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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I suppose if you’re a turbo autist, yes it is.

In reality being pushy towards a woman who is not interested in the kind of relationship on offer, and who has made that clear, is quite a bit different from a date request to a woman who’s looking for one. More analogous to pursuing a married woman.

Being pushy is just traditional and courtship. That’s not “autistic”. Being pushy is just part of every romcom ever made.

Like in yougotmail for example Meg Ryan hated Tom Hanks in person but he realized she was his pen pal they both got along with. He spent months courting her with the today awful secret ambition of boning her and having kids and living happily ever after. Or Mathew Mcconaughey chasing down his girl on his motercycle going to the airport in how to lose a guy.

Basically every romcom plays some story of guy realizes he loves girl then stubbornly pursues her because she’s his special little snowflake.

So I don’t understand how that is autistic when it’s the plot of every moving I ever saw growing up on how a guy should pursue a girl.

So I don’t understand how that is autistic when it’s the plot of every movie I ever saw growing up on how a guy should pursue a girl.

I also, and that's a large part of why I thought that was absolutely horrible. She said "no", why are you trying to force her to do something? It's like okay, you love jazz so you want her to like jazz too and if she says she doesn't like jazz you keep pursuing her and playing jazz at her and trying to make her give in. Nobody would tolerate that!

Movies are a terrible way to get the information of what the world is like, but that's how most of us do get it - and then we eventually run our faces into the wall of "movies and TV are not real, they're fiction, and the real world is not like that".

Every woman says "no". That's the most basic of shit tests. In order for a man to become romantically/sexually successful, he needs to learn to differentiate between a fake "no" and a real "no" and power through the former.

If people actually took the feminist line about how "no means no" seriously, nobody would ever have sex, because that is simply not how women work.

I've definitely gone all the way without ever hearing "no". (Sometimes it's "yes yes yes" all the time haha.)

The line is far less distinct then you're letting on. What one person sees as too pushy is often times completely effective and other times will make a woman quite uncomfortable or even angry. It's difficult to know which is which until you try, and the threshold is actually far below the aforementioned case of trying to get some women to join what amounts to a harem.

Exactly, the threshold is far below trying to talk some woman into joining a harem after she's said she wants nothing to do with the whole thing.

Just because someone is a degenerate weirdo in silicon valley doesn't mean that dating norms, or the stated (but entirely ignored) norms set out by HR departments and oversocialized libs are valid either. Nor is being a silicon valley degenerate weirdo particularly a big deal. People don't have a right to social comfort beyond the option of just getting up to leave. This is a case of hysterics in the face of someone who is maybe slightly out of line.

And the point was that the threshold for discomfort can be lower. Again, a person doesn't have a right to total social comfort. The moral question of polygamy is a whole other thing which really isn't done justice by any leftist lenses.

Agreed that the question of whether polygamy/amory is OK is ancillary to the question of whether or not the specific behavior in question is OK.

Disagree that this is only slightly out of line(at least if true; I will very much allow for the possibility that the story is greatly exaggerated). This is worse than more central examples of being aggressive and pushy because the woman has demonstrated a previous opposition to the lifestyle in question. It's very much the equivalent of badgering a conservative Christian woman into a friends with benefits situation, or a happily married woman into cheating.

And, realistically, this is the problem with live and let live liberalism more broadly- it only seems to go in one direction(that is, in favor of degenerate sex weirdos and drug addicts). You see the same thing with lesbians getting pressured into sleeping with intact biologically male transwomen, or the constant odor of marijuana smoke in major American cities, or that Colorado baker that's been sued so many times that if I put out a number it'll have to be edited right after I hit "comment". And yes, some of those examples are sympathetic to me, but some of them aren't. I have no illusions that these women trying to join up in EA spaces are going to follow socially conservative norms otherwise, but that doesn't mean it's OK to try to pressure them into joining a harem over their own objections to such an arrangement. It shouldn't be #metoo level to say that. SJW's writing a set of ridiculous norms about dating doesn't mean they're wrong in every particular just like gun control advocates saying ridiculously false things about AR-15's doesn't mean I'm not going to leave if I see a skinny teenaged boy open carrying one in a Walmart.

I think we just have fundamentally different moral values. I don't think it's that big of a deal for some woman to have to turn down a weirdo multiple times. To me, that just seems like part of life. I don't think its nice for some weirdo to keep asking, but there's a huge gap between not nice and meaningfully wrong. There is no damage caused here, at least on the individual level. If we want to talk on a societal level, that's a lot more foggy, especially because currently there is no presiding sexual morality to speak.