theology manuals actually condemn courting(a term used because in not every culture is this done by going on dates) for too long without engagement and require a bishop's permission for abstinence within marriage. Of course manualism is deeply unfashionable these days but there is nothing else to inform the zeitgeist; even Jesuits will recommend against teenaged but not college aged dating on those grounds, albeit only if asked and taking care not to outright condemn anything.
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Women sharing authorship and responsibility for their own lives and the world around them.
— so yeah, there probably isn't one.
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I think this article is best read while imagining "and yet you keep fucking them" attached to the end of every paragraph.
I often reflect upon the fact that “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” is one of the curses put upon Eve in Genesis 3.
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We might call her a "sex-communist," although I prefer "sex-conflict-theorist." Specifically, the faction that advocates for the woman's class interest is feminism. I think she has all her facts right, too. I didn't get through the entire article (or her first one) but I suspect I got the gist of it.
I admit I can't explain why "feminist" in the public imagination is sex-positive. Was it a shadow campaign by the Chadiarchy to trick woman into Hookup Culture? Did feminists falsely believe sex-positivity was in woman's interest?
My pet theory from last month is that sex-positive feminists are highly psychologically atypical women who are almost as interested in casual sex as the modal man is, and who erroneously attribute their interest in casual sex as evidence as their having transcended the internalised misogyny (read: false consciousness) that their peers fell victim to.
My guess is that this phenomenon explains quite a lot of feminism - and likely ideological activism in general. People who write essays and books and give lectures on any sort of transgressive ideology will almost inevitably be highly atypical members of whatever group they belong to. The typical mind fallacy is an extremely seductive one, especially if you're already drawn to thinking that other people are "sheeple" or "NPCs" while you are an enlightened independent thinker who has escaped from her programming. Hence you see feminist professors and entertainment writers pushing becoming independent girlbosses who pursue their favorite intellectual or professional endeavors over things like family as being the correct, enlightened way that women would behave if they were freed from the patriarchy (this is - often unintentionally - also obfuscated as part of a motte-and-bailey game as being about giving women choice rather than about pushing them towards this). Women who are happy staying in the kitchen aren't as likely to publish books or go on lecture tours about how great their preferences are and how it's only through society-wide brainwashing that more women don't share their own preferences (though the comedienne Ally Wong had a good bit about this).
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Boomers' cultural worldview of feminism is stuck in the '70s, which is the last time that was true.
The side of feminism comprising the modern #fightfor25/Junior Anti-Sex League wouldn't get back to the same rent-seeking position on sex it had in the early 20th century until after AIDS.
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I remember sex negative feminists growing up. Girlbosses but no bikinis, that sort of thing. I think it's just a generational barber pole.
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In my opinion and recollection feminist used to have a sex negative valence - it was associated with ugly women who hated men, bull dyke lesbians etc.
It seemed to switch valence in the 90s I think.
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Traditionally, woman will be shamed for being sex-positive while man will be prided.
The first few waves of feminism (in the west) try to combat this contradiction by pushing woman's stand closer to the man's side, likly due to this appear to give more power to woman instead of stripping power from man.
I think this is a mistake, in practice, this casued a conflict of interest for womon. On one hand woman are now free to have sex without legal repercussions and too much socal slut naming, on the other hand woman are now finding out the biological difference between both sex, namely man can fuck and go now, while woman might need an abortion or get a 18 years liability.
Purhaps feminism should instead goes for shaming man of pre-marital sex, but it is too late now
It is currently doing that right now; that's what "Rape On College Campus" (and related), #metoo, #fightfor25 is agitprop for.
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The conservative Christian wait until marriage position is vindicated, yet again. Yet like Cassandra, they're cursed to have the rest of the world not believe them.
Maybe that has something to do with their messaging or decisions about which issues to prioritize?
Maybe! Go craft a message that will be listened to, perhaps even get your Elite Human Capital buddies to help you spread it, and show us how it's done.
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Despite being an interesting and well-written essay, I have absolutely no sympathy for the author or her views.
Right. As if the average man is doing so hot.
Dating apps suck for the majority of people. I'd say they'd suck less for the average woman, if they were capable of setting up boundaries.
On a only-barely-related note, I may have missed it but are you still in contact with the woman back in India? It seemed like things were going well
In contact? Yes, I've got a message from her waiting for a reply right now.
Unfortunately, things soured somewhat. She stood me up/flaked on me multiple dates in a row, initially with valid explanations, and then nothing even approximating one. I was understandably pissed, but I was going to fly back to the UK in a few days, so I told myself not to bother. It was a much needed dousing with cold water, I have a disconcerting tendency to fall for people very quickly when the stars align.
I didn't think much of it later, but a few weeks down the road, she reached out to me and apologized for her behavior. I got the strong impression that things hadn't been going great for her, and there was something she wasn't telling me (not in, I'm sleeping with other people sense, just some kind of difficulty in life, I suspect she's depressed).
I was rather cool on the whole notion afterwards, but I've kept in touch. Even when I was head over heels, I knew on an intellectual level that it couldn't go anywhere right now, so we'll see how this pans out.
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Prettymuch. The average woman is likely capable of getting into a stable relationship with a pretty good guy from a dating app if they just jiggle their preferences a bit. The average guy has to go on a massive path of self improvement to get attractive enough to then actually start meaningfully 'dating' then can maybe look at dealing with it.
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Right but she's not talking about the average man, she's talking about the dark triad psychopath who makes her horny.
I have pointed questions about the kind of men she's "friends" with. They're so far from a representative sample that it's farcical.
This kind of shit is prime fodder for someone like hoe_math to respond to. Men who make up the bulk of an actual representative sample, to her, are Not People.
Ouch, part of me, especially as I get older, thinks videos like that are needlessly cruel, but then I remember, and realize that yes, while they may be cruel, they are also, in a very important sense, necessary.
I can't see the video right now, though I've seen some clips of hoe_math talking about such men being considered "not people" by women, and if this video is of a similar vein, I'd say that not sending men messages like this is closer to needlessly cruel.
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You are replying to a filtered comment.
Oops. I've let it through now.
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