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Fair distillation in my book.
Its crazy how we've come around to the "porn is bad (from the feminist perspective) but women should be rewarded for producing it" (see: Bonnie Blue) point of view as a seeming cultural default.
Then add the additional wrinkle where men who are excessive porn consumers (where 'excessive' is a moving target, mind), or otherwise admit to partaking are still ostracized... even though the action of consuming porn is, I'd say, objectively less degrading and disgusting than the acts involved in producing the hardcore stuff.
There's sort of an implicit "if you're a male porn addict you're pathetic and its good that your money is going to women, even though we wish women would instead choose to not produce porn at all" subtext or something.
And on top of that women can read the most egregiously pornographic books and make them best-sellers... and we're all pretty aware that they're getting off to these things in private, but once again they can claim this makes them 'bookworms' and get a certain amount of adulation from admitting it.
There's an absolutely fair argument "real porn is produced by real people and depicts genuine suffering" vs. words on a page.
But as far as the psychological impact on the consumer I'd wager they're quite similar.
The fully cynical view is that the women are wonderful effect just dominates all cultural narratives. Human psychology is bent against criticizing attractive women, and so if women are engaging in [taboo/disgusting acvitity] maybe many humans will just contort their thought processes to find that thing really good actually, as long as its women doing it.
That's not the explanation I'd run with, I think it just frames the issue properly.
There is a far more basic dynamic at play there, which is also the reason why sex toys for women are a much bigger and less stigmatised market: because men's value is measured by their ability to convince women to have sex with them, men who obtain sexual gratification without the need to do so broadcast to the world that they are losers.
There is no obvious counterpart of this for women - given that the counterpart animal-brain valuation is often stated as "measured by their ability to exercise choice and reject even high-value men", and the animal need is taken to be for resources and validation rather than sex, perhaps the distaff version of the coomer is something like a streamer maintaining a simp army by way of heavy plastic surgery/makeup/AI retouching/voice changers. I do get the sense that the embarrassment around women's no-makeup high school photos is a bit similar to the embarrassment around men's browser history.
Its an odd clash between our primal lizard/ape brain and our more economizing higher mammal brain that we seem to be well aware that "sex" is cheap in the abstract, you can find it with just a little effort and risk, and if you have some cash can acquire it, in varying degrees of quality.
Got specific names for it and everything. High end "sugar babies," low end "lot lizards."
So its not like some hard-to-acquire thing that has intrinsic value due to its rarity.
But... acquiring it from decent-looking women without having to pay out for it (up front, especially) usually means you're an absolute high-value stud who will literally be the envy of other men.
Status-seeking interacts with sexual politics in some odd ways here. If I have, I dunno, about 4-5k, I could spend the night with some of the most gorgeous women on the planet (so my research suggests). But I don't think that would, by itself, afford me any extra status points, and would in many contexts lower my status.
So its a commodity, but also something way, way more important.
I like this comment because it sets up and interesting model.
Want a thing and don't care about status games? Buy it. Get rich, get what you want.
Want status but don't care about money? Get famous through any means necessary.
Want a thing and also care about status? Play whatever status game you want, and get to the level of wealth you need to acquire the thing.
But, of course, we see the hacks all over the place.
If you have lots of money - like, lots and lots of it - you acquire at least some status. If you have a lot of status (fame) you can pretty easily acquire money, perhaps even lots and lots of it.
It's that "both" model that is tricky. You want both status and money but you have to balance out one with the other lest you lose one or the other.
I don't know. This was off the top of my head, but it's interesting to play with.
I like what you're laying down.
Minmaxing seems to be in vogue now.
Nobody really wants to do the slow, steady, 'reliable' path. And, granted, I think there are fewer of those nowadays, given the pace of change.
You're 'losing' if you only bought index funds rather than YOLOing on NVDA.
One can also compare and contrast how, for example, Billionaires like Soros, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos have spent their fortunes.
A simple illustration of your point is the fear of the "Gold-Digger" woman who only loves you for your wealth. So guys sometimes go to pains to conceal the extent of the wealth to see if they can land a girl without ostentatious displays.
and then... some guys go ALL IN on ostentatious displays, going into debt to give the appearance of wealth and hoping to fool women long enough to lock them down.
People can arguably choose which games to actively compete in, and their particular goals in it will inform strategy.
But if you're not implementing a minmax strat, playing for the 'meta,' you can feel like you're losing constantly in the short term.
Absolutely. So what matters more is which game you choose to play. Finite and Infinite Games does a great job of describing the two types of primary social games. This is one of my most recommended books.
Not to bring it back to Jesus, but ... to bring it back to Jesus, the entire "game" chosen there is sacrificing the fame / wealth / comfort of this world for the infinite comfort of the next. From a pure game theoretic standpoint, it's a total no-brainer. If not only the expected return but the guaranteed return to one course of action is literally infinite bliss forever, you go all in on that. For people who choose not to believe, they are still making a somewhat rational decision in their pursuit of wealth/status in this life. The tricky part is for lukewarm believers - C&E beige Catholics, whishy washy mainline protestants, cultural Jews, secular Muslims etc. who "believe" yet also hedge by pursuing wealth and status on earth. It's actually that exact non-minmax you're talking about and they'll likely get caught in the middle one way or another. And then, you know ,go to Hell forever.
I need to read that one.
Added to my library pull list.
Funny to bring up the Jesus thing. Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) is very near death, and he has claimed the intention to convert to Christianity.
Leaving aside whether that is a true conversion under Christian doctrine, its a ridiculous approach to minmaxing to live life a certain way all up until the very last moments then hit the "I want eternal bliss" button at the end, consciously trying to stave it off rather than just, you know, doing it.
Women have a particularly stark issue here, where part of their ideal strat for maximizing happiness is to have kids, which has a fairly sharp biological cutoff, so one would think they should try to satisfy that element early on. But cultural advice is to get other goals out of the way first, then play a game of baby fever chicken in your late 20's/early 30's. The tradeoff probably seems reasonable looking at it from the perspective of a 20-year-old.
I've noticed several female friends and acquaintances who developed their professional careers and now are just sliding under the fertility wire by having a kid (twins, in one case) with some guy who... I mean he's in the picture, but they are distinctly NOT married to him.
Time will tell how that turns out for them, but its also a bit unfair to the child, you ask me. One of the issues with minmaxing is you forget that other people's interests are entangled with your own.
Relevant Simpsons clip
You can't fake true, in the heart intent. If Scott Adams is doing this because he is, all of a sudden, afraid of going to hell, then 1) He's acting out of fear (sinful) and 2) Is not acting out of a true love for God (also sin). All that being said, I don't actually believe that all deathbed repentances are invalid. Sometimes, someone is called in those last few moments. While it may seem like this is the ultimate "Get out of jail free" card, the reality would probably be that the person, while truly called to Christ and therefore happy to (after a stop in purgatory) go to paradise, is also full of remorse for not having Him in their life for all of their other years. Imagine having had an entire life you thought was happy and then, moments before death, discovering the ultimate in music / art / passion. It probably wouldn't actually be that enjoyable as you'd be full of regret.
From what I understand of him, he might be hyper-autistic enough that HE won't feel like the conversion is genuine unless his condition is so bad that he has no choice but to actually take a leap of faith and call up on a higher power.
Or maybe I'm projecting my own faith experience on him.
Either way, he's written a bit of philosophy on this which suggests he's really tried to reconcile science and religion and is like, I dunno, 80% to being a believer.
This whole situation is very unique. Got a guy who hasn't rejected religion, isn't really an atheist, but clearly doesn't follow Christian rules, and is basically livestreaming his final days and stating his full intent to try to get into heaven, and is about as detached and neutral about the situation as a human can be.
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