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I didn't reply to your original comment in the small-scale thread, but since you posted this again in the CW thread I feel obliged to say something.
This is unhinged and unreasonable, and genuinely alarming. This just further confirms my prior statements on the hypocrisy and one-sidedness of many people (including many social conservatives), in that they like perpetually invoking men's supposed degenerate nature and women's supposed inherent vulnerability and manipulableness (which of course implies nothing about their ability to occupy positions of influence), and will routinely place extra responsibilities for prosociality on men that they won’t on women.
Expecting women to shape up and stop participating in antisocial and reckless behaviours of their own isn't something to be advocated for since it's too tall an ask. Expecting women to regulate their own sexual behaviour, sensibly assess risk and accept the consequences of their bad decisions like adults apparently is not reasonable, and they deserve recompense for their freely-made decision to have sex with obvious players whose intentions would be clear to anyone with an IQ above 20, like children who must perpetually be sheltered from the repercussions of their actions. Judging women for their sexual behaviour and placing restrictions on them is also a no-no. But ordering forcible marriage, castration, etc on men is I suppose no big deal. I'm not even a fan of lotharios or players and don't believe it to be a particularly beneficial life choice, but this is an extremely disproportionate punishment relative to the actual harm caused. But hey while we're coming up with bright ideas about how to fix dating, perhaps we should infibulate women or something for engaging in acts of deception in the sexual marketplace like gold-digging and serially stringing men along for attention, and “ruining men”.
This kind of casually expressed sentiment nudges me closer and closer to harbouring @Sloot's positions every day (a user who is very abrasive, very different from me and wants vastly different things out of life, but who I actually think is more right about things than people here give him credit for). I am always amazed by the sheer unparalleled power of women's tears, such that it can get people to order atrocities for offending them.
Of course these lotharios are doing something bad, should they not have consequences?
I agree that castration is dumb. But what’s wrong with seduction laws?
Well, women are actively giving Lothario what he wants. It's not like women should be considered incapable of assessing their own risk or bearing the consequences of their own decisions, and it's often trivially easy to identify a cad - they barely even need to hide that fact. Personally I think that if women decide to play with fire, it should come as no surprise once they get burned. You did a stupid thing and had unrealistic expectations of a man you probably already knew wasn't looking for the same thing you were, learn from it and grow.
Perhaps seduction laws make some level of sense within a traditionalist sexual/moral framework, but right now, we don't live in that world. We live under a bizarre marriage of Victorian era morality and female sexual liberation that is the schizophrenic brainchild of modern gender feminism. Most people are somehow still capable of harbouring the traditional idea that female sexuality is a Big Deal and must be guarded closely; that any woman who feels violated (by her own free choices, mind you) is an agency-less victim who should have the ability to shift responsibility onto the man and obtain restitution of some form from the one "responsible", while somehow also holding the liberal idea that women are agents who can freely make whatever sexual choices they want without outside constraint or any personal responsibility to safeguard their own virtue. All the choice, without any of the responsibility.
Men and society have no ability to police women, despite the fact that once the sex they assented to does not result in what they want, it is the responsibility of society - whether that be the men around them, or society as a whole - to intervene on their behalf. Historically this would've been a woman's father beating the daylights out of the man in question and forcing a shotgun wedding, today it comes in the form of public cancellation and blacklisting of the man as a predator and objectifier of women. In effect, this means that men are policed, whereas women aren't even expected to accept the consequences of their own behaviour. Introducing seduction laws into this clusterfuck makes the situation even more unbalanced, not less.
At the very least it should go either way - sexual liberation or sexual traditionalism. But we fall short of even that basic standard at the moment. Right now many people's moral evaluations are incoherently structured around what would be most convenient for women, switching between traditionalism and liberation in a way that allows them to maximise the benefits women extract while minimising judgement and stigma, and that is something I do object to. It needs to be consistent.
Eh, the case for sexual traditionalism is pretty strong.
No one has every died from being too horny. If this were the case, men would have an expected and maximum lifespan of 16 years.
Men commit the overwhelming majority of murders and violence crime. The are, generally, three broad reasons for this; money/currency (including drugs), respect or prestige, and access or exclusive access to women.
The near human universal antipathy towards prostitution is largely based in concerns for a) health and b) preventing the breakup of families due to infidelity. I know it may come as a shock, but our hundreds of millions of illiterate agricultural ancestors weren't actually involved in a highly ideological effort to "own women's bodies and sexual agency" -- they didn't want creepy-crawlies in their pants, and also knew that Uncle Nimrod was one seriously horny dude.
Won't pay it much attention here but; pregnancy and abortion.
Simply put, sexual hyper-liberalization is obviously high risk for society. Risk, even when high, isn't inherently bad, but one then has to weigh it against the other side of the equation; reward.
And what is the real reward for sexual liberalization? I mean this genuinely as a question, not a rhetorical device. The most common responses I have heard or seen fall into a bucket of fuzzy, highly emotional self-justifications; "People should be able to express themselves however they want" , "sexual agency is a necessary requirement for personal liberty" (I don't know what that means) , "people have a right to love whoever they want to love." None of this is very concrete and side steps the entire risk-reward framework.
I also haven't seen much in the way of good faith or realistic discussions of the downsides of a return to sexual traditionalism. The Handmaids Tale LARPing is, hilariously, just a publicly accessible BDSM fantasy. Sexual traditionalism wouldn't mean women couldn't vote or drive or have "real jobs" (read: high status wordcel jobs). I can see slut shaming becoming a little more prevalent but my thought there is that it still absolutely exists, but is just done in layers-upon-layers of backhanded compliments and covert communication styles instead of out in the open.
Does it? "Not having a fundamental moral right infringed upon" is a kind of reward, surely. You may as well ask why a traditionalist sexual mores shouldn't simply shoot all transgressors without a trial. I'm sure a practical argument could be constructed on why such a policy would be detrimental to society along some tangible metric, but that's not why any sensible person will immediately reject such a proposal with horror: it's because they feel that killing people is, all else being equal, morally wrong. This isn't "concrete" and it "side-steps the risk-reward framework", but all the same, you can't have a real conversation about the issue without bringing it up.
In the same way, as a true liberal, I feel it is, all else being equal, axiomatically, fairly wrong to prevent people from doing whatever the hell they want; and doubly wrong to force them to do things they don't want to do. Society naturally has to mandate a little bit of each to keep itself running, but that's a trade-off from the word go, and you should only add more restrictions and duties with the understanding that you are doing harm to your citizens with each new bylaw by infringing upon those basic rights, so the payoff had better be damn good. Traditional sexual norms include a fair bit of forcing women to do things they don't want to do, and positively enormous amounts of preventing people of both sexes from doing things they want to do. There's an enormous penalty in the "cons" column on that basis alone, and in a world where STDs and unwanted pregnancies are under control, the fuzzier benefits just don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of making up for it. It's like asking what kind of subtle improvement to demographic statistics would be worth mandating that people whack themselves in the knee with a hammer every morning.
I want to sincerely thank you for creating such a succinct illustration of why liberalism always fails within its own framework.
Please actually elaborate on and demonstrate how this one statement shows liberalism to be self-contradicting.
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Gonna go off on a tangent here that's unrelated to what you were trying to say, but I'm just going to point out that this is largely down to their risk taking and greater aggressiveness within the public sphere, which also means that they are responsible for the overwhelming majority of acts of heroism (men are 90% of those who have received the Carnegie Hero Medal, for example). Of course, the negative aspects of these traits always get discussed so much more than the positive ones, and by virtually every political group in existence. Wonder why. Then there's also the reality of violence-by-proxy by women, which is yet another thing that fuels male-perpetrated violence. I wrote a longer comment about all of that here.
I wasn't so much advocating sexual liberalisation or disparaging sexual traditionalism as much as I was simply pointing out that if we're accepting a sexual framework, we need to fully accept all of its consequences. Sexual traditionalism doesn't just mean "shotgun weddings for men" and "penalties for cads for having deflowered a woman": it also means stigmatising and penalising women who have premarital sex or tart themselves up inappropriately or use sex/intimacy to wheedle money out of men, granting the men around them the power to vet and police who they can go out with (since they will have to defend any breach of their honour), and placing responsibilities on both husband and wife in a marriage to put out and provide sex to their spouse. The responsibility for maintaining a pro-social scenario was not placed only on one party.
Note I don't consider this to be the Handmaid's Tale either. I very much agree with you that that's basically feminist oppression porn and an unhinged caricature of traditional sexual mores which borders on the fantastical. I think all of these traditional strictures are just a consequence of accepting that entire framework of looking at things, and I don't like how we've basically adopted a chimera of sexual liberalism and traditionalism, having accepted only the parts of both worldviews that benefit women while discarding all the bits that may inconvenience them. Within this current context, I won't accept any more sexual strictures being placed on men; the system is already engineered to give women maximal choice while displacing maximal accountability onto men. If we're advocating a traditional society, the obligations of women that made it make sense need to be enforced. We need to pick a lane and stick with it, instead of relying on women's tears to help us shape our approach to everything regardless of how conflicted and schizophrenic things get.
What makes you think I have a problem with any of that?
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thejdizzler's comment is pretty extreme, and if I had to bet I'd bet that this is just him coping with his own jealousy and shortcomings while trying to find a "logical" solution to the problems that affect his type the most. It's not rational though. It's an absurd proposal. It seems like he's just grasping for straws in hopes that some others will empathize with his situation. I do empathize with the sort of turmoil he's dealing with right now, because I think it's become a broader societal problem.
It's reasonable in the current moment because current society allows it. The problem is that it has the potential to bring about societal consequences that people no longer seem to think are possible. A group willingly volunteering to scale back the most freedom and opportunity they've ever had for the sake of the other half of the population will not happen. If I were a Western woman in the current environment, I too would not want to willingly give up my position in society.
What's likely to happen though is that after this has run its course for a while, either A) some capable portion of the lower 80% of men, accompanied by a handful of the top 20% of men, will make increasingly harder pushes for men's control than the one that's happening right now, or B) AI will increasingly fill the emptiness these men feel, come up with new methods to prevent human violence, and stave off a chaotic uprising. Plenty of other scenarios could play out, but these two seem the most obvious in the current setting. Any other scenario that trends away from prosperity will be much worse for current women's rights, because ostracism, shaming, and emotional manipulation will take a backseat to the threat of violence.
Right now, warning the population about the possibility of something violent like this happening just rings hollow. Nobody in the lib or progressive camp actually believes that their behavior fuels the fire they most want to put out. Worst of all is that there's nothing to be done about that on a macro level. In my opinion, the only real way this shakes out is people learning the hard way, like we always have.
My predictions are obviously open for criticism. I present two distinct possibilities and a vague third one, when in reality there is an infinite number of possible outcomes.
Here's my prognostication:
A disproportionate number of western women enter their 40s and 50s single, never married, and childless. It doesn't matter if they "realize" they want a family or not. Instead, the tyranny of aging means they will simply get less male attention as time goes on. Gracefully accepting defeat isn't something many humans do, so they will rebel in their own way. Not against men in some sort of wide scale "Go Girlboss!" moment. Instead, they will attack the easiest to spot targets with the lowest possibility of retaliation; young women.
The great reckoning will thus be these spinsters attempting to shame or otherwise emotionally blackmail these younger women not into avoiding the older generations mistakes (see: failure to accept defeat) but into agreeing with the spinsters ahead of schedule. Recommended Slogan: "The only way to be a feminist in 2035 is to admit that all men are evil. Defund the patriarchy!"
But young women themselves will largely see this for the spite fueled grift that it is and veer away from anything that even resembles this. They'll continue to be pretty and young and go on dates, but perhaps not put out as much, and perhaps seek the counsel of trusted male friends on their potential mates. Play this tape forward enough and all of a sudden the "cool girl" thing to do is to take things slow, pair bond hard, and get married early and have babies.
My primary support for this prediction is that it's already happening. Gen Z women, from the survey's I have seen, are super divided between "all men are evil" levels of feminism and "lol, I just want to be a mom" levels of trad. There isn't much of a middle ground. I've also seen some millenial women, after having become moms, hit the hard defect button out of the sisterhood. My anec-data of note was seeing a FAANG director-of-something-made-up leave that $500k / yr job to be a SAHM after taking an extended maternity leave and changing her mind to "whoooaaa babies are way better than spreadsheets."
In business, there's always a lot of discussion about the unit economics of company. Simply put, does selling one unit of your product to a customer cost more than you're selling it for? In startup land, the answer to this question can be "yes" for some amount of time. In a high growth setting, paying to buy up market share can be a viable strategy. But, eventually, the answer has to be "no." If it isn't, you're running a structurally negative return and it's just a matter of time and debt before the company dies.
I see failing ideologies like third wave feminism in this regard. You can have whatever worldview you want, but if having and professing that worldview leads to a lifestyle that cannot support itself in the long term, eventually that worldview dies out. Freezing eggs, looking for sperm donors, and then being a single mother is a far far higher risk, lower return, more expensive, and more complicated strategy than "get married. have kids" You can try to find some sort of grey middle ground, which has been the entire experiment since, roughly, the late 1990s / early 2000s, but I think the experiment has shown that middle ground is, at best, a thin isthmus rather than a lush and wide peninsula (geography metaphors for the win).
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You and @Tree and @Sloot are correct. Upon reflection last night, I think I don't want to hold this position, and at least some of it comes from rage at my personal living situation. The prosocial thing for me to do would be to move out as soon as my lease is up (which I will do). It's not good for me to hold enough rage in my heart that I'm willing to advocate for castration (although everyone seems to miss the marriage part which is much less severe), and to hold such a dim view of women that I think they are fundamentally incapable of change. Thank you for helping me realize how ridiculous my position here is.
Good. Soaking in that much bitterness is not healthy. Poor James never knew how close he came.
It’s rare for people to admit they’ve changed their mind as it happens, so thanks for that. Hard to say if in this instance it’s purely the result of rational argument, or the moral condemnation by multiple people (in addition to describing it as low status), and if so, if that is just as legitimate a reason to use/change one’s mind. Probably.
According to OP James has a pattern of stealing women from his lovelorn roommate. Such a fellow is lucky to still have all his teeth, and if he continues in that vein will not have them all for long.
The problem here is that James will not lose his teeth and everyone knows it, especially James. What pretty much everyone misses is that patriarchy is fundamentally about dealing with male intrasexual competition. All the stuff psychoanalyzing women largely misses the point.
Patriarchy wouldn’t have applied to begin with; these aren’t chaste Virgin daughters he’s laying with. They would, by the standards of a patriarchal society, have been reckoned as prostitutes.
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Please say more about this!
Whether or not "patriarchy" is a system that was codified (as in the Abrahamic religions) or simply a set of norms that turned out to be optimal for dealing with pre-industrial (or, perhaps more properly, pre green revolution) life, the idea is that beyond a certain point an excess of male intrasexual competition is bad because energy spent on that (be that fighting and killing each other in more primitive contexts, or power-swiping on dating apps and spending tons of time and money in bars for the non checked out in our present context) isn't spent on more useful things like working (This can still be seen by the fact that married men still earn more money than their unmarried counterparts.).
Likewise, some degree or another of enforced monogamy fixes the failure that in a purely free market the sexually successful male is completely relieved of obligations toward women or their children because the value of a given woman for those men rapidly approaches zero (aka. "a bitch is a bitch").
That such an arrangement also boosts fertility by enabling the median man to have a wife and children (that he is in turn obligated to provide for and defend) and that said arrangement is good at securing the loyalty of average men is a nifty bonus.
IMO the easiest way to demonstrate that patriarchy hindered certain men rather than women is merely to ask who dismantled it. Was it women? Not really. Sure, the feminists were a thing and they went along with it for their own reason, and capitalists were certainly happy to get a new supply of labor, but it was largely a bunch of upper-class male lawyers who did it.
Edit: Something I failed to convey is that patriarchy has fallen apart in large part because it's been rendered obsolete (save for the "enabling fertility" part, anyway; we haven't figured out how to get women to take what they can get instead of living childless in someone's Tinder harem or giving up out of despair for how lacking they perceive their options to be). Male provision and protection are pretty much worthless, and even loyalty to a cause or group doesn't mean much in a world where real existential threats to elite (or elite through scumbaggery; you can't take what doesn't exist from those who don't have it) men are rare.
So what changed to enable them to do it in modern times, but not the upper-class in medieval/ancient times?
The short answer is that the upper/educated class and state got a lot bigger and more secular.
One could add a longer answer involving economics (Societies as a whole became vastly richer, and we had a whole new class of jobs in which women were competitive in doing, increasing the opportunity cost of keeping women out of the workforce.).
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I think a combination. There's rationally no reason for me to hold this opinion, as it's not actionable (unless I want to end up in jail). It also implies that women are not accountable at all for their actions, which I disagree with. It takes two to tango, and most of the time a women knows what she's getting with Lothario (she thinks she can change him however). It would be abhorrent to me if someone advocated FGM or something similar for women in this situation, so my position on castration doesn't make sense.
And then morally it makes me sound like a whiny bitch that is upset he isn't getting any. That's not the kind of person I think I am, and it's certainly not the kind of person I want to be. Although I agree with most of the arguments that @faceh here and in general, I'm starting to wonder what the use of arguing about this on the internet actually is for me. It's not fun like other debates here are, it doesn't help me develop my arguments for the real world, and it doesn't really help me improve my own attitude and life. Think I am going to ban myself from discussing these topics further on here (@Mods feel free to enforce this from now on).
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That's reasonable, and for the record you do have my sympathies - I do understand the rage at your living situation and at your roommate, it seems rough.
Definitely you should move out, I wouldn't like living there either if I were you.
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