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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30822 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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She correctly perceives that when people (well, men, at least) think about men, the properties they notice in order of salience are "web developer, white, middle class, male, father...", something like that. But when people think about her, the ordering is "woman, web developer, white, middle class...". Her body is what people want, it's what they're seeking; or at least, this is always necessarily a lurking suspicion.

I agree with some of your points, but I'm not sure if I fully agree here.

While the idea that "men do, women are" is accepted as a truism in some online circles, and I even think there are probably evopsych forces pushing in that direction, I think there are plenty of women who find fulfilling communities, hobbies, etc. where the fact that they are the "scarce resource" in reproduction isn't really that relevant one way or another.

Consider Youtube channels like this one for scrapbooking, or this one for miniatures. Both women are just disembodied hands, and yet I know people like my mom (who does scrapbooking and homemade cards) and an older family friend of ours (who made elaborate miniature dollhouses when her health was better) love these kinds of channels, watching them obsessively for ideas to try out.

I also have several lesbian friends, and they tend to have crafty hobbies that they love. One (whose day job is as a web developer) is an amazing seamstress, and has won cosplay contest awards for historical accuracy (due to her obsessively deep diving into Chinese clothing history for a costume she did.) One loves crochet and once made dozens of crochet stuffed animals (including several quite large ones) to give away for a party. Both of them seem to be pretty satisfied with their lot in life, most of the time, and neither their professions nor their hobbies seem to be affected very much by the fact that they're the scarce resource biologically.

Now, I grant that all of these are female-dominated hobbies that probably appeal to a "people-oriented" personality more, but it really isn't that hard in the modern day to have a friend group consisting of almost no straight guys, which has the practical effect of reducing the salience of being the scarce resource biologically to practically zero.

I mean if you’re doing a female centric hobby and your video content is mostly watched by other women, you might be able to get by with doing that, but even “disembodied hands” videoed will read “woman! Who happens to do X hobby,” when the audience contains more men. Even their voice over the internet, or a chosen screen name in gaming and they become a Woman and thus get treated like an object of desire rather than “just another dude playing an online game.”

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