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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28322 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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This Valentine's Day, I am thinking about why the Pelicot rape case has received so little attention, sparked so little discussion. This is the case of a French man, Dominique Pelicot, who invited 72 men to rape his drugged wife, Gisèle Pelicot, over the course of nine years. The trial took place in 2024 (all accused found guilty), but it surfaced in the NYT again this week. I could not find a single mention of it in on this site.

Yes, it's been reported in every media outlet. No, I'm not claiming it's been hidden or suppressed. But the case has no political relevance. It hasn't generated heated discussion. No one seems to care or talk about it that much. Why? Here are my speculations.

You could claim that this was an isolated incident that has no implications for society in general, that one specific forum enabled the perpetrators to find each other. But these men were mostly from nearby towns, within 50km, from all walks of life.

I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman if there were no consequences. This is the nature of men. We have known this since the beginning of time. Most adults understand this already. The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general, and this particular manifestation is hardly a surprise. Women largely know this force, too, because they have been told of it, or because they have been targeted by it, though they sometimes pretend not to know.

Men aren't eager to discuss this particular case because it is unflattering to the male sex. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to inspire moral outrage among men. It doesn't trigger tribal instincts - race was not a factor, for instance. And a couple of the elements that make rape viscerally repugnant are absent in this case. For one, she was unconscious during the rapes. In some sense, apart from the drugging, the violation was merely psychological - the knowledge post facto of the strangers' assault, and the knowledge of her husband's betrayal - and I have the sense that many men simply struggle to empathize with psychological harms to women. Men can empathize with other men, but in this case the would-be secondary victim, her husband, wanted to cuck himself. "So be it," seems to be the unsaid reaction.

It's harder for me to say why women aren't eager to bring this up as ammunition in the gender wars. Doesn't this vindicate the radical feminists? I see it discussed in forums dominated by women, but not much beyond that, and even there not particularly passionately. Maybe one factor is that Gisèle Pelicot herself apparently didn't believe her daughter's claims of abuses at the hands of her husband, and so isn't the perfect victim. But perhaps the whole thing is just unpleasant and depressing. It seems to shatter the possibility of love, and of the dignity of women among men. She thought he was a good husband.

And perhaps it's simply that there is nothing to fight about. There is no toxoplasma, no scissor statement. No surprises at the trial. No one even cares to come out and repeat the defense of the accused, that they thought she had consented. No one wants to argue. There is nothing to be done. Castrate all men? Don't have the bad luck of marrying a depraved cuck? Conservatives have nothing to say. Do liberals have something to say? If so, I haven't heard it either.

some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman

Well I checked and that seems in line with some, limited, statistics: https://www.newsweek.com/campus-rapists-and-semantics-297463

Approximately 32 percent of study participants said that they would have "intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse" if ''nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences.'' Yet only 13.6 percent admit to having "any intentions to rape a woman" under these same circumstances.

But I still don't believe it?

If this is true, why don't men just more or less openly rape women as they please? Why do I go on the beach and see women in bikinis, or go out in the city and see women in very revealing clothes late at night? Is the idea that men would be unwilling to force a conscious women but are OK with unconscious women? Do we think rapists are really affected by how women feel, as opposed to being impulsive lowlives? It could be so, I am not a rapist and do not pretend to know...

The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general

Why are men looksmaxxing, jestermaxxing, prestigemaxxing and not just rapemaxxing? Why is feminism a thing? The corrupting force of male sexuality doesn't seem to have that much explanatory power, based on the world I see.

I think men's true proclivities are different from what they say, or perhaps people are fiddling the figures (the above link uses a very small sample size of 70-80 men at one university - exactly the same sample size as the Pelicot case though). Or perhaps the 'nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences' part is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

If 30% of men would rape if they thought they'd get away with it, then how many would go 'eh, not a big deal' (taking the path of least resistance) - who is left to create strict rules punishing rapists, who is left to create consequences? Couldn't the rapey many just ignore the few? The structure of Western civilization would surely be quite different if men were actually like this, it would look more like Africa or India or those stories from Rotherham where the girl gets raped again by the first taxi driver who sees her.

Edit, see a thread here which illustrates the kind of structure I'm thinking of: https://x.com/willsolfiac/status/2023143282889326852/photo/1

The western system, it is thought, permits free sexual relations and allows, even encourages, women to dress revealingly and to provoke men. One Pakistani man who had recently arrived in England, commented on seeing a of female University students sunbathing that the male undergraduates who were passing by could not be real men or else they would have thrown themselves on the women

Why are men looksmaxxing, jestermaxxing, prestigemaxxing and not just rapemaxxing?

The easy answer there is that the maxxing-type men want sex not as an end in itself, but as a means to gain approval from other men.

Once you notice the daddy issues inherent in manosphere culture, you really can't unsee them.

If 30% of men would rape if they thought they'd get away with it, then how many would go 'eh, not a big deal' (taking the path of least resistance) - who is left to create strict rules punishing rapists, who is left to create consequences? Couldn't the rapey many just ignore the few?

For a purely recreational act, though, energy tradeoffs can result in large deterrent effects even from relatively mild potential consequences. You see similar logic in predator-prey relations, where an opportunistic predator will still decline to chase most prey, and will back off pursuing an animal with any capacity to fight back, simply because it's not worth the risk of taking any damage at all. Better to hold off and look for an easier target.

Just because a guy would cheerfully rape an incapacitated woman in a cone of silence doesn't mean he thinks it's worth it to potentially get scratched or bruised, or risk social disapproval or reprisals from her allies, as would happen with frank rape under normal conditions.

The easy answer there is that the maxxing-type men want sex not as an end in itself, but as a means to gain approval from other men.

Broscience has always been comfortable with the idea that the muscular figure that impresses bros is more cut than the figure which is attractive to women, which itself is more cut than the optimal athletic figure you see among e.g. World's Strongest Man contestants. Just don't suggest that a bro's interest in his bro's cut figure is homoerotic...

Just don't suggest that a bro's interest in his bro's cut figure is homoerotic...

Obligatory Stonetoss cartoon.

The easy answer there is that the maxxing-type men want sex not as an end in itself, but as a means to gain approval from other men.

It seems to me that the easy answer is that men want to be in a relationship with someone whom they love and who loves them in return, someone who makes them both feel like a better person and want to be a better person. Yeah, sex is great and fun outside of that, but if given the choice between a woman who actively wants to be with you and a prostitute who will only stick around as long as you pay her, most men will prefer the former. Basically, the easy answer is that men are generally romantic.

Basically, the easy answer is that men are generally romantic.

Nice if true. I hope you're right. Especially given the holiday weekend.

Why are you complicating this, isn't the conclusion we should draw from "men say they would do this thing if there were no consequences, but then they don't do that thing" that "they believe there will be consequences."

I'm wondering where the consequences come from. If men were generally like this then we'd expect women to be property of specific men, their husbands or fathers. It'd be 'Rape of the Sabine women' writ large. But that's not the case, there are consequences without regard for whether she was married or not, large and powerful organizations run by men that treat rape as an offence against human dignity.

Is the idea that men would be unwilling to force a conscious women but are OK with unconscious women?

The idea is that men have a lot of things that, in sexual terms, they'd like to do but can't or won't do because of fear of consequences. We've already thrashed out on here that male and female sexual drives are very different in strength, intensity, and objectivity. Men (in general) want sex and don't really give a hoot about emotional associations with sex; casual sex is good enough. So men who would like to have sex with no strings attached but don't want to go through the bother of meeting the woman, taking her out to dinner, and getting over the barriers to casual sex just to have sex, would (if given the opportunity) like to have sex and then nothing more comes of it (hence 'if she was unconscious and I didn't get caught') but in real life that usually requires, if she doesn't want to have sex with you, trying to force her and then you get accused of rape and then bad things happen to you, so you don't do it.

After all, date rape drugs exist, even if not as much as claimed and if many such cases are in fact "no, you got black-out drunk, you weren't drugged". So guys who would drug women in order to fuck them and get away with it do exist.

I followed the citations, and the "sexual aggression scale" the researchers used in their questionnaire involves asking questions with five possible answers ranging from "not at all likely" to "very likely". However, they got that 30% statistic by re-coding the answers as either "yes" or "no".

So this seems like the classic social-science trick where you inflate the number of "yes" responses to a question by providing one answer choice that means "no" and four answer choices that all mean "yes". And because they asked about both "rape" and "forcing a female to do something sexual she didn't want to", you get the bias where people want to answer that one is less likely than the other.

(The "Materials and Methods" section of the paper makes clear that the "something sexual" wording was what they actually asked on the questionnaire. The researchers seem to have paraphrased that as "force a woman to sexual intercourse" in their results, which also seems kind of misleading.)

Well I checked and that seems in line with some, limited, statistics: https://www.newsweek.com/campus-rapists-and-semantics-297463

That study is awful, please read this article explaining its bad methodology. They used a 5 point scale that indicated likelihood to engage in any given activity. The question that's usually focused in on as the source of this claim was like question 35 on a long quiz asking if you would force a woman to do something sexual, where a question about whether you would rape a woman had just been asked in the same quiz, creating the implication that this question was something different that wasn't rape and obviously making people want to give rape the lowest likelihood.

As to how that five-point measure got made into the 1-in-3 statistic? Anything that wasn't recorded as a 1 was taken as a "yes". This is frankly a ridiculous method of coding that data and inflates the percentage by a crazy amount. The answers provided on that scale were basically "No, Yes, Yes, Yes, or Yes." Also "the men in Edwards et al (2014) were in between two to seven times less likely to say they would rape a woman than kill someone if they could, depending on how one interprets their answers. That's a tremendous difference; one that might even suggest that rape is viewed as a less desirable activity than murder." I suppose we live in a murder culture too, then.

In other words, it's an incredibly sketchy study with such awful methodology that I can't help but regard it as being intentionally bad just to inflate the percentage.

TBH I suspected the study was awful. In politicized fields of science it can be better to reason from first principles.

In other words, it's an incredibly sketchy study with such awful methodology that I can't help but regard it as being intentionally bad just to inflate the percentage.

Well I think that given the woke capture of the social sciences, any study which is unflattering to men as a group should be considered suspect.

It's harder for me to say why women aren't eager to bring this up as ammunition in the gender wars.

What's the point? I'm already fresh off a ban for being inappropriate in tone to a guy who said paedophilia isn't a real crime, it's "The baby-rapist is a canard invented to shame young men out of dating 17 year olds."

What response do you think I'd get about dragging up a case where a woman was drugged and raped between the ages of 59 and 68, her husband being responsible for arranging and doing all this? Robin Hanson's gentle silent rape would be the least of the examples shoved at me about how this wasn't a real crime at all.

It's a disgusting betrayal of trust, and the guy was clearly a creep along all dimensions, but what good is it trying to persuade the unpersuadable that this was wrong?

Over a period of nine years, from July 2011 to October 2020, Dominique Pelicot, a man from Mazan in south-eastern France, repeatedly drugged and raped his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and invited male strangers through the internet to rape her while she was unconscious. Gisèle, who was unaware of the abuse being perpetrated against her, was raped at least 92 times by 72 different men while her husband filmed and photographed them. The crimes were discovered in September 2020 after Dominique was arrested for taking upskirt photographs of women in a supermarket; the ensuing police investigation uncovered hundreds of images on his computer equipment of men raping his wife.

The trial of Dominique and 50 other men accused of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault began in Avignon on 2 September 2024, and concluded on 16 December, with verdicts delivered on 19 December. All were convicted, with Dominique receiving the maximum 20-year prison term. Dominique was also found guilty of taking indecent images of his daughter and two daughters-in-law, and the rape of the wife of co-defendant Jean-Pierre Maréchal, who was charged with drugging and raping his own wife, and not Gisèle.

The crimes were discovered in September 2020 after Dominique was arrested for taking upskirt photographs of women in a supermarket

One crime at a time, man. One of the most egregious cases I have seen.

Seriously this guy seems to be just genuinely awful

Yeah. The wife was brave to go public, a lot of people would have been too shocked and traumatised to do that. There's a lot happening behind closed doors that we have no idea about.

Sex pests are consistently unintelligent and seem to compulsively commit crimes to satiate their disgusting desires even when there's a high likelihood of being caught. If he was smart enough to do one crime at a time, he wouldn't be rape cucking his wife in the first place.

I don't know whether "Only commit one crime at a time" is somehow difficult advice that you need to be smart to follow, or if criminals are even dumber than I think after grokking that criminals are the dumbest people alive.

I think it's the dumbness, but also impulse control. "Don't do two crimes at same time" is very difficult unless the criminal in question is disciplined as well as smart. Doesn't even need to be all that smart provided he can be disciplined. But I think the sex pest types don't have the self-control or the smarts to figure out "pick one crime, stick to it" because it's all about what gets them their jollies so why not do a little from column A, a little from column B, and hey let's graduate to column C while we're at it?

Robin Hanson's gentle silent rape would be the least of the examples shoved at me about how this wasn't a real crime at all.

It's a disgusting betrayal of trust, and the guy was clearly a creep along all dimensions, but what good is it trying to persuade the unpersuadable that this was wrong?

<high decoupler hat>

Hanson isn't saying that rape of this form shouldn't be a crime or isn't wrong. His argument is better characterized as this is wrong and a crime, but so is cuckolding, in the sense of forcing a man to raise another man's child without his informed consent.

</high decoupler hat>

Hanson almost certainly has no objections to Pelicot and his fellow rapists being punished as he is, or even significantly more.

There was a lot of discussion of the case in the UK press and by opinion columnists, feminists prone to sharing infographics on social media certainly shared infographics about this case. The present Queen commented on it. Beyond that stories from non-Anglo countries are never going to be as prominent in the anglophone press for obvious reasons, but I think it received extensive coverage.

I think the starting point is to ask which rape/sexual assault cases DO get a lot of attention. And the answer to that is simple. When the person accused is Jeffrey Epstein; Harvey Weinstein; members of the Duke Lacrosse team; etc. In other words, if the alleged perpetrator is coded as being part of the white elite.

Stranger rapes with a "perfect victim" (roughly, middle-class and hot) get a lot of attention locally when they happen regardless of the perp.

Nobody gives a flying flamingo about date rapes or rapes of chavettes unless they happen to reinforce a partisan narrative. The Weinstein and Epstein cases have the legs they do because "blue-state white male 'billionaire'* elites are depraved sex pests" can be used to reinforce both partisan narratives, and the (((perps))) having an obvious ethnic skew that powerful people don't want to talk about gives you double super conspiracy theory memeness.

* Epstein liked people to think he was a billionaire, and is widely referred to as one by his left-wing political opponents, but his net worth peaked in the mid three figures. Weinstein never claimed to be a billionaire, and his net worth peaked in the low three figures. This is part of a general problem talking about the super-rich, which is that the level of wealth needed to qualify is between $30 and $100 million depending on who you ask, and neither "millionaire" nor "billionaire" is a useful description at that level. The midwit leftists complaining about "billionaires" absolutely mean to include Weinstein and Epstein in the group they are complaining about.

Stranger rapes with a "perfect victim" (roughly, middle-class and hot) get a lot of attention locally when they happen regardless of the perp.

I basically agree with this. Kind of a variant on Missing White Woman Syndrome.

Nobody gives a flying flamingo about date rapes or rapes of chavettes unless they happen to reinforce a partisan narrative. The Weinstein and Epstein cases have the legs they do because "blue-state white male 'billionaire'* elites are depraved sex pests" can be used to reinforce both partisan narratives, and the (((perps))) having an obvious ethnic skew that powerful people don't want to talk about gives you double super conspiracy theory memeness.

I basically agree with this as well. Although I think that if Weinstein or Epstein had been non-Jewish, the amount of mainstream attention would have been roughly the same. It's basically the fact that they are coded as elites, particularly white elites IMO.

I think they would have got the same amount of attention in the first few months after coming out. But it is the "outsider" (including fake outsiders like Trump when he was in opposition) conspiracy theory-type interest in Epstein which makes the scandal run for years, and I can see that "was he Mossad" is a huge part of that.

AFAIK Bill Cosby was canceled for sex stuff and he's black. Is he "coded as a white elite" too? Or are "elite-coded" and "white elite-coded" synonymous?

Is he "coded as a white elite" too?

They considered him a race traitor.

AFAIK Bill Cosby was canceled for sex stuff and he's black. Is he "coded as a white elite" too? Or are "elite-coded" and "white elite-coded" synonymous?

Probably you could come up with a formula for the amount of attention an allegation of sexual misbehavior will receive based on various factors including the perceived race, social status, notoriety, etc. of the alleged wrongdoer, the alleged victim, etc.

I'm certainly not claiming that alleged sex crimes by non-white celebrities receive no attention. If someone is well known, then a serious accusation of wrongdoing against that person is going to get attention. That being said, I'm pretty sure that if Bill Cosby had been white, the allegations against him would have gotten much more attention.

OTOH, Cosby was conservative coded. On the other hand, Diddy. On the gripping hand, Tyson.

Although I think that if Weinstein or Epstein had been non-Jewish, the amount of mainstream attention would have been roughly the same. It's basically the fact that they are coded as elites, particularly white elites IMO.

I think the Jewishness means the Hard-Right pounds the drum harder, but if they were non-Jewish then the NGO-Left would pound the drum harder, so in the end it kinda balances out, yeah.

I think the NGO-left is lousy with 'anti-Zionist' anti-semites for whom "Mossad is sponsoring paedophiles" is catnip in the same way "Jewish elites are sponsoring paedophiles" is catnip for right-populist anti-semites.

I think the NGO-left is lousy with 'anti-Zionist' anti-semites for whom "Mossad is sponsoring paedophiles" is catnip in the same way "Jewish elites are sponsoring paedophiles" is catnip for right-populist anti-semites.

I would have to agree with this, except that far-right anti-semites seem to get pretty excited about "anti-Zionism" as well.

his net worth peaked in the low three figures

Is this a typo or do you mean +10,002,000 with obligations of -10,000,000? Which indeed is very different from a man with $2000 in his account, although we don't have good ways to talk about this.

I was puzzled by this. I think he meant deca-millionaire. Maybe it’s a British thing?

Low/mid three figure millions. Online guesses of peak net worth are 300-500 million for Epstein and 150-250 million for Weinstein.

Dropping the last six figures when talking about client net worth/deal size is a financial professional shibboleth. (Even relatively successful financial professionals are not rich enough to do this when talking about our own money). I should probably stop doing it on the Motte.

You may give the wrong impression, yes :) Though very interesting to know!

I’ve heard “he is worth 100 or 150” without giving the base but I’ve never heard anyone mention figures while dropping the first six.

I probably overgeneralise some of these things. I am still trying to promote "metre" as a colloquial term for 10^9 Euros.

[Joke explanation for non-traders - "yard" is a corruption of "milliard" which was used in old-school British English to refer to 10^9, with "billion" being 10^12. (This convention is still used in French and German.) So a "yard" was traderspeak for 10^9 currency units, assumed USD unless otherwise stated]

Celebrities get more attention than regular people? Shocker.

I'd never heard of Epstein prior to his arrest. "Celebrity" is a bit of a reach.

Not quite the right word, perhaps. Still, is elites being more scrutinized by the public eye such an oddity?

No, absolutely not, provided the scrutiny is actually warranted (the Duke lacrosse case being a prominent example in which it was not).

Duke lacrosse bros weren’t celebrities

Yes, the "Duke lacrosse bros" weren't themselves celebrities, but also nobody knows or refers to them as individuals merely as pseudo-anonymous representatives of an elite University.

But that’s conflating things—elite and celebrity. The two do not always go hand in hand.

Yes, the "Duke lacrosse bros" weren't themselves celebrities, but also nobody knows or refers to them as individuals merely as pseudo-anonymous representatives of an elite University.

I think the key word here is "elite." The woke media were super excited about the idea of elite white frat-boy types gang-raping a black woman. It totally fit their Narrative.

Exactly. I think your point is correct and conflating elite with celebrity misses a key point.

You could’ve also mentioned the UVA scandal.

Duke University is a celebrity because it is an elite university. Representatives of Duke University become celebrities by proxy in their representative role, which is why they are always referred to as "member of the Duke lacrosse team" rather than individually named.

Duke University is a celebrity because it is an elite university. Representatives of Duke University become celebrities by proxy in their representative role, which is why they are always referred to as "member of the Duke lacrosse team" rather than individually named.

What would you say about a university which is not elite, but still very well known. For example, Alabama or Texas A & M. Would you say those qualify as "celebrities" under your definition?

Yes, by definition (emphasis mine):

The state or fact of being well known, widely discussed, or publicly esteemed.

Being an elite institution is merely a way to become a celebrity, and likely in my mind the reason Duke University is.

More comments

Duke lacrosse bros weren’t celebrities

Agreed. And if the accused individuals in the France case had been French bankers that nobody had ever heard of before, you can bet the case would have provoked a lot more outrage.

Even Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein weren't celebrities in the sense that they were relatively unknown before the accusations came out against them; the main reason they are well known is the accusations themselves.

Harvey Weinstein was extremely well known before the accusations themselves.

Harvey Weinstein was extremely well known before the accusations themselves.

The average person had no idea who Harvey Weinstein was before the infamous article came out. But anyway, let's assume for the sake of argument that he was a celebrity. Certainly Reid Seligmann had not been a celebrity.

@ChickenOverlord

He was well known enough for his name and activities to be a punchline in 30 Rock and for his name and appearance and attitudes to be parodied in Entourage which I suppose were higher concept than like, NCIS or Friends but not exactly esoteric knowledge.

He was well known enough for his name and activities to be a punchline in 30 Rock and for his name and appearance and attitudes to be parodied in Entourage which I suppose were higher concept than like, NCIS or Friends but not exactly esoteric knowledge.

Obviously it's a matter of semantics, but I would say that these things do not make him a celebrity, although I would agree he was well known within his industry. In any event, I think the example of Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty shows that the "celebrity" hypothesis lacks explanatory power. Unless of course you strategically re-define the word "celebrity"

The stuff in 30 Rock was inside baseball, nothing to do with the average person.

He was well known in the movie industry and by film nerds and by the sorts of people who actually pay attention to movie credits (guilty as charged), but he wasn't really well known amongst the general public.

Even Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein weren't celebrities

To echo @FiveHourMarathon: other than Harvey Weinstein, the only single individuals more frequently thanked in Oscar acceptance speeches were Steven Spielberg and God. If that's not a celebrity, I don't know what is.

If you asked the average Joe or Jane in early 2000s who Harvey Weinstein was I bet few would know (do ordinary people pay attention to thank you’s in an Oscar speech — do they even pay attention to the Oscar’s?).

If you showed a picture even less would’ve been able to tell you who that was.

If you asked them who Clooney was, a majority would be able to tell you.

do they even pay attention to the Oscar’s?

They don't now, but this is a fairly recent phenomenon. I'm old enough to remember people being outraged when The Dark Knight didn't receive a Best Picture nomination, a decision which was so controversial that it was the primary impetus for increasing the number of nominees from 5 to 10. In absolute terms, the best ratings the Oscars ever received was in 1998, when 57 million Americans (i.e. 20% of the country) tuned in. For comparison, in the same year the Seinfeld season finale saw 76 million viewers (27% of the country) tune in. Until very recently the Oscars were just as much as part of the Zeitgeist as any major sports tournament and would make for just as reliable water-cooler conversation.

Separately from the Oscars thing, The Weinstein Company produced some of the highest-grossing films of the twenty-first century, meaning millions of people would have seen the name "Weinstein" immediately before watching a film they enjoyed. That's bound to create name recognition and positive mental associations.

If you showed a picture even less would’ve been able to tell you who that was.

A noisy metric. People who work behind the camera are bound to be less facially recognisable than people who work in front of it, but that doesn't mean they aren't famous. A lot of people couldn't identify Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Alfred Hitchcock, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson etc. from their photos, but don't tell me these men aren't famous.

Sure people used to watch the Oscars (though still not most people). Someone ruining Weinstein in passing would not create widespread name recognition. Movies perhaps but even then how many people paid attention to that kind of thing?

Walt Disney was some what recognizable as he did shows etc as part of marketing. The other famous people were directors and people would go see movies due to directors. Pretty rare to go see a movie because of a producer.

More comments

I have the same question I had last time this came up. When she repeatedly passed out for hours only to wake up later with body aches and sore and messy private parts, did she not suspect anything? This seems like the sort of thing you only get away with a few times before even the slowest people wise up, but somehow he did this to her 2-3 times per week(!) for 9 years(!) including sex acts she wasn't willing to do, such as anal(!), and apparently these strange men were sometimes forcing her to gag on their members while she was unconscious(!). I do not understand how you she could not out the pieces of the puzzle together.

I'm really not trying to blame this victim here as the husband seems like an absolutely awful person, but there must be more to the story. Did the wife have some psychological issues that caused her to miss the signs? Was she aware of it but refused to report it because she feared for her safety? Was she hiding the abuse because she was too ashamed to reveal it? Did she have some mild kink that her husband just took way, way too far?

I have the same question I had last time this came up. When she repeatedly passed out for hours only to wake up later with body aches and sore and messy private parts, did she not suspect anything?

Seems to me that the right kind of childhood trauma would accomplish this pretty handily. Enough horrifying experiences at the hands of a caregiver during the right developmental window, and a kid's brain is extremely capable of constructing a protective narrative that runs "this didn't happen"/ "I feel weird but this was OK, ____ loves me, so clearly there's nothing wrong"/"since ___ is my only protector, actually they are great and I am fine."

Everyone's lived reality is heavily filtered through their existing stock of life narratives, so it's plausible that a traumatized person with this background could go on to (a) feel most comfortable/ most attracted to other horrifying abusers, and (b) not consciously notice signs of additional abuse, or notice them but on some level be incapable of recognizing or acknowledging them. It's how women who were molested go on to serially date child molesters, and often don't consciously notice the signs that those men are also molesting their own kids.*

Pelicot's mom died when she was 9 and she went on to be raised by her military father. I haven't read her memoirs, but that history, while not dispositive, is also not a history that's inconsistent with suffering childhood abuse at the hands of a male caregiver at some point. During her marriage, even prior to the rapes, there were also many red flags that her husband was a deadbeat and a sexually dangerous man: convictions for assault and upskirt pictures, as I remember, and he didn't hold a steady job but launched a series of failed businesses while her salary supported the family. The fact that she stuck with him through all of that has to say something about what she'd been primed to see as normal in a relationship.

*This is also why I am unimpressed by people justifying sexual aggression/violence against women by quoting stats on the number of women who fantasize about these things. Repetition compulsion will make you seek out repeated encounters with the things you most fear and loathe, in a vain attempt to master them.

This would make it all add up for me. And adds an extra layer of tragedy to the whole affair.

If you read up on the case it started with her own prescription for sedatives, then he added muscle relaxants and would police and supervise the men to such a degree that he insisted they warmed their hands before touching her and didn't smoke cigarettes beforehand lest they smell of smoke. Apparently she did initially question him about deliberately drugging her but he gaslit her (if you'll pardon the proper use of the term) that she was too ill to know her own mind.

Thanks, that makes a lot more sense. Really sad stuff.

All this is speculation, but if she was used to waking up sore because hubby wanted some and didn't bother waking her up before sticking his dick in, that would have been enough of an explanation for her (and hubby sure sounds like the kind of guy who thought a little somnophilia was no big deal). Also she was 58 when this started, so she would have gone through menopause. Physical and mental changes happen then. Doctors are very prone to being dismissive of women's complaints along the lines of "you're just getting older, these are natural changes" if she did go to her doctor about it.

And if he was careful enough to clean up, and if she mentioned anything to him he had plausible explanations like "oh you must be getting incontinent in your old age" and so on, then it would take a lot to immediately jump to "the answer must be I'm being raped by strangers in my sleep". You'd sooner think you were paranoid and worry about were you going crazy than accept that as an explanation.

Being raped by strangers in your sleep is not a common occurrence. It's entirely possible that she thought her husband was having sex with her while she slept and even if she didn't like it she didn't see what the big deal was. Like if you know your husband doesn't always take no for an answer you'd just assume it was him doing it.

This seems the most likely explanation to me. Not noticing anything at all or attributing it to menopause seems far-fetched. Noticing but not jumping to the deeply-weird truth seems plausible.

I would think that the problem is self-compounding due to the absurdity heuristic. A woman waking up with sore genitals for the first time ever could conceivably put 2 and 2 together and go "oh God, have I been raped in my sleep"; but provided she otherwise trusted her husband, what kind of a mind does it take to go "I've been periodically waking up from sleep with sore genitals for years; it must be because I have been systematically raped every time"? The latter sounds insane. Even if the thought occurred to her, she might very well dismiss it as ridiculous paranoia. Human bodies are weird and full of little aches and itches, middle-aged women's bodies especially. I would guess that precisely because it was a somewhat regular occurrence, she just assumed these sensations must be some kind of natural most-menopausal ailment.

And perhaps it's simply that there is nothing to fight about. There is no toxoplasma, no scissor statement.

I think that's the main point. There is no apologetic side for the husband or his co-conspirators.

Speculatively, I would also say that Mme Pelicot being older has something to do with it. The instinctive aversion that women have to rape stems primarily from the fact that they are forced to carry the child of an inferior man they didn't choose, who is presumably absent. Men's instinctive aversion is that someone is doing this to 'our' women. Gisele was 58 when the rapes started, so our pregnancy alarms don't go off.

People are obviously sympathetic to Gisele, but I think the general reaction shades more towards confusion and disgust than outrage. As if her husband had sex with an animal or something.

I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman if there were no consequences.

50/2,000,000/20 years = large fraction?

Yeah, you really have your finger on something big here. Huge effects. With such a strong signal that certainly holds true for every man, and women being unconscious like a third of their lives, the true rape rate must approach 100%.

To state the obvious, we have to adjust for

  • the rarity of the opportunity (I admit, there aren't many Dominique Pelicots around)
  • how many men would have sought out the opportunity if they knew it existed
  • how many men sought out such an opportunity but just didn't find it (it's not like it was well advertised)
  • how many men were afraid of being caught and decided against it
  • how many men who would have done it if the victim were younger or more attractive
  • how many men went through with it and simply weren't caught
  • not sure where you got 2 million. ChatGPT estimates the population within 50km of Mazan to be 700-900k, so adult men are probably 300-400k?
  • it was 9 years, not 20

I'm genuinely curious what your honest estimate would be of the fraction of adult men who would have sex with an unknowing unconscious woman (that they're attracted to) if they could be guaranteed no consequences. I want to say 5% of men acculturated to the modern West, probably much higher in other times and places. The prevalence of rape in wartime historically points to higher number I think.

I want to say 5% of men acculturated to the modern West

IMO, this is ridiculously low.

  • "Would you fuck a random hot woman (with no STDs)?" Call it 30 percent (assuming the other 70 percent have romantic partners and don't want to cheat).

  • "Would you fuck a hot woman (with no STDs) who put zero effort into the sex, but merely allowed you to have your way with her?" Still 30 percent (all of the remainder).

  • "Would you rape a hot, unconscious woman (with no STDs), if it were magically absolutely 100-percent guaranteed that you wouldn't be caught?" I think 10 to 20 percent (1/3 to 2/3 of the remainder) is a reasonable guess.

How familiar are you with the case? Because it reads like a swinger presenting conman type succeeded in persuading a bunch of dumb low life deviants -- more likely to be rapists -- to entertain his own fetish. Some portion of them were fully cognizant of the situation, but others were too stupid to see the game or indeed convinced themselves their fantasy was real. A French retiree pimping his wife of 40 years without consequences. In other words you, a low life, congregate on Roofie and Rape Unconscious Women Fantasy forum so you're very motivated to indulge in your preferred paraphilia. The number of men in the Wiki chart without prior criminal convictions is a minority.

If we restrict the circumstances to the worst aspects of the real crime as we see it, then I feel safe with an an estimate of <1% of men as likely to participate in it. If we ignore the substance abuse claims said to a judge we have: a child porn guy, sixteen prior convictions including child sexual assault guy, a repeat domestic violence offender, "eight prior convictions for theft" man, career drug dealer fled-to-Morocco guy, a previous inpatient at psych ward, and a one Mohamed Rafaa who had served time for raping his own daughter. What percentage of men are likely to do any of those things? There's an answer to some of your questions in the data of sexual offenders.

A couple do sound like average enough middle-aged men, but then I'm reminded these were late middle-aged men (old for rapists, statistically) found themselves guilty of rape after they trolled the Roofie and Rape Unconscious Women Fantasy forum. I don't think there are any men in this case who were surprised when they discovered they were quite willing to engage in a criminal taboo. Bob, college student, who decides to have sex with Anne after a night out on the town because she said she would put out but fell asleep is something that sounds way more generalizable to me. Bob committed date rape, and I'd guess 5-15% of men are potentially like Bob. The complexity of consent is no stranger to this forum and few cases are as clear cut as sex with a drugged French retiree. Bob rarely finds himself popping into the bedroom of an old, sleeping French woman with her scumbag husband cheering him on with high-fives and assurances from the cuck chair.

Sex with an unconscious Scarlett Johansson lookalike does sounds like something with more potential popularity among men. An unconscious woman, however, is next level for "Are you done yet?" My assumption is that sex with an unconscious stranger is (I imagine) categorically different than bad sex with a disinterested or bored woman no matter how attractive they are. (Can confirm.) So we're back to asking about general rates of sexual deviancy and willingness to act on that. Almost all men will have sex with women not fully interested in the sex, but <5% could shamelessly rape strangers to completion as unconscious sex doll objects without memory.

You know who I bet could answer your questions well? Aella.

An unconscious woman, however, is next level for "Are you done yet?"

With the caveat that this isn’t something I’ve actually experinced, I’m actually pretty sure this isn’t the case, because if the woman is unconscious there isn’t any pressure to finish.

Maybe but Aella doesn’t shower so….

I think that the "large fraction" of men is actually closer than your 50/2M.

Consider a hypothetical woman whose kink it is to have men fuck her while she is unconscious. So she explains that to her tinder dates. "I will let you record a short video statement of me consenting for legal purposes, then drink my roofie and as soon as I am unconscious, you can perform certain sex acts we agreed upon beforehand."

Do you honestly believe that 99% of men would go ewww and quit their date right there?

My prediction would be that there would be 10-30% for which that kink would be a hard no. Perhaps 5-10% would be really into it. The remainder would find that it makes sex less enjoyable for them. Some would be able to arrange another fuckdate on short notice which they anticipate will lead to hotter sex. The others would likely take her up on her offer -- it might not be the best sex of their lives, but it beats jerking off.

That is to say, a majority of men on tinder would likely be willing to go along with having sex with an unconscious woman, as long as there are no ethical or legal obstacles. I do not think that this tells us anything about men except that a lot of them are underfucked and will prefer suboptimal sex to no sex.

In the French case, it seems very unlikely that the husband contacted 2M men and only got 50 to take him up on his offer.

From an evopsych point of view, I would imagine that by inclination, most men are born indifferent about consent, just as we are born without much in the way of inhibition towards killing members of our outgroup or stealing from them. The pro-social preferences for not raping, murdering or stealing all have to be taught, and just like we sometimes fail to instill a deep preference against murder, we also sometimes fail to instill a deep preference against rape.

Presumably (I did not read deeply into the case), the husband searched his accomplices in forums where the norms about consent were horribly absent, perhaps some telegram channel related to upskirt photos. This might explain why he found so many without anyone reporting him to the cops.

At the end of the day, my feeling is that there is a significant minority of people who are severely misaligned, and only the threat of punishment keeps them from defecting. His accomplices were simply taking up his offer because they believed that their crimes would be much less likely to be discovered compared to rapes they might commit on their own.

Your thought experiment is "what if it weren't rape"? Yes, I expect those numbers would differ, if consent was explicit and the woman were attractive.

But this is just misandrist equivocation. "Some significant fraction of men would engage in behavior that would be rape if not for all the explicit consent and instruction from the woman" isn't great evidence for "some significant fraction of men are hardened rapists who are victimizing anything unconscious in their general vicinity".

Before we question "why is there no outrage over X?", we must first consider if there is even something to be outraged over. Horrific crime happens, people know this and it's why we expect for police and other authority institutions to exist to punish them. In this case upon being discovered, the men they could find involved were arrested and charged. There's not really much anyone could object to in this scenario except against the criminals, the people who are already in the process of being punished.

Now if they get off easy then there would be room for outrage. If the police had ignored it, there would be room for outrage. If a bunch of freaks were trying to defend it, there would be room for outrage. Right now the process worked. It's a tragedy for sure, but not really much else.

And like you said there's also little toxoplasma. Nobody is calling for collective punishment over gender or race so there's no reason to "defend innocent men" or anything so no counter outrage room either. It seems to be the simple idea of guilty people get punished working as it should.

To me this case spoke more strongly to the nature of the French, who I have always disliked.

This.

I notice that legacy media occasionally tries to push the story but there’s basically no social media take-up by anyone reading the news, because it gets (rightly) understood as categorised in a box of “Shit French people do”, not “Shit men do”.

It seems like we get these kinds of "men are sexual degenerates" posts semi-regularly, I've never found them particularly convincing, and this one's no exception. The major problem with your analysis is that it is, ultimately, an example of the Chinese robber fallacy, in spite of the atypical circumstances of this case. It is always possible to find examples of regional cabals of people who have helped to perpetrate or cover up a crime, but that does not make it an illustration or indication of larger society (I would also note that 50km around Mazan is a massive radius that features the city of Avignon, home to 487,000 people in its larger metropolitan area, and the arrondissement of Carpentras is itself home to 220,000 people; it is not particularly surprising to me that someone could find 72 criminals there over a period of nine years if they really tried). But here is an example of what one can write that follows the broad strokes of your comment, if so motivated:

This Valentine's Day, I am thinking about why the Thai penile-amputation epidemic has received so little attention, sparked so little discussion. This is the curious case of a rather hyperspecific form of crime that became oddly common in Thailand in the decade after 1970, where angry wives severed the penises of philandering husbands. I could not find a single mention of it on this site. You could claim this was an isolated incident that has no implications for society in general, that this is cherrypicking isolated cases and not reflective of an attitude that women have towards men generally. But series of interviews carried out with prominent Thai women revealed that they almost unanimously endorsed this method of retribution. It was to the extent that expertise in managing penile amputations has developed in Thailand, and that “I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat,” is a common joke and immediately understood at all levels of society.

This article notes about it: "In 2008, the Journal of Urology carried a retrospective by Drs Genoa Ferguson and Steven Brandes of the Washington University in St Louis, called The Epidemic of Penile Amputation in Thailand in the 1970s. Ferguson and Brandes conclude that: "Women publicly encouraging and inciting other scorned women to commit this act worsened the epidemic. The vast majority of worldwide reports of penile replantation, to this day, are a result of what became a trendy form of retribution in a country in which fidelity is a strongly appreciated value."" It was endorsed by female society at large, publicly, occasionally in a televised way (which suggests they expected no blowback for these viewpoints), and thus resulted in a rise in prevalence in Thailand.

In the West, such light-hearted endorsements have occasionally become apparent as well, and for far less than infidelities. The Catherine Kieu Becker case is only one example of that. On July 15, 2011, a popular CBS daytime television show titled The Talk discussed the news story of Becker who was charged with drugging her husband, tying him to the bed, and waiting until he awoke to sever the man's penis off with a knife. She then proceeded to throw the appendage into the garbage disposal before calling 911 and reporting the crime herself. The audience members along with the other hosts immediately after hearing the details and the supposed reasoning for the mutilation (the husband had asked for a divorce) responded surprisingly by laughing. One woman in the audience was heard saying, "That'll teach him" and the host found it amusing enough to repeat it so it could be broadcast. Sharon Osbourne, one of the hosts of the show, offered her opinion that she felt the crime was "quite fabulous" only after making a gesture with her hands mimicking what the severed body part would have looked like while being destroyed in the garbage disposal. In spite of the talk of how men find it hard to relate to women, men do not collectively laugh on TV about women being raped; I find it quite interesting that women are capable of making light and even excusing when this kind of mutilation occurs to men.

I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of women do not view sexually violent retribution against men as particularly heinous, and are very capable of endorsing these acts, committing it while justifying it to themselves as a method of revenge for perceived slights. This is the nature of women. The vast majority of women know just how vengeful women can be, and I have the sense that while women can empathise with other women, most of them simply struggle to empathise with harms to men. The women in question here had issues with their husbands, their husbands weren't satisfying their needs in one way or another, and as such they're capable of viewing it as a trivial matter when they do the deed.

Is this sentiment unhinged? Maybe it is, but it's where this kind of reasoning is capable of getting you. When looking at 8 billion people interacting over the course of decades, it will always be possible to find case studies that sound like prima facie convincing evidence for most any position. But that never stops people pointing at them as soldiers for whatever viewpoint they want to support and going "See? This proves [sweeping statement] about [significant proportion of the population]".

The audience members along with the other hosts immediately after hearing the details and the supposed reasoning for the mutilation (the husband had asked for a divorce) responded surprisingly by laughing.

I know it's an inappropriate remark to make on my side in this context, but I find this hilarious. You'd assume as a man that the thing that's incur women's wrath in this case would be him not wanting a divorce or refusing one (i.e. expecting the poor wife to just keep putting up with it). Damned if you do, damned if you don't, I guess.

With respect to Sharon Osbourne, I agree with you but I wouldn't draw that many conclusions. If you read up on her antics and controversies, I think you'll also find that she's generally an insufferable, aggressive twat. And The Talk has always been a lipstick feminist circlejerk, as far as I know.

And with respect to the Thai/Siamese story, I'd mention the Hungarian post-WW1 rural arsenic poisoning epidemic, which was more or less a similar phenomenon.

Interesting, I wondered if the Thai cases were inspired by publicity around Lorena Bobbitt, but that case happened in 1993 so couldn't have been a factor.

I don't think it's unhinged. I do actually find the reaction of women to penile amputation (which is worse than post-menopausal rape) very troubling and recall encountering this phenomenon on a different occasion as well. I will conclude that both sexes struggle to empathize with the opposite sex, especially as regards sex-specific harms, and perhaps I have given one direction less attention than it deserves. This is all very discouraging.

I don’t really understand your point, or what you’re trying to say. I care about and love the women in my life a great deal. I empathize seriously with the experiences of victims of sexual abuse, and in fact I find their stories hard to encounter because I feel such anger and outrage at the loss of self-possession and immense sense of shame and guilt that survivors struggle to overcome. It’s evil, plain and simple.

The reason it’s not a subject of debate is just what you said last: there’s no toxoplasmosa. It was a horrible crime and the guilty were sentenced.

You seem, at least to me, to be trying to argue from this case that heterosexual love is impossible, or that heterosexuality is inherently corrupting. Well, actually, you said “male sexuality.” That’s interesting.

Your profile hasn’t seen any posts in two years, and in one of the final posts before this valentine’s post you wrote this:

I bring these examples up not to harangue men but to explicitly set aside the discourse about romantic relationships, in which most men and women seem happy to accept a certain asymmetry. A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy. As a spergy gay man, I don't have a dog in this fight, if it is a fight, but I do find explicit commentary on the expectations of gendered social interaction helpful (and entertaining).

Do you believe that love between gay men is possible? Is lesbian love possible?

Both, as I’m sure you know, have cultures of asymmetry and opposites, of masc tops and femme bottoms and dalliances with much older, wealthier men and daddy kinks, of butch lesbians and lipstick lesbians. Is gay love fairer than straight love to you?

Asymmetry coexists with mutual desire all the time, and with every orientation. And so, of course, does abuse and sexual assault. Love exists in spite of the evil of this world, and indeed sexual tenderness exists in concert with the impulses of male sexuality.

Most men are driven by a desire not only to please themselves through sex but to please their partners as well. I don’t doubt that, as a gay man, you are highly familiar with gay men who would rather give head than receive it; you should understand that the desire to please your sex partner exists among straight men as well. Most men highly enjoy sex noises and dirty talk from their partners, as a sign of that dirty phrase, “enthusiastic consent”, and of mutual pleasure. There could be no jokes about women faking orgasms if men did not find the idea of women faking orgasms to be Ego-destroying. Men overwhelmingly find the idea of sex with an unconscious person unarousing, in addition to morally unconscionable.

I guess I wonder what drives you to believe that male sexuality is inherently corrupting, instead of merely a force that can be used for good as well as bad — obviously, in this case, for bad. Have you ever fallen in love with someone, and wanted more than anything their happiness? Have you ever desired sex with someone out of a desire for unity with them, to make them feel good, to be as close with them as physically and emotionally possible? These are all compatible with the intensity of raw, undifferentiated male desire, and if you might allow me to say, far more erotic than mere lust.

I'm also wondering about the claim that this case has received "little attention". I think it has received a large amount of media attention for an event in France not related to international policy, at least in Finland, and has been discussed in considerable detail by feminists in social media, insofar as I've seen.

I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman if there were no consequences. This is the nature of men. We have known this since the beginning of time. Most adults understand this already. The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general, and this particular manifestation is hardly a surprise. Women largely know this force, too, because they have been told of it, or because they have been targeted by it, though they sometimes pretend not to know.

Have we really known this? What large fraction?

It would be uncharitable to say you are typical-minding here, and I am not trying to establish myself as some kind of saint by saying "What the fuck?" but really... what the fuck? To me, having sex with an unconscious woman would have pretty much zero appeal no matter how hot she is, and I have a hard time believing I'm some weird undersexed outlier. It's not even just about it being rape (which it obviously is), but it would also be like fucking a RealDoll, which I know some men do also but I have always thought has to be the absolute last refuge of the desperate and pathetic.

Obviously there are men who get off on it (I know there are men who will stick their dicks in anything warm), but I'm unconvinced, even if this guy found 72 of them, that they aren't akin to rapists and pedophiles... sure, we all know these urges exist in the male population, and they aren't super-rare, but neither are they... normal.

It's harder for me to say why women aren't eager to bring this up as ammunition in the gender wars. Doesn't this vindicate the radical feminists?

It only vindicates them if you agree with them that this is in fact the natural state of men and we'd all do it if given the chance and that every husband secretly hates his wife. That's certainly a view unironically held in parallel, horseshoe-like, by a certain strain of radical feminists and ultra-misogynists, but the problem is that they are largely wrong about men being amoral rapacious monsters barely(unfairly) held in check by society.

And perhaps it's simply that there is nothing to fight about. There is no toxoplasma, no scissor statement

Well, yeah. I doubt even our he-man woman-haters will be able to muster much of a "This wasn't actually bad" argument. How do you defend it? She was unconscious so she didn't really suffer? She's female and therefore should be available for any use to which her husband sees fit? You have to go pretty far out there to defend the indefensible. Some things don't engender disagreement even between liberals and conservatives.

To me, having sex with an unconscious woman would have pretty much zero appeal no matter how hot she is, and I have a hard time believing I'm some weird undersexed outlier. It's not even just about it being rape (which it obviously is), but it would also be like fucking a RealDoll, which I know some men do also but I have always thought has to be the absolute last refuge of the desperate and pathetic.

I'm just a "desperate and pathetic" virgin, but I think this sounds unreasonable. Isn't it a stereotype that the hotter a woman is, the less effort she feels that she needs to put into sex? Yet, despite this stereotype, men still seek out hot women (including prostitutes). The difference between sex with a lazy "starfish" woman and sex with an unconscious woman seems negligible.

Isn't it a stereotype that the hotter a woman is, the less effort she feels that she needs to put into sex?

Uh, I understood the stereotype is that the hotter she is, the less effort she needs to put into obtaining sex. Which is pretty obviously true. The stereotype that hot women neither enjoy nor actively participate in sex is a new one to me, unless you're just referring to the stereotype that women in general don't really enjoy sex and only perform it to the minimum degree necessary to secure a mate. Which, may be true for a lot of women, but (ahem) I have it on good authority, not all of them.

I cannot say I am a connoisseur of prostitutes but my understanding also is that men generally prefer hookers to at least pretend to be into it and are not going to enjoy the experience much if she just lies there with an "Are you done yet?" expression on her face.

The difference between sex with a lazy "starfish" woman and sex with an unconscious woman seems negligible.

Can't say I've done either, but damn, who are these guys finding? And obviously, the difference would still be pretty significant in terms of at least implied consent (which, evidently and depressingly, a lot of guys still seem to think is a quaint modern notion that we shouldn't care about that much).

"Obtaining" is probably not the correct word. She's "obtaining" sex with the man whether she's enthusiastic or not, after all. That's not the relevant part. What I think is going on here is that hot women normally assume, for a good reason, that they have a strong mesmerizing effect on men. If she submits to a man's desire, she assumes that he'll be so overwhelmed with urge and longing that he'll be unable to think of anything else but taking her in hand and ravishing her. This has indeed been normally the case throughout history. It's just the typical female fantasy (heh) and the reason why "rape fantasies" exist. The idea that she'd need to proactively take additional steps to inflame his urges so as to ensure that he really wants her and that he's really enjoying it all is, frankly, not only alien but also degrading and demoralizing to her.

That sounds like a just-so story. How many hot women have you had sex with, to know so much about the calculations in their mind and their sexual performance? Do you base this on anything at all other than supposition?

Uh, I understood the stereotype is that the hotter she is, the less effort she needs to put into obtaining sex.

I'm pretty sure I've seen jokes on 4chan (and possibly even on Reddit) about how the ugly "practice girlfriend" will put in extra effort in bed while a hotter woman will not. But I can't find any such jokes after a cursory search.

Uh, I understood the stereotype is that the hotter she is, the less effort she needs to put into obtaining sex.

That's less a stereotype than a factual statement. But @ToaKraka is far from the first person I've seen claiming that attractive women are crap in bed, while mid women are demons in the sack. I don't think there's anything to it, but I have independently encountered multiple men making such a claim.

Isn't it a stereotype that the hotter a woman is, the less effort she feels that she needs to put into sex?

I've encountered this claim on many occasions. There's no way to express the following opinion without sounding like I'm humblebragging, so consider this an inb4.

I've had an unusually high number of female sexual partners, so my sample size is unusually large. Some of those partners I would consider quite attractive (with the caveat that none were literal supermodels or Hollywood actresses); some were "mid"; some were not even that, and I only had sex with them out of sheer desperation at the tail end of a lengthy dry spell. If this claim (that attractive women put in less effort in the bedroom) has any truth to it, then in my fairly extensive sexual history I honestly cannot claim to have observed it firsthand. I've been with hot girls who starfished and passable girls who starfished; I've been with hot girls who were rearing to go and passable girls who were rearing to go. I think the best predictors of how enthusiastic a woman will be in bed are a) her basal sex drive (controlling for how long it's been her last sexual encounter); b) her sexual experience (everyone's a little shy and awkward their first few times; the trope of the pure virgin who's a demon in the sack during her deflowering only exists in porn); and c) how attracted she is to her sexual partner. In the latter case I'm thinking in particular of a fairly hot girl I met ~7 years ago, who did have sex with me but seemed of two minds about it. I imagine it would have been a very different experience if I'd been someone with whom she had more chemistry.

Frankly, I think this "hot girls are all crap in bed, while mid girls give it socks" thing is one of the purest, most transparent examples of sour grapes in human history. I daresay most men claiming as much have literally never had sex with an unusually attractive woman, and so aren't in a position to make any kind of generalisation.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that my assorted sexual partners came from a diverse array of ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, socioeconomic statuses and so on. It's not like I'm making a sweeping generalisation about the entire fairer sex based on a sample drawn from a single country.

The difference between sex with a lazy "starfish" woman and sex with an unconscious woman seems negligible.

I assure you, it is not. I've had sex with women who seemed a bit unenthused or tired etc., but I would never dream of having sex with a woman who was literally unconscious.

As a contra anecdote - I've also slept with lots of women, and I've found my level of attractiveness varying quite a bit over the course of my life so I've done a decent range.

I've found this meme to be an exaggeration but mostly true. Plenty of mid women are mid in bed, but the gorgeous women were way more likely to be bad, especially 9s and 10s. Being bad in bed doesn't always mean unenthusiastic, but plenty of 9s and 10s just didn't know how to do anything. Importantly this sometimes included what they liked - since they knew they could count on a man trying as hard as possible they never put much effort into figuring themselves out either, much less a dick.

Might be enthusiastic, but technical skills were rare.

Women have a meme about men with big dicks being bad in bed, and similarly it's not universally true but really does seem to capture the heart of it.

We should compare spreadsheets. (You do have a spreadsheet, right?)

I am an adult in a committed relationship now. For legal reasons any spreadsheet would have been deleted looooong ago.

I did have a (female???) friend who kept detailed information on her phone with phallus stats, which should would whip out at parties from time to time.

That was always horrifying and amusing.

Dying to understand the significance of the three question marks.

I am an adult in a committed relationship now.

So am I. The spreadsheet stays.😁

Dying to understand the significance of the three question marks.

Gossiping with your girlies about men's performance is very female coded. A spreadsheet (or document) with detailed stats is very male coded.

So am I. The spreadsheet stays.😁

I like my balls attached, thanks.

especially 9s and 10s

I suppose everyone has their own definition, but assuming a “10” is at least 99.9th percentile for fit, healthy people your age (so probably 99.99th percentile overall; one in ten thousand men or women) I think seducing many 10s would be quite impressive.

Fair dinkum - my standard for what a 9 or a 10 is is something like "is a model" "could be a model" "if you told your friends she was a model they would believe it." With a 10 being more of a get drunk with your bros and sass each other and they won't disagree she is a 10 even though that is a big brag.

I don't think I've thought of it the terms you describe but it's an interesting thought. If a 10 means 99.9th percentile then it really means something, but I suspect you'd run into taste issues. Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, and Lisa (Blackpink) are all probably 10s by any objective standard but if you go by 99.9th percentile for an individual man's interest then at least one of those three is likely to get thrown out most of the time (see: the hate for Zendaya here).

Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, and Lisa (Blackpink) are all probably 10s by any objective standard but if you go by 99.9th percentile for an individual man's interest then at least one of those three is likely to get thrown out most of the time (see: the hate for Zendaya here).

I agree that the people calling Zendaya ugly are overdoing it: by any metric she's a pretty girl. But I'd hardly call her a 10/10. In fact, I think part of the basis of her appeal is that she has a certain girl-next-door quality that makes her seem approachable and down-to-earth: a nerdy MCU fan projecting himself onto Tom Holland could imagine himself dating Zendaya in a way he couldn't with (to pick a handful of her MCU costars) Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman or Cobie Smulders. I think any of these women (in their prime) would be considered more attractive than Zendaya by just about everyone.

I mean this is where taste comes in - you'll note that she doesn't look at all like your other examples.

That said she's literally famous for being beautiful in an industry that the most beautiful people in the world go into. If getting paid millions of dollars a year to be beautiful isn't a sign of being a 10/10 then I don't know what is.

You are allowed to find her not attractive. Many people don't like um ethnic women, or women who are low on curves. That's preference, but if we are looking objectively...

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Isn't a "10" more likely to be, uh -- 90th %tile?

Unless you are using the female scale, which as I recall is exponential to the point where a 90th %tile man is like a "5" -- men are much more linear!

It seems better to model it like a normal distribution where the vast majority of people are in the 3.5 to 6.5 range. Your way seems to lead to a lot of ambiguity between what counts as an 8 or a 9 or a 10, for example, because they’re all equally common.

That's the female scale! I maintain that my way is far closer to the way that men see the world; it is, in fact, non-trivial to tell the difference between a 9 (maybe even an 8) and a 10.

The neat part is that this... kind of reflects the male view on attractiveness pretty perfectly.

I don’t know what the percentage is, but it seems we have ample evidence to conclude that some nontrivial percentage of men really would rape more or less any human given the chance. Between this case, the Epstein Files, Rotherham, wartime rape, I wouldn’t be surprised at any number between 5 and 80 percent of men.

5 percent I believe. I don't think you'd find 80 percent in an Indian slum.

To me, having sex with an unconscious woman would have pretty much zero appeal no matter how hot she is, and I have a hard time believing I'm some weird undersexed outlier. It's not even just about it being rape (which it obviously is), but it would also be like fucking a RealDoll, which I know some men do also but I have always thought has to be the absolute last refuge of the desperate and pathetic.

I’d add my 2 cents from a dudebro perspective.

If you’re a toxic shitty dudebro with a friend group of the same sort, you’re likely to regularly engage in acts that you basically consider to be pranks. Either you do this in a pair or in a group, or by yourself, but also in the latter case you’re mostly doing it to gain bragging rights and form memories with other shithead dudebros.

Some examples I can think of: acts of vandalism and theft typically associated with teenage delinquency. (Smashing up the mailbox of that neighbor you hate. Stealing a car while drunk, going on a joyride at night, abandoning it at some desolate place. Stealing and shoplifting for the hell of it.) Pulling pranks on your loser computer nerd classmates and bullying them. Getting blackout drunk and boning the town slut. Getting some loser broad drunk/drugged and spit-and-roasting her with your bro. Lying to some woman you picked up that you’ll use a rubber and then doing her bareback. Going on an exotic vacation and boning some whorey tourist girls. Picking up some fat girl who’s clearly desperate and without self-esteem, debasing her sexually (but still consensually, at least in the everyday normie sense of the word) and never calling her afterwards. Jizzing on your girlfriend’s hair even though you promised her you won’t do that. And boning some unconscious / passed-out girl.

The sole reason you’re engaging in any of this is so that you can brag and tell stories about it to your bros, have a good laugh about it and down another round of drinks, and forget about it until you bring it up again sometime later. It’s not that you’re proud about it; on some level you do realize that all of this is kind of wrong, and that you’d never do this to a woman you do care about, or you imagine you would care about. And it’s also assumed that you’ll embellish or simply make up some details. After all, it’s done for laughs, to have fun. Your bros know it, and you know that they do the same things, the embellishment included. It’s basically a male bonding ritual. And it’s not like sleazy women don’t have something similar anyway.

they are largely wrong about men being amoral rapacious monsters barely(unfairly) held in check by society.

I think you're wrong here actually. I think you're the one doing typical minding, and most men are actually like this. Some are like you and me, who find that behavior repugnant, but then... Africa. And India. And and and.

I think this is another case of fish in the post-Christian sea having no idea about water.

I'm skeptical that Christianity (or Western civilization) is the sole difference, though I know this is a popular theory (with Christians). Yes, large parts of the third world are rapacious hellholes, but there are ancient and contemporary non-Christian societies that do not seem to have been such.

I'd like to draw the distinction between states with enough capacity (and will) to deter rape by threat of violent reprisal, and peoples who believe that rape is implicitly morally wrong regardless of circumstance.

As far as I can tell this is a uniquely Christian innovation. Even the notion that a woman should have the final veto in whether she gets married seems to be Christian; c.f. the custom of the priest asking her if 'she does'.

Jewish legal codes speak for themselves and Islam is cool with sex slaves taken in wartime. Pagans understood rape as a normal reward for conquering armies and that higher class men could naturally enough have their way with lower class women, not to mention slaves.

Really, the notion that rape is wrong is fairly peculiar historically.

Same with murdering one's own infant children but that's another topic.

Really, the notion that rape is wrong is fairly peculiar historically.

I would argue that women have always thought it's wrong, so it seems more like the notion that women's feelings should be considered is peculiar historically. And I don't think it's that peculiar, or that Christians have been particularly better about not raping and treating lower class women as public goods. It is definitely not a uniquely Christian innovation that women have some say in who they marry; Christians are not the first people ever who recognized female agency and gave women rights.

Your reference to Jewish legal codes and Islam makes me think we're going to go down the same road we've gone before, where the worst and most uncharitable readings of what other religious books say should be taken literally, without context, and as exactly what all those people really believe and those with a more humanitarian reading aren't really following their religion, whereas Christianity (and the Old Testament in particular) should be not subjected to similar treatment.

I weary of the women-haters (I don't mean you, though you seem to be giving them too much credit) who argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property and before our modern age, no man in any civilization ever gave a shit how females felt about their treatment.

I weary of the women-haters (I don't mean you, though you seem to be giving them too much credit) who argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property and before our modern age, no man in any civilization ever gave a shit how females felt about their treatment.

There are precious few (though admittedly not zero) women-haters here who "argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property". Most restrain themselves to recognizing that humans tend to view each other instrumentally by default, and that includes men viewing women instrumentally, women viewing men instrumentally, and society viewing both instrumentally. That the non-women-haters seem to only be concerned about the former and sometimes the latter--when women are being viewed instrumentally by society--demonstrates they don't view men as humans deserving rights and view women as inherently superior to men.

There are precious few (though admittedly not zero) women-haters here who "argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property".

If I had a nickel...

It wouldn't be a lot of nickels, but it would be more than one.

That the non-women-haters seem to only be concerned about the former and sometimes the latter--when women are being viewed instrumentally by society--demonstrates they don't view men as humans deserving rights and view women as inherently superior to men.

The concise response to this is "balderdash."

The less concise response is basically the same with more words: people (like me) who push back against those who view women as instrumental goods/property are not the "Women Are Wonderful" simps the latter like to characterize the former as, but merely arguing that we are all human beings and part of rising above our monkey natures (which should be our goal as a species with starfaring ambitions) requires not viewing every relationship as transactional and every other human being as an instrumental good. This includes treating women as Sex, and whatever bad thing you think women treat men as.

How are "people who push back against those who view women as instrumental goods/property" and never push back against those who view men as instrumental goods/property while smearing any who do as "women-hater" not deserving of the title "Women Are Wonderful" simps?

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The changes to law codes imposed by Christian missionaries are, afaik, not really disputable; they do seem to involve women being asked their consent to marriage. This process occasionally happens today in parts of the deep third world where Christianization imposes huge increases in the rights of women over very low baselines.

It's fair to point out that Christianity does not immediately solve every problem with poor treatment of marginalized groups, and that societies which are not Christian often have some informal pressure for women to get the rights Christian law codes later guarantee(the Viking sagas are quite explicit that a woman's father's consent is important to a marriage, not hers, but use the girl's consent as a trope marker for good fatherhood). But anthropologists are still making hay out of cultural differences between villages in polynesia and remote parts of Africa and the Amazon which were Christianized at different times. It seems to be a robust finding that women and girls in traditional societies have a much better go(albeit not up to modern western societies) when their village is Christian.

I'm not disputing that Christianity greatly improved the lot of women (and the poor, and many other marginalized groups). I'm disputing that improvements in women's rights are uniquely Christian and that only Christian societies ever treated them as more than property.

I would argue that it is more accurate to say that it is "uniquely Western" as we see similar attitudes present in the late Roman Republic, but to the extent that one's notion of "Western Civilization" is inextricably entangled with the influence of Christianity, I agree.

Jewish legal codes speak for themselves

Could you expand on this? I'm not familiar.

As far as I can tell this is a uniquely Christian innovation.

I mean, the Chinese have evidence of this in writing even in pre-Imperial history; 墨子 discusses punishments for rape during the Warring States period, and various annals including 春秋左傳 and 詩經 describe rape in a decidedly disapproving manner. I'm sure other cultures would

This is, of course, in the background of a very different philosophical culture and climate than Christian Europe. For one, the Christian idea of sin is probably actually quite peculiar, which I suspect makes much of the difference in mental interpretation.

墨子 discusses punishments for rape during the Warring States period, and various annals including 春秋左傳 and 詩經 describe rape in a decidedly disapproving manner.

Yeah but they disapprove because it soils the man’s qi, in a ‘this practice is not consistent with obviating temporal desire and attaining the Dao’ sort of way. That a woman is involved at all, let alone an unwilling one, is of no consequence - they’d complain just as much about a long goon session.

I think this is really quite inaccurate, and frankly, quite disparaging and myopic.

For one, since I previously referenced 墨子 Mozi:

墨子卷十五號令

官府城下吏卒民家前後左右相傳保火火發自燔燔曼延燔人斷諸以眾彊凌弱少及彊姦人婦女以讙譁者皆斷

Mozi, Chapter 15, section on Orders and Commandments

Among the officials, officers, soldiers, and common people within the government offices and the city, those to the front, rear, left, and right are mutually responsible for reporting and preventing fires. If a fire breaks out due to one's own negligence, and it spreads to harm others, the responsible party shall be beheaded. For any who use their numbers to bully the few or the weak, who forcefully violate or rape women, or those who encourage such actions, all such offenders shall be beheaded.

We can see that rape is packaged as part of actions that harm others.

Aside from this, while rape (as 强姦/彊姦) is not often directly mentioned in Chinese annals except in legal settings, the euphemisms used are telling.

The most direct is 妻/妻略 - “to wickedly take [as if she was] a wife”; others include:

  • 不敬 - “to show disrespect”
  • 非禮 - “to fail to behave in accordance to ritual and manners”
  • 弗賓 - “to fail to treat as a guest”
  • 姦亂 - “anarchic/disorderly licentiousness”
  • Etc.

Even in veiled form, these terms show disapproval of rape both as a personal affront to the woman as well as besmirching the honour of her husband or clan. Of course this is not quite the same idea as our liberal standards of rape, but it nevertheless is very far from the idea “that a woman is involved at all, let alone an unwilling one, is of no consequence”. And to this day, the term for molestation is 非禮.

Or you could go through eyewitness accounts of the Nanjing event for more details about how the Chinese reacted to the rape of their women. That works, too.

What makes your statement even more bizarre is that some Chinese cults that actually do have a strong proscription not just on rape, but on sex in general, sometimes were also the most sex-egalitarian; IIRC some millenarian cults (maybe some parts of the White Lotus societies?) worshipping Wusheng Laomu were like this, though I couldn’t find any sources in a hurry. Traditional Daoist thinking would both admit that 精 "essence" is lost in ejaculation, but that abstinence produced various maladies and infirmities, so caution and moderation would be most healthful.

hieroglyphics

Links: 1 2 3

I linked this down-thread but there's notes about each of the convicted rapists in this case here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelicot_rape_case#Convicted

Do you see a pattern?

I'll admit some of these fit some stereotypes.

Nizar Hamida

Had eight prior convictions, including domestic violence and attempted abduction of his child with a former partner.[65] Said he went for a sexual encounter to celebrate the end of his bachelor days as his wife-to-be was arriving shortly from Tunisia.[64]

Mohamed Rafaa

Had prior conviction for raping his 17-year-old daughter, for which he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Raped Gisèle while the Pelicots were at their daughter's holiday home on the Île de Ré.[64]

Hassan Ouamou

Convicted in absentia having fled the country, travelling between Morocco and Romania claiming no intention of returning to France. Thirteen prior convictions in connection with theft, violence, drugs, and possession of weapons.

But to me it's not that solid a pattern. Plenty of these people have proper French sounding names and like they'd be familiar with Christianity.

The most solid theme for me is: losers and imbeciles with a splash of psychopathy.

I also noticed the overrepresentation of Arab names among the perpetrators.

To me, having sex with an unconscious woman would have pretty much zero appeal no matter how hot she is

I am a man who happens to have this fetish, and indeed I am a man who related this fetish to my gf, she thought it was hot, and we contrived some bs about our apartment being too close to a busy highway in order to get a doctor to prescribe heavy-duty sleeping pills that we could indulge this fetish. And it was great.

It’s the “doing another guy’s wife” and “doing a fugly old grandma” that confuses me about the appeal. Not the unconsciousness, which, indeed, is a distinct improvement over the vanilla sex act.

And it was great.

Out of curiosity – I assume you mean it was great for you? Presumably your girlfriend didn't remember it? Or did she?

I did indeed mean that it was great for me and she didn’t remember it. However, she’s a self-proclaimed sub, and so while she didn’t remember the act, the abstract knowledge of it has an enduring appeal.

Well, I believe there is a fetish for everything, but you know that fetishes by definition are outside the norm, right? And your girlfriend was willing - would you actually do it to a woman who hadn't consented?

but you know that fetishes by definition are outside the norm, right?

Well that’s begging the question isn’t it? We are trying to puzzle out who are really the minority, those who see the unconscious woman as a gross RealDoll vs those who still see her as person.

would you actually do it to a woman who hadn't consented?

No, sure, but your previous post wasn’t complaining about the absence of consent, it was complaining about the absence of consciousness.

Okay, but specifically asking a woman to let you drug her so you can fuck her unconscious body and her agreeing to cater to this very specific fetish is not the central example of "Guys who like fucking unconscious women."

If she's into it, okay, whatever. (Though, sorry, yes, I still think that's weird. But lots of people are into things I think are weird.)

is not the central example of "Guys who like fucking unconscious women."

You are basing this statement on what evidence?

I can get the appeal of sleep sex as an extension of a freeuse fetish (where the focus is on relieving oneself without the worry of mutual pleasure, essentially enhanced masturbation) but I'm baffled that you consider it a strict improvement. Not being able to see the woman in pleasure is a considerable opportunity cost, even setting aside the lost potential of her active participation.

The two parts of your statement do not logically synch up. If you don’t consider it an improvement, then you don’t see the appeal, because, by your own logic, it is not appealing (compared to the default).

I think Eupraxia means that it's one thing for sleep sex to have its own appeal that might make up for the advantages it otherwise lacks relative to conventional mutual sex; and another thing to declare it a strict improvement.

As someone with a hobby for trying to theory-of-mind others' fetishes, I would imagine that there is some element of taking observation/judgement to detract from the enjoyability of the act, or feel oppressive in a way that doesn't let you fully indulge sexually - some sort of anti-exhibitionism (except not necessarily concerned with the gaze of third parties as much as with that of your target?), and closely related to the time stop trope (the thing where the protagonist can freeze his time for everyone but himself and have his way with the bodies of other people in everyday situations, the targets being none the wiser).

If you were to feel crushingly self-conscious about how the person you are performing any sexual act with perceives you, it would make sense that any act where that possibility is not removed would be strictly inferior.

Close, but you’re way off. I think I’d describe it more as “Will you please just shut up and stop getting in the way of my enjoyment”. Sex with a conscious partner is like trying to watch a movie with someone who’s always interrupting: “Ooh can we rewind I liked that bit”, “Volume up please!”, “Want some popcorn?”; and I’m like do you mind I’m trying to concentrate. Being obliged to consider someone else’s watching preferences takes me right out of the zone.

Now, in fairness, sometimes you really are more interested in the watch party bantz than the watching itself. But not often.

It's a fetish so of course it doesn't have to be rational, and it's been around a long time. I can't remember where I read this years ago, and I don't know if it's true or just fiction, but there were claims that some Victorian brothels specialised in having prostitutes who pretended to be, or were drugged to be, sleeping while clients had sex with them. Other claims were pretending to be dead, to the extent of lying in a coffin and wearing heavy makeup to look pale and bloodless.

Again, no idea if this is truth or fiction, but it's possible.

I know very similar things have been said in parallel responses a number of times already, but really, you have answered your own question in the last paragraph. The world is a terrible place! This story is outrageous, but so is the life story of every single one of a million of starving orphans in the Third World, any random child of a single mother having a severe case of Münchhausen syndrome by proxy, or lone elderly person caught up in one of those Floridan elderly care scams where the local judge and state-appointed legal guardians are in cahoots, or anyone working in a Bangladeshi sweatshop. It turns out we don't actually care for all these horrible fates if they don't directly intersect with ours, and we surely wouldn't even have the capacity to if we actually tried.

Whether accurate or not, the pitch of the toxoplasma stories is that their contents, and our allocating a share of mind-space to having a stance on them, will have a real material impact on our lives. What is the pitch for caring about the Pelicot case, over caring about any of the other myriad of outrageous tragedies including the ones I listed above?

And perhaps it's simply that there is nothing to fight about. There is no toxoplasma, no scissor statement.

Exactly, it's the equivalent of a "man tries to rob a grocery store, shoots at police, police return fire, man is shot and killed" crime story. Even if the man is black or gay or trans or disabled, no one important is going to accuse the police of needlessly taking his life.

Sure, there's some merit in estimating the share of men who are so depraved they might have sex with an unconscious old woman, but it looks like it's low enough that no one has to update their priors.

Here's why it didn't get much press coverage:

  1. Based on their names, at least 24% of the perpetrators were of obviously Arab descent (hence likely Muslim), despite Arabs representing 7% of the French population. In this regard the case is a bit like France's small-scale answer to the grooming gangs scandal.
  2. Contrary to your claim that the perpetrators came from "all walks of life" and represented a cross-section of French society, they were in fact overwhelmingly from working-class backgrounds (if professions like canteen worker, car mechanic, farmhand, mason's helper, supermarket receptionist, construction worker, factory worker, video rental shop owner, soldier, restaurant manager, construction worker, truck driver, firefighter, forklift driver, delivery driver, carpenter, electrician and food processing worker are any indication).

"Woman gang-raped by scions of the wealthy elite" is a man-bites-dog story that woke journalists can't get enough of (see Epstein's island, "A Rape on Campus", the Duke lacrosse scandal, Brock Turner – I posit it's not an accident that two of those turned out to be completely made up, and it still seems to be an open question as to whether any actual "gang rape" occurred on Epstein's island). "Woman gang-raped by working-class men, many of them first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants from Arab countries" is a dog-bites-man story, in addition to being profoundly dissonant with the woke worldview.

It also explains why feminists don't want to talk about it, as most modern feminists have been so compromised by intersectionality theory that they can only conditionally agree with a statement like "rape is bad" after they know the ethnicities of victim and perpetrator. Following the October 7th attacks, a popular slogan highlighting this hypocrisy was "#MeToo, unless you're a Jew". To be more exacting, I think the modal Western feminist is functionally operating on the principle "#MeToo, unless your rapist was a man of colour" – less pithy, admittedly, but more precise. Liberal feminists simply do not want to acknowledge or pay attention to sex crimes committed by Arabs, Pakistanis, immigrants etc. for fear of "giving ammunition to the far-right". They especially don't want to discuss the possibility that men from such demographics commit a disproportionate amount of sex crimes, and that there might be cultural reasons for this (as certainly seems to have been the case with the aforementioned grooming gangs scandal: I've read some articles claiming that, within Pakistani culture, a married Pakistani man raping a white British teenager who "dresses like a whore" is not even seen as adulterous, never mind criminal).

Your comment convinced me @ffrreerree2 was right on the money to bring this up as a Culture War topic.

It's basically Epstein Island but for blue collar and/or immigrant types instead of the elite, the victim is older instead of underage and the videos of the rapes exist.

How so?

sorry I edited this in a few minutes after my reply

It's basically Epstein Island but for blue collar and/or immigrant types instead of the elite, the victim is older instead of underage and the videos of the rapes exist.

I remember the days when the Rotherham grooming gang scandal was on the news for the first time (to an extent). Jezebel, which normally dissects the smallest and most trivial "outrages" of the last vestiges of patriarchal misogyny in multiple columns, posted one column about the entire subject, which consisted of nothing but repeating the official press release of the police.

They especially don't want to discuss the possibility that men from such demographics commit a disproportionate amount of sex crimes, and that there might be cultural reasons for this (as certainly seems to have been the case with the aforementioned grooming gangs scandal: I've read some articles claiming that, within Pakistani culture, a married Pakistani man raping a white British teenager who "dresses like a whore" is not even seen as adulterous).

It's simply an ingroup-vs-outgroup thing. I guess Islam plays into it somewhat but in the end it's fundamentally tribal. If the women of the outgroup signal any disrespect towards the moral code of the ingroup, they're fair game.

See also media coverage of white on black shootings vs black on black shootings.

Is there a general way to balance the ubiquity of "dog bites man" stories with the novelty of "man bites dog" stories such that audiences are cognizant of the relative merits of both?

You can have men bite dogs so many times it becomes mundane.

I can't really imagine all of those men thought they were knowingly raping this guy's wife against her will. I have to believe he told them it's her kink to be drugged up and raped and then she wants to watch the videos later. Or something. This is a lame excuse but I can see at least a few pathetic horn dogs falling for it.

Now let me see if any of the men offered any defense.

Update: I'm back. A few of the men said they thought it was a role play situation and that they were led to believe this by her husband. But most of them sound utterly indefensible. So, I underappreciated the horror by quite a bit.

There's a full table here with notes about each man and their defenses, if available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelicot_rape_case#Convicted

They kind of sound like the dregs of society to me.

But yes, what is there to say? You can find dirt bags to do sex crime if you look long enough. The were all publicly shamed and convicted. The right thing happened, at least. My update is France takes these crimes more seriously than I would have expected. Also the right thing.

I'm slightly reassured it was only 72 men over 9 years and not, like, a thousand. Suggests the candidate pool is not a vast ocean.

I'm slightly reassured it was only 72 men over 9 years and not, like, a thousand. Suggests the candidate pool is not a vast ocean.

She was in late middle age.

The dates given in the Wikipedia article for the incident suggest that the victim was about 59 years old at the start of the incident, and it continued until she was about 68.

Where I'm from, I think that'd be called "old age". And to @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola's point above, it seems like a stage of life where it'd be pretty normal to have a lot of unexplained aches and pains.

Men do a heinous thing, get found guilty. No defense, no fanfare, and no additional traumatic publicity for the victim (except for the NYT going for round 2, I guess). What, exactly, is missing here?

I'm going to take a general sentiment in a previous thread somewhat further.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that having kids is the biggest and most successful disinformation campaign society has pulled on itself in all of history. Having kids is one of the worst things you can do to your short term happiness, up there with getting addicted to heroin or getting in a motorcycle accident. Whatever things you might have enjoyed in life before them is completely gone, for the rest of your life. Every waking moment of your life outside of work will be completely occupied by taking care of monstrous creatures that make every single bodily function besides breathing as difficult as humanly possible. Eating, sleeping, farting, shitting, drinking, etc. will each be a torturous ordeal that you will have to deal with multiple times per day. It's backbreaking, thankless, and absolutely positively unfulfilling. After having kids you will finally understand the men who work 18 hour days every day despite having kids. They're actually doing it because of the kids. Because work obligations are the only excuse they can give themselves to let them spend less time dealing with kids and instead doing something relaxing like writing TPS reports or updating excel spreadsheets. Getting into the office and getting a stack of work from your boss is sweet relief compared to the torture of taking care of the kids.

I'm pretty sure the lie around it has persisted for so long because of the corresponding hard social stigma against saying you absolutely fucking hate taking care of the kids. Anyone who even hints at that idea is going to get completely crucified in the comments section. It's like the Havel's greengrocer, where if he doesn't put up the sign with the approved message, he's going to get hauled off to the gulag. Except for parents the punishment will be worse.

Anyways I find it likely that the cratering of birthrates across the entire world is a mass viral sensation where the lie is breaking down. Likely fuelled by social media as well as other factors, people are finally realizing en masse (though not openly admitting it yet) that it seriously just sucks. Even the welfare queens and third world brown hordes realize that this is true for them too. And they're understandably picking the hedonism option.

And no I don't hate or dislike kids. Kids are great, as long as they're someone else's, and their parents are around to jump in and take care of it as soon as something goes wrong.

I pretty much agree, but that’s why every culture needs a level of default pronatal propaganda. You need even more pronatal propaganda today than in the 19th century, which already had a ton, because of screens and extracurriculars, as parents have more opportunity for entertainment and kids require more time doing extra-curriculars. Propaganda just means selectively drawing your attention to the pleasant aspects of some activity versus another. To joyfully endure dealing with the bad aspects of having kids, you need to be reminded of the good aspects all the time. Moments of innocent joy when they do something new, witnessing human nature, being able to give your kid talents and skills like he’s a brand new account on an RPG, feeling proud that you’ve completed your duty, believing you are making the world a better place. Intrinsic joys + socially-mediated joys. Now it’s more pleasant in total, so you will do it.

Another thing is that parents need to know how punishment works. As long as the behavior is followed immediately by something unpleasant, you never need to yell or get stressed or anything, but the punishment needs to be more unpleasant than the misdeed is pleasant, which parents get wrong. If he throws something at his brother, that’s really fun, so he will keep doing that even after you yell and give a 10min time out, because if’s worth it. And instead of saying “because you have to” or “because I told you so”, you need to invent frightening stories about monsters and curses and other bad consequences, as every culture in history did. This is essential so that your kid doesn’t see you as a tyrant, instead he sees you as a guide and rescuer in a life filled with monsters.

And yet, evolution.

You have only one purpose here on this earth, and it isn't to avoid diapers. It isn't vidya games. It isn't your job. It isn't your hobbies or your religion or your political ideology. It isn't any fake achievements you might get while here. You have only one purpose. You will only ever make two choices that will matter beyond your lifetime, but luckily, you seem to be making the right one. Stay at it, no matter what those pro-natalists say.

The other choice, I assume, is "kill someone or otherwise convince them to not have children"? Affects the gene pool just as well, in the opposite direction.

Spicy AF take, and one that I fully agree with! A lot of parents will say that kids are worth it overall in some metaphysical sense, even while they complain constantly about all the object-level problems kids cause. I've heard a lot of parents claim that you only like kids after they've been born, that your body flips a switch or something and forces you to be happy about them. Maybe this is true for some people, but it kind of sounds like a combination of cope + reciting the only socially acceptable line. What, are people going to say "no, I wish I didn't have kids"? I've pressed a few parents in private and it has sort of seemed like they angle that way, although they'll never explicitly say anything like it since that makes it sounds like they don't love their kids.

Anyways I find it likely that the cratering of birthrates across the entire world is a mass viral sensation where the lie is breaking down.

It's almost certain that the increasing quality of childless life in terms of entertainment is a big contributor. I don't think a lot of people remember how boring everything was even just 20-30 years ago, but now we have an endless stream of high-quality entertainment constantly at our fingertips. With that competition, kids frequently get bumped off the to-do list. A lot of people would like to have them as a "feather in the cap" sort of achievement, but they require an absurd amount of commitment relative to literally anything else that the opportunity costs are just too great.

I've dealt with mild depression for most of my teen and adult life.

Not suicidal. I just have vivid memories of sitting in my highschool parking lot and wondering why the fuck I was here. Contemplating filling up a tank of gas leaving town and driving as far as the car would take me. The only thing that stopped me was the thought of "what the hell would I do when I got far away?" Same old bullshit of course.

Same thing when I started working a job. Just wanting to stay at a bar and pound beers because wtf was the point of anything, and being drunk was slightly fun.

Social situations all felt stupid and fake. Working out to stay in shape seemed like a waste of time, as long as I didn't get too fat my life would be easy enough.

Life with kids just feels different. I've never contemplated leaving. A few days not around the kids and I miss them. Jobs to support them feel easier to go to. Staying in shape so I can live longer and have energy to be around them seems like a no brainer. Social situations that would have been painful without them have a lubricant of talking about the kids, and I find myself happy to build social connections that can help them.

It's not as dramatic as "kids saved my life". But it is as dramatic as "kids gave my life a purpose".

Whatever things you might have enjoyed in life before them is completely gone, for the rest of your life. Every waking moment of your life outside of work will be completely occupied by taking care of monstrous creatures that make every single bodily function besides breathing as difficult as humanly possible.

? Parents go to parties, they have hobbies, they have lives.

Parents go to parties held by other parents, where hopefully they can shove all the kids into a room and the kids don't cause too much trouble.

Parents have hobbies like: taking the kids fishing, taking the kids hiking, taking the kids for a bike ride, taking the kids to see the game etc.

I think you are maybe trying to say this is a bad thing which makes no sense, yes, actually getting to participate in my hobbies with my kids is tremendously fun.

You're free to take this approach, as long as you understand that this is quite literally dysgenic, and those who think like you will not propagate.

Which, you know, fine and all, but, you know it's a literal dead end. Right?

as long as you understand that this is quite literally dysgenic

Eh. I sort of feel like anyone who doesn't want kids (for reasons unrelated to taking catholic holy orders or living a sanctified single life) is probably genetically and/or morally unfit to have them in the first place, so they're pretty much strictly benefiting society by not propagating their deleterious genetic/cultural adaptations. I know my feelings on the subject are morally wrong because I obediently submit to the catholic church's doctrine re: universal redemption the beauty of children, and evil of eugenics... but knowing intellectually how I should feel isn't the same as actually feeling that way.

I meant this more as a commentary on society in general, rather than as something about me myself. I could choose to have tons of kids for reasons inscrutable to others and not applicable to society at large. Maybe I'm going to have the tons of kids because I believe the muffin man said so and that his orders are absolute.

this is quite literally dysgenic, and those who think like you will not propagate.

It's interesting because memes spread differently than genes. And I have no interest in propagating the ideas noted in OP. In fact I quite enjoy having society exist, so I really hope that the winds will change and more and more people will be duped into having kids, especially those of my race.

More people knowing the truth can be harmful to some people, and duping people can be highly beneficial as well. That's kind of the whole reason why disinformation exists in the first place.

Additional factors, speaking personally:

  • All the pronatal propaganda is making it clear that being a father is extra hard if you're not in your early twenties, so I'm already at only the second best age to become one;

  • Even the top countries are getting doompilly about AI-related lack of opportunity and meaning in society in a decade or two, and my country is likely to be behind on AI and so get the worst of both worlds, just like it's the worst of both worlds between liberalism and tradness at the moment.

  • As others mentioned, unless you already live in a world where you get a mandatory wife at 18, you can't have children unless you have a female partner amicable to it. At the moment, I don't have one at all, and dating in modernity as someone who doesn't already have big in-person social circles has already been discussed to death.

  • My job would allow plenty of time for children, but not if I want to support my wife and get an apartment that will fit us. And it appears to be an absolutely miserable time to switch jobs right now, since, again, total industry upheaval. I'm only comfortable right now because we have legacy code and non-yuppie upper management.

All the pronatal propaganda is making it clear that being a father is extra hard if you're not in your early twenties, so I'm already at only the second best age to become one

Na, especially as the dad, you just shouldn't be very old, i.e. in retirement when they are in high school. Especially since, despite all the talk, many women really want to be the primary carers for the kids anyway. For that reason and simply due to fertility issues the situation for women is different, but even for them plenty of pronatalists actually consider late twenties the best time.

My greatest regret is not having more kids before finding out that we couldn't.

Anyways I find it likely that the cratering of birthrates across the entire world is a mass viral sensation where the lie is breaking down.

Obvious next step is mass suicide, we'll see if we get there. Why live at all?

Isn't vidya, fast food, and pr0n good enough reason for anyone to keep living?

Fully agreed. If I was an animal in the wild then it very well may be true that life would be consistently painful enough that suicide was the better choice in the long term. Maybe this could even be extended to medieval peasants and early factory workers. But today? Modern life has so many conveniences and entertainment options that we're all functionally living in a cornucopia. I do 5-10 hours of real work per week to maintain a solidly middle class lifestyle, then spend the remainder of my time doing whatever I want.

It's not a disinformation campaign. It is literal Darwinism. Societies and cultures that don't promote having kids cease to exist.

I tend to think the whole "drop in birth rate" thing is overblown. It will correct itself in a generation or two, after people who lose the drive to reproduce in modern, information rich environments are removed from the gene pool. This is the strongest selective pressure our species has come under in quite a while. And if all that comes out on the other side is a bunch of Mormons, Muslims, and Haredi Jews, so be it. Natural selection has spoken.

It will correct itself in a generation or two

I highly doubt this will happen automatically, as birthrates were a nonissue basically everywhere 100 years ago, but now they're affecting basically every society. The Amish + Orthodox Jews seem exempt for now, but they're very strange societies that both see a decent chunk of people leaving the farm every generation, and which aren't sustainable plans for entire societies -- a lot of the Orthodox Jewish birthrate is propped up by insane welfare leeching, for instance.

IIRC American Orthodox Jews have some awareness that their gravy train isn't unlimited and are (slowly)adapting to needing to compete in a modern society.

There may be civilizational difficulties down the line as generations of elderly Redditors and the like all turn into childless skeletons forgotten in dusty apartments, but human beings aren't going to go extinct because the members of the last genetically viable colony all look at one another and say "meh not in this housing market." Sooner or later this situation will indeed correct itself.

Societies and cultures that don't promote having kids cease to exist.

Not if they are very good at getting other people's kids to join.

Autonomously reproducing cultures susceptible to recruitment will either die out, killing parasitic cultures off with them, or select for adaptations that reduce that susceptibility. The modern information environment has massively increased the virality of low-reproduction high-recruitment subcultures, but they're just intrinsically doomed to either die out or change into something unrecognizable.

Now, I don't particularly fear he mormons, muslims, and haredi jews will take over the world like @wingdingspringking mentioned, but that's because minority groups are adapted to being minority groups, and as they become a larger share of their host societies their adaptations will become less suited for their environment. For example, we're seeing more and more discussion about conscripting ultra-orthodox jews in israel as they become a larger share of the population, and the likely outcomes are that they're either going to start getting conscripted (which will reduce their TFRs) or the israeli army will weaken to the point where israel gets destroyed and their death rates cancel out their birth rates.

Even that still depends on what those other people's kids to do the host society once they're incorporated. Replacing your population with foreign cultures doesn't necessarily mean the same society and culture make it through the other end.

I find discussing this sentiment to be like the discourse around death, except much less compelling. Death is that thing that only those who have experienced it can describe, and those who haven't can only guess at. The catch is that once you've experienced it, you can't explain it to anyone else.

Kids are funny because, in contrast to death, every single person on this earth who has had them can tell you how they have affected their lives, and yet there's a subset of the population (apparently, you included) that will say that it's a lie. Literally all the parents I know, even those with difficult kids, find it much more meaningful and full of joy than they would have suspected. I say joy meaningfully, too. That word gets thrown around but the absolutely out-of-the-blue fun, happiness, and pride I feel when my kid picks up or says something new or outrageous is something that outweighs everything else in my life. These are things that people will regularly say, I'm far from the first, so I have no doubt it will do little to convince you; but I still find it funny.

There are bad parents, there are bad kids, and there are people who are a bad fit for parents happiness-wise, but the idea that a lie that has existed longer than written word has only just broken down as many other changes to our environment influence our behavior in curious and unnatural ways is laughable on its face.

I have a somewhat more involved theory (rather than a totally-unique-to-the-lie-filled-online-world awakening to the objective truth of things on social media) here.

yet there's a subset of the population (apparently, you included) that will say that it's a lie.

How can we know whether it's a lie or the truth when saying it is impossible? People who aren't overjoyed by their kids are considered the worst of the worst, up there with pedofiles and rappists.

This is the worst kind of hyperbole. No, someone saying they're not that into their kids isn't subject to the same degree of social ostracism as actual rapists or pedophiles. C'mon dude.

A rappist? Ah, is this the explanation for the Bad Bunny hate?

Two points:

1 - Even if the true joy of parenting is ineffable (unfortunately the case) you can get an approximation by experiencing them in some way. Maybe it's "Kid's say the darndest things", hanging out with neices/nephews, or just being attentive at a playground while you eat a picnic lunch. This is hard, but I've already had 4 things happen today (despite having a job and typing out this reply) that I would classify as super cool and worth it.

2 - Think about how many people have to lie consistently over thousands of years for your thesis to be true. In the entirety of human history... wait, no, in the entire history of this planet for every form of life, Parenting has been worth it. And yet, only with the advent of social media and the mass delusional influence of women it enables in just the past 15 years... now we've finally woken up to the fact that procreating actually sucks? Just use your common sense here. How likely is that?

Every group that figured out the lie ended up extinct

Presumably this is also what happened to every group that decided that "being alive is neat" was a monstrous lie also ended up, only slightly more quickly.

Or perhaps beliefs that lead directly to "going extinct" aren't just bad but also incorrect.

Beliefs that lead to extinction cannot be widely accepted in a society for more than a short period of time, for obvious reasons.

That doesn't mean they're necessarily wrong.

Additionally beliefs that enhance survival are not necessarily correct or true.

beliefs that enhance survival are not necessarily correct or true.

Generally speaking, beliefs that are incorrect do not enhance survival and, if sufficiently delusional, detract from it. (A very trivial observation, but if it were otherwise we should have no particular confidence in our ability to arrive at the truth at all.)

Similarly, it would be unsurprising if the human mind and body was not at least somewhat well-adapted to its natural habitat (which, for most of human history, was surrounded by family). And there are of course reasons (from social science research) to think that having children does not necessarily decrease happiness and may even increase their happiness and their lifespan.

Kids are funny because, in contrast to death, every single person on this earth who has had them can tell you how they have affected their lives, and yet there's a subset of the population (apparently, you included) that will say that it's a lie.

I don't think it's a lie (so I guess I'm not really the sort of person you mean), but I do have a similar-ish reaction. When parents say they experience great joy from their children, I believe them. I just don't believe it'll be the same for me. I realize many people will say they felt the same way, but it was different for their own kids. I believe that too! But there's no guarantee that it would happen, and it's one hell of a risk to take with your life. If you turn out to be a person who is not wired to enjoy children, you're in for 18 long years.

It's a moot point in my case since my wife isn't able to have children any more, but this is definitely something that gave me pause when having children was still in the realm of possibility for us.

I’m of the opinion that people who don’t want kids probably shouldn’t have them. My main problems are with those who insist it they are bad; and the overall societal landscape that has led a lot of people to never even seriously consider it.

Conversely, I do consider it the civic duty of anyone who is of means and of sound mind to have kids at or above replacement rate. It increases the amount of kids with a) a support system (good for the kids), and b) the genetic and environmental background to be more likely to succeed (good for society). This is possibly the one place I put my money where my mouth is regarding societal issues.

Not that you’re in the position to act on it anymore, but for anyone of decent means I would say in general the highs are very high and the potential lows are not as low as you’d think. The one exception is being unlucky enough to have an honest to God psychopath kid or something, but you’re in “multiple lightning strikes” territory there.

Children do not stay children forever, and 18 years is a legal fiction. Kids grow up, and develop, fast. The baby stage is going to be over soon(toddlers and infants are very different). And little kids are different from toddlers- and in turn, older kids are different from little kids.

Every waking moment of your life outside of work will be completely occupied by taking care of monstrous creatures that make every single bodily function besides breathing as difficult as humanly possible.

Source for inflammatory claim

PersonTime spent on leisure and sports (hours per non-holiday weekday)
All persons age 15 and over4.56
Parents with no own-household children under age 185.10
Parents with own-household child under age 182.88
Parents with own-household child under age 132.70
Parents with own-household child under age 62.44

Data for employed parents (as opposed to all parents), and for parents with infant children, are not available.

Also the "leisure" time likely counts a significant amount of time spent with the kids, such as walking the kids, which is not explicitly a childcare activity. These dual use activities probably count as leisure but aren't the first choice of activity that the parents would like to engage in. Not 100% sure of the methodology though so maybe I'm wrong.

Pregnancy is a horrible experience, after three pregnancies I still think we basically lie to women about how bad it is.

My SIL just gave birth. For the last two months of the pregnancy she said she never wanted to have another kid after this one. I asked her how she was feeling about that post the kid and she said that basically as soon as the baby was out she was no longer as opposed.

That wasn't my experience with the kid who gave me PPD, there's a reason it took years to have the next one, when a kid literally drains away your ability to feel happiness that doesn't make you want another one. Although the PPD was also a pregnancy thing, because pregnancy is a garbage shit experience. It's possible if we had incubators I wouldn't have even had the hormonal imbalance that turned off my ability to feel happiness.

That said, overall I think you're wildly exaggerating how bad the actual kids are once you've finally expelled them from being literally parasites in your body. The first four months are basically the hardest it gets because they're not really cute yet and (if you're unlucky) they scream all the time and do nothing else worthwhile. But at least you can put them down occasionally instead of having them permanently pressing against your internal organs, which in the first few months is still enough of a relief to keep you going.

After four months they're usually cuter, they can do things like "move in a direction" or "smile", and things improve pretty rapidly from there.

Toddlers are annoying again mostly because you have to potty train them. I think some people also mind the tantrums. I found tantrums, like dirty diapers, to be significantly less annoying on my own kids than on other people's kids and in general this appears to be a common experience, so you can't assume you will find your own kids tantrums as obnoxious as other kids tantrums. Otoh, unlike new babies, toddlers are actually genuinely cute to help you not feel tempted to kill them. They love you very much and find ways to show it like sharing their treats with you. Being loved feels nice.

By the time kids are five years old basically all the things online parents complain about are over. Like your entire litany of complaints about them making life impossible sounds bizarre in the context of a five year old, I can eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, read a book, etc, all completely fine around a five year old. And as they get older they improve further. My nine year old is already a net benefit to the household. She helps with her siblings, we pay her to do small sewing repairs, she offers to make supper for fun, she's an actual entire human being. Yeah we still have conflicts over things and yeah she can still get moody, have tantrums, etc, but basically she's just a nice person to have around.

So yeah the pregnancy is truly awful, way beyond what it's sold as, and the early years are approximately exactly as hard as they're sold as, but it's around 2 years of peak difficulty once you survive the ten months of pregnancy.

I've been able to have an enjoyable career, maintain a workout schedule, have creative hobbies, and go travel to new countries, with three kids. And all this without much in the way of grandparents around, and without having ever found a reliable babysitter, so if you have those it's even easier.

(Yes obviously some of this is because I have a great husband but you too can acquire a good spouse and having kids is a lot nicer when you feel positively about increasing the copies of that person's genes anyway)

Now, to address some of the hyperbole

Whatever things you might have enjoyed in life before them is completely gone, for the rest of your life.

Not only is it not completely gone, to the extent that your amount of time free to do whatever you want is reduced it's certainly not for the rest of your life. Kids eventually leave home.

Every waking moment of your life outside of work will be completely occupied by taking care of monstrous creatures that make every single bodily function besides breathing as difficult as humanly possible. Eating, sleeping, farting, shitting, drinking, etc. will each be a torturous ordeal that you will have to deal with multiple times per day.

No? None of these things are as difficult as humanly possible with kids.

It's backbreaking, thankless, and absolutely positively unfulfilling.

Backbreaking — no, they start out very light and you get stronger as you lift them

Thankless — no. From a very young age kids try to reciprocate, my baby would try to feed me back at six months or so. By the time they're writing they'll start making cards to you that they love you. I am not a person super comfortable with receiving thanks so I appreciate them less than others might I guess but my kids give me cards covered in hearts telling me thank you multiple times a year. And that's formalized thanks, they'll also just randomly hug me and say thanks pretty frequently.

Unfulfilling - listen, I personally am very low on the bell curve of how fulfilling I find kids, a combination of being naturally quite selfish and a little bit emotionally stunted. But I wouldn't call them unfulfilling either. I consider something to be unfulfilling if it feels totally pointless. Keeping another human being alive and happy isn't really able to be unfulfilling.

After having kids you will finally understand the men who work 18 hour days every day despite having kids. They're actually doing it because of the kids. Because work obligations are the only excuse they can give themselves to let them spend less time dealing with kids and instead doing something relaxing like writing TPS reports or updating excel spreadsheets. Getting into the office and getting a stack of work from your boss is sweet relief compared to the torture of taking care of the kids.

There's a grain of truth here. I would hate to be a SAHM. I really don't enjoy childcare in more than small doses. So going into work is a nice change of pace. But I wouldn't describe taking care of kids as torture, it's just something I don't like too high a dose of.

I'm pretty sure the lie around it has persisted for so long because of the corresponding hard social stigma against saying you absolutely fucking hate taking care of the kids. Anyone who even hints at that idea is going to get completely crucified in the comments section. It's like the Havel's greengrocer, where if he doesn't put up the sign with the approved message, he's going to get hauled off to the gulag. Except for parents the punishment will be worse.

The internet is anonymous. There's subreddits for parents who regret having kids. I've read them, and I don't get at all the sense it's nearly as widespread as you're trying to suggest.

I do think wanting a break can be very common though. It's definitely a common complaint that parents don't get sick days. Doesn't matter how crappy you're feeling, you still gotta do the basic parenting tasks. So yeah that aspect sucks. But from there to "every moment of the rest of your life is torture" is a huge leap.

Pregnancy and early baby time is also really high-variance. My wife didn't mind the first one that much, until at around month 7 she suddenly couldn't lie down anymore without a massive heartburn. It got a bit better once she found an elevated positioning that was just the right mix of less heartburn while still being somewhat comfortable. The last three months were still kind of awful, and the birth was the crowning achievement, 24 hours of pain and screaming without any sleep, and at the end she was so tired that the nurses almost started a cesarian. Then the first few days the nurses tortured us by waking us up every 2 hours sharp (independent of the babies actual sleeping pattern, of course) to make absolutely sure the baby drinks enough, despite even the doctor visiting us saying that it's fine if the baby drinks irregularly early on, as long as they start drinking more, get enough overall and she looked healthy anyway. Chadette nurses don't give a fuck about virgin doctor advice, though, and carried on. After the third day we were let go, and finally got some okayish sleep for the first time.

Some others friends even apparently mostly enjoy pregnancy, while others were suffering from day one, with pain and throwing up. Birth is universally awful, though. But after the first it's at least usually relatively quickly over.

Sleep is also really variable; Our first was mostly sleeping through the night except for a single milk (which we didn't mind at all) from around 1 until 3, and then completely slept through. Among other friends, we know babies that sleep through the night with like 4 months (really jealous), and toddlers that still wake up every two hours with 3. Our second also certainly sleeps worse than the first. The pregnancy and even the birth were much better, though.

Then there are kids like me. Early birth, low weight. Barely drank anything. According to my parents, I loudly screamed through large parts of the night, and regularly during the day, up until one. My parents don't say it, but I suspect that might be one reason I'm an only child. And we still don't know why, I have no lasting condition and there was no family history. Just random.

Of course, this makes it no less scary for first time parents; You really don't know which way the dice will roll.

Then the first few days the nurses tortured us by waking us up every 2 hours sharp (independent of the babies actual sleeping pattern, of course) to make absolutely sure the baby drinks enough

I had something quite similar. I got about 5 hours of sleep over the course of 96 hours in the hospital because the hospital had precisely zero respect for any need on my part to sleep. So yes I definitely skipped over the -1 to +3 days of the baby's life but they are a peak of badness relative to the entire rest of the experience. Not really the baby's fault though that's definitely an "adults caused this suffering needlessly" situation.

(This was the first birth. Subsequent births were at other hospitals and I got more sleep)

On hospitals not letting exhausted new mothers sleep when baby is sleeping: I set myself up at the door to the room and refused entry for anything not critical, and it turned out there was nothing critical. Doctors making rounds, nurses taking vitals, all that can be deferred.

the birth was the crowning achievement

I see what you did there

I've got 2 under 2 at the moment. I did the first year or so of the first kid's life in stately 'Developed World Nuclear Family' style and then relocated to somewhere with a sprawling multi-generational family structure.

The difference in quality of life between the former and the latter is insane, in terms of how much time you get back, but I think you're vastly overstating exactly how punitive childrearing is at the early stages and how engaging a lot of the creature comforts you were otherwise packing your time with actually were. I feel I'd experienced a sufficiently wide slice of 'the good life' before having kids, between going to 50-odd countries, having a solid dating history, playing sport at a high level and being a reasonably high earner to be able to say most of that is fine but ultimately when/if you experience having kids there's an inherent flip of perspective and drivers.

IMO the main fall-off now is that the rise of birth control & abortion means that increasingly people are having to 'opt in' to having children instead of it just being a constantly present baserate risk of conceiving and then rolling with it.

I've got 2 under 2 at the moment. I did the first year or so of the first kid's life in stately 'Developed World Nuclear Family' style and then relocated to somewhere with a sprawling multi-generational family structure.

God do I wish I had this. My side of the family is fully devoted to the "we're empty nesting, figure it out" mindset, and my wife's side has some cultural issues with raising kids (that have given her lasting lifelong issues) that I'd rather not pass along. What's funny to me is that my regret is not in my own dip in quality of life - it's in the kid's. Every time I realize I haven't taken mine out for a proper outing, or have stuck them in front of the TV (to my credit, in front of properly vetted age appropriate material for a limited time) I have a huge pang of guilt for not having a proper and engaging village for them to experience. It used to be that having that was the norm. Even as the nuclear family developed, the baby boom was in full swing, and full neighborhoods of children would be able to play and parents could easily organize (or fall into) play dates to lighten the load and develop their children's social minds. Each generation has been a poor recursion of this structure, but without the baby boom, fewer people having kids in more spread out places means the full neighborhoods of kids just don't exist on any sort of scale anymore.

If anything, I would say this is the biggest practical limit to having kids today, though I think some other factors are at play when it comes to the actual decision-making (shameless plug).

Yeah I was raised in the developed West and was barely exposed to aunts/uncles/cousins due to a combination of my parents moving away and fighting some crab bucket tendencies in the wider family. My kids can now go downstairs and run into a ridiculous amount of cousins and neighbors inside the same gated community, which I hope can serve to ameliorate spectrum behaviors and tendencies on the part of my genetic material.

Back when I was in Australia for the first year or so, a combination of being the only person in my early-thirties yuppie friend group to reproduce and my own parents bailing to be closer to the ocean meant that there wasn't really a social layer. The government parenting group programs were well-meaning, but even then tended to have weird hodge podge cultural mixes of like... 18 year old headscarf-wearing recent immigrants and mid-late thirties upper middle class neurotics in my area. With nothing in between. Plus even if my friend group was particularly fecund the geographic reality of home-ownership in the city I lived in essentially forced people to buy an hour and a half away from the CBD in farflung locales so unless you happened to land on the same compass-point as your social group you were fucked.

I have four kids. I like hanging out with and taking care of my kids. It gets more fun after they turn 1, then even more after they turn 7, then still more after 10.

It's really not that bad. It's hard, but so is training for a marathon, learning violin, studying Chinese, learning to sail, reading literary fiction, really anything worthwhile in life. I personally do not think a life of video games, Netflix, international vacations to the rest of the now-Disnified tourist-friendly world, concerts, craft beer bar visits, escape rooms, or whatever single millennials my age are doing these days would be very fulfilling for me personally. I actually WFH expressly because I want to help my wife (a SAHM) cook, clean, and take care of the kids. We also do part time homeschooling and plan to switch to full homeschooling soon. Neither of us had to do any of this, we both have careers and made enough money to pay for daycare and still have disposable income. We chose to. I promise you we are not doing it under duress.

Also, there isn't really a stigma against saying you don't want to have kids anymore. Everyone in my entire company AFAIK has 0-2 kids. Probably 70% of coworkers over 30 are childless. Not having kids is the normal default now. Having kids at all is slightly unusual. Having enough kids that you must orient your life around raising them instead of throwing them into daycare is on par with being a Scientologist or something. People clearly think I'm a little insane. But I've also been surprised at the small minority who express admiration and jealousy. Not everyone thinks the way you do.

I have 4 as well and people think I’m crazy

It's really not that bad. It's hard, but so is training for a marathon, learning violin, studying Chinese, learning to sail, reading literary fiction, really anything worthwhile in life.

Playing an instrument, playing a sport, learning an instrument, or learning a language is what a ton of people do just for fun, in addition to vidya and netflix sessions. Honestly none of these things are really hard if you're operating on a hobbyist level. These are all things where you can goof off while doing it and get gradually better. In a sense it's the same as vidya - after sinking 300 hours into the game, you'll be a lot better, though there's still going to be a massive chasm between you and people who practice seriously to play competitive (being sweaty and tryhard is of course different from practicing seriously to get good).

there isn't really a stigma against saying you don't want to have kids anymore. Everyone in my entire company AFAIK has 0-2 kids.

This is true, but there is still a stigma around saying that kids suck or that you hate taking care of them. Everyone will put up the sign saying that their little bundles of terror are perfect and they love taking care of them.

How do you do part time homeschooling? Can you explain how that works? I thought it was an either or kind of thing?

It's very common for older kids. Either homeschool for most things with some classes(either online, or community college, or...) taken on the side, or a dedicated hybrid program(readily available but often requires a religious test).

I didn't phrase it well. It's really just supplemental education at home, no exams or registration with the government. Just extra reading and study in addition to what theyre doing at school. Currently just religion, English, and history.

Ahh I see, gotcha. Good stuff. We want to homeschool ourselves so we’ll see how it goes. Good luck going full time into it.

Thanks. I will try to report back after a year. Maybe do a small write-up in the Small Questions thread.

It might be worth looking for exams your kids can sit, if they're learning more regardless, to get some recognition for it. My son studied a bunch of math on his own during Covid, but then was bored silly when all his school would offer him was at his grade level. Fortunately the local University has a Credit-By-Exam process for high school subjects, and a decent Algebra I score was enough to get him jumped to Geometry the next year.

I think the social expectations surrounding childrearing has more to do with it than the breakdown of any longstanding disinformation campaign. Until basically now, families had 4+ kids, and the oldest would start taking care of the younger ones from age 6 or so (this was my grandmother's responsibility and lived experience, as my great grandmother died in childbirth of the youngest sibling). If you lived on a farm, you'd be pitching in with chores from the time you could walk, and you were much-needed labor. Get out of line? Get the belt. And so on. This was a hard living, but it built children into little adults rather than the coddled tyrants that you describe.

Fast forward to today, and it's no wonder than parenthood is so all-encompassingly exhausting. The "gentle parenting" trend has made children the rulers of the domain and the adults their indentured servants. And parents do it to each other, constantly trying to one-up their peers with lavish birthday parties, 5-figure caches of toys in dedicated playrooms, chauffeur services to endless activities, and general capitulation to absolutely anything Little Johnny and Janie could ever demand. Get out of line? Uhh, "don't do that, I guess?".

The pendulum will swing back, because as a parent currently trying to wage this war, I can confidently say that it is not a sustainable state of affairs.

5-figure caches of toys in dedicated playrooms,

I don't think toys are usually a matter of interparent competition. It's more because toys are an easy way to spend money to pacify the kids. It's going to the store and buying a few minutes of peace, one toy at a time, and without the guilt of handing the kid a phone with tiktok on it.

My wife and I have been wanting to do a toy culling for months and just have never found the time.

At least in our social circle I think the high status flex would be an uncluttered playroom with low tech toys.

Having kids is one of the worst things you can do to your short term happiness, up there with getting addicted to heroin or getting in a motorcycle accident. Whatever things you might have enjoyed in life before them is completely gone, for the rest of your life. Every waking moment of your life outside of work will be completely occupied by taking care of monstrous creatures that make every single bodily function besides breathing as difficult as humanly possible. Eating, sleeping, farting, shitting, drinking, etc. will each be a torturous ordeal that you will have to deal with multiple times per day.

You forgot to mention that you do all of that while being subjected to months of sleep torture that would make a CIA contractor call up The Hague. Calling that a "hedonistic cost" is like referring to the Troubles in Ireland as a "disagreement".

It's backbreaking,

Yes.

thankless,

True.

and absolutely positively unfulfilling.

Here's where you could not be more wrong. It is the most fulfilling thing you will have ever done with your life. Are you familiar with Nietzsche's question of whether you could approve of your life if it were eternally reoccuring? All baby-related suffering automatically gets a big fat stamp of approval. Not sure that's true for anything else.

Eudaimonia does not equate to feeling good.

I just want to add that the situation many newly married couples find themselves in nowadays, namely that they have nobody else in the practical sense assisting them with childcare, that this is a task the two of them need to manage on their own, day after day, is historically abnormal and definitely not sustainable as a social norm. It has not been the usual case in any society or any age in the past.

Having kids is one of the worst things you can do to your short term happiness, up there with getting addicted to heroin or getting in a motorcycle accident.

I believe that for a many values of "short" in "short term happiness", heroin would help.

I invert your argument: my contention is that children are the opposite of heroin, you're trading short term comfort for long-term satisfaction.

Your analysis fails because it assumes that the purpose of a human life is to remain in a state of homeostatic bliss until you flatline. It assumes that "happiness" is defined solely by the absence of friction. If the goal of life were simply to minimize suffering and maximize relaxation we should all just hook ourselves up to morphine drips and gently pass away in a warm bath.

This is the philosophy of the last man. It is the worldview of a creature that has mistaken the safety of the zoo for the purpose of existence.

I have many reasons for wanting children. But the one that's the most stark, and relatively recent, is watching the elderly die.

It's rarely fun, dying. Especially of old age and the baggage train it brings with it. But the ones who die least painfully are those with children and grandchildren to mourn them, and remember them long after they're gone. I've seen many people die bitter and unloved, looked after by attendants paid minimum wage and providing minimal care. It's not like having children guarantees comfort in your last days, god knows that quite a few people have few qualms about sending granny to rot in a care home, and many more do have qualms but are forced by circumstance.

Still, I know which option I'd prefer. I have the fortune to not be a hypocrite: my grandfather isn't quite on his death bed, but in his late 90s, the difference is marginal. It's probably the bed he's going to die on, assuming we don't need to change the wheels after our dog gnawed on it. He's not going for a jog or getting the mattress changed. But he's at home, surrounded by family, and loved. All endings are sad endings, but I expect his will be less sad than most. Good luck getting any of that without a family in the first place.

The childless elderly don't just face worse deaths. They face worse lives in the decades leading up to death. Your 70s and 80s, if you're lucky enough to be healthy, are not years of adventure and self-actualization. They are years of watching your friends die, your body deteriorate, and your cultural relevance evaporate. The things that gave your life meaning when you were 30 or 40 or even 60 have largely evaporated. Your career is over. Your relationship with your spouse, if you still have one, has likely settled into comfortable routine or quiet resentment. Your hobbies persist but with diminished intensity.

What doesn't evaporate is family. Your children are still there. Your grandchildren are growing up. You have people who need you, not in the desperate dependency of infancy, but in the gentler ways that adult children need their parents. Advice, support, connection to the past, a sense of continuity. You have a reason to get up in the morning that isn't just "I haven't died yet."

You seem to think that the choice is between a life of relaxation and fulfillment versus a life of drudgery and misery. But this badly misunderstands the actual choice on offer. The choice is between a life arc that resembles an inverted parabola versus one that resembles a cliff.

With children: your 20s and 30s are hard. You're building a career, raising kids, sleeping four hours a night, and wondering if you'll ever feel like a human being again. Your 40s get easier as the kids become more independent. Your 50s and 60s are potentially quite good. You have grandchildren but without the grinding responsibility of primary care. You have adult children who are friends and companions. You have purpose and connection. Your 70s and 80s, while inevitably diminished by age, are softened by family.

Without children: your 20s and 30s are great. You have freedom, money, time. You can travel, pursue hobbies, sleep in on weekends. Your 40s and 50s continue this trend, perhaps with even more money and stability. And then somewhere in your 60s or 70s, you drive off a cliff. Everyone you know starts dying or moving away or becoming too old to do things with. You have no natural support system. You have no one whose life you're intrinsically woven into. You have resources but nothing to use them for. You have time but no one to spend it with.

Yes, parents complain about parenting. They make jokes about needing wine. They talk about how hard it is. But they also, when you actually ask them, report that their children are the most important and meaningful parts of their lives. They have more children. They encourage their own children to have children. They don't act like people who made a terrible mistake and are trying to trap others into the same fate.

The simpler explanation is that parenting is both genuinely hard and genuinely meaningful. That it involves real sacrifices and real rewards. That the rewards are not the same kind as a good night's sleep or an uninterrupted brunch, but they're rewards nonetheless.

An interesting argument. I wonder if I've been overly influenced by propaganda about the resentment millennials feel towards their boomer parents. Of course I know it's likely not true in the general case but there's definitely a narrative of millennials feeling like they're the victims.

But also, I don't think having children as an investment in a future support structure during is truly a compelling argument. Firstly, most of human society throughout history has existed where the truly elderly would not survive. Of course average lifespans tell a misleading story due to infant mortality, but if someone was truly bedridden they would not survive long. Modern society finds people in their 60s fit to continue working, and it's likely that the ancients felt the same, until the elderly rapidly dropped dead.

But the other wrinkle is of course that rationally, sinking so much into a dubious investment that will only pay off in 50+ years in the best case, where the state of the world after that time could be completely different, does not make much sense.

They don't act like people who made a terrible mistake and are trying to trap others into the same fate.

The simpler explanation is that parenting is both genuinely hard and genuinely meaningful. That it involves real sacrifices and real rewards. That the rewards are not the same kind as a good night's sleep or an uninterrupted brunch, but they're rewards nonetheless.

Of course this is the real reason. But the question is whether or not it's truly true, versus a deception.

I did say that this was just one of many arguments for pro-natalism, but others have done a good job of advocating for them, and I won't rehash them.

I do not mean to claim that children are necessarily the most sound financial instrument you can invest in to ensure a comfortable retirement. That's probably not true today, at least, you'd probably get a higher yield from investing in the stock market instead of child care and education for your kids.

For what that's worth, that was unlikely to have been the case in the past. Passive investing with returns good enough to retire on, at low risk is a phenomenon that is maybe a few hundred years old, and only decades in certain parts of the world. For the average peasant (and most of your ancestors, and mine, were average peasants), children represented the most secure investment they could make. Both in the distant future, and in the medium term, your field could always use another farmhand. It's no accident that widespread automation of physical labor coincided with a drastic decline in fecundity.

Of course average lifespans tell a misleading story due to infant mortality, but if someone was truly bedridden they would not survive long. Modern society finds people in their 60s fit to continue working, and it's likely that the ancients felt the same, until the elderly rapidly dropped dead.

That's going too far in the other direction. Family is immensely useful to have around when you're sick in many cases. A bad flu, or a broken leg, for common examples. Children are family you make, and if you're looking after ailing parents or siblings, well, they're children someone else related to you made.

Even today, even if you're wealthy while you're old and infirm, there are few people you can trust more than your own children. I've seen bad actors and elder abuse, but they're clearly in the minority. Most kids genuinely hold affection for their parents and act as good guardians when the familial contract flips around.

Of course this is the real reason. But the question is whether or not it's truly true, versus a deception.

It's true for the majority of people, the majority of the time. Parents sacrifice a lot for their children, even in circumstances where they could get away with doing less without catastrophic social consequences. If that isn't revealed preference (for those inclined to parenthood), I don't know what possibly counts. And even a lot of people more lukewarm on the idea report "a switch being flipped", where suddenly they become far more driven and determined to protect their kids from harm and ensure their well-being.

But the other wrinkle is of course that rationally, sinking so much into a dubious investment that will only pay off in 50+ years in the best case, where the state of the world after that time could be completely different, does not make much sense.

Speaking only for myself, I am very concerned that the social safety nets we have for the elderly now (which I do not view as an adequate replacement for friends and family, in terms of happiness, but are decent enough at prolonging life) will be in much worse shape in 40 years. From my perspective, having kids is the most sure way to ensure some decent and adequate standard of care in my twilight years.

From my perspective, having kids is the most sure way to ensure some decent and adequate standard of care in my twilight years.

Might want to ask King Lear about that one.

I am curious how you evaluate these life trajectories from the perspective of AI timelines.

I know you're pretty bullish on AI; even if you don't subscribe to short 5-10 year timelines, it would seem to me that if you believe in transformational AI, there would be a very high probability you would see some sort of strong AI by the time you are 60 or 70.

It would seem to me, then, that the optimal strategy is to front-load your life trajectory by not having children early. If AI goes poorly, then at least you managed to enjoy your 20s and perhaps your 30s without having to deal with the suffering of your children, while if it goes well it's unlikely that your age would be a barrier to having children, and indeed it would be much easier to raise children in such a world.

I believe that the average life (including mine) is good, and that it is better to live a short life rather than not be born at all. If my life had been much the same, except I was killed at the age of 5 by a coconut falling on my head, I'd still have been grateful to have been born. I extent the same to my kids.

AGI never happens? Kids will probably be fine.

AGI creates a post-scarcity utopia? They're definitely fine.

AGI kill us all? It'll probably be quick. And if that doesn't seem to be the case (the biosphere slowly dying without an active effort to kill humans), then at least my medical background means I can make it quick. No need to suffocate, or starve or...

Besides. I want kids, and I'd rather not wait till 60 in a delayed AGI scenario. They're kinda nice, and would satisfy me even if I could get away with having them later.

I agree, this is largely my thinking. Death by AGI is likely to be quick, whether it’s by killbots or disease. The really bad stuff (like some kind of bioengineered torture plague terrorism or evil AI) are very bad but I’m not sure they’re worse or more likely that the worst ‘present day’ ways to die.

Bravo sir, bravo. Couldn't have written it better myself.

I'd also like to add that in addition to all this, children seem to change who you are as a person. Many folks I've talked to more on the spiritual side, so to speak, all report that children open you up to a newfound level of love and compassion, a depth of feeling almost impossible to reach without them.

I've noticed this depth of love in myself when spending time around children for long periods of time.

To me, that's one of the most attractive pieces. It can be extremely difficult, especially to folks who deal with depression and anxiety, to get access to these blissful moments of love and joy. Having kids seems to make them far more available, and in a healthy way to boot. Not, as you say, just like shooting up heroin.

Either way, I strongly reject the philosophy of the last men as well.

The lie isn't breaking down. A new lie is growing up, which is that the purpose of life is constant amusement. If human life has a purpose in any grand sense, that purpose must have applied to humans in all periods of history, and constant amusement at scale only became possible 40 or 50 years ago, and only for a narrow segment of the Earth's population. So people should really reconsider whether they are intended or evolved or whatever for nothing but tourism and concerts. So "it's not fun" is a pretty weak argument for tossing out the biggest of Chesterton's fences. I agree, though, that that's what people are doing.

But love is not "fun" either. I mean romantic love- the fretting and ups and downs and fights and giving control of your happiness to another person. But it's still worthwhile, and possibly more worthwhile than most amusements. In that sense, having kids is kinda like romantic love- worthwhile in a bigger way than fun.

I had a marriage proposal rejected once, and though we don't talk anymore, I'm pretty sure the main reason was my stated goal of never having children. Later I married someone else, and we fought for years about having kids, because I was adamant that having children was contrary to the will of God (the goal of life is either to serve God or be happy, the vast majority of people do neither, therefore you are probably condemning your kids to earthly unhappiness or eternal damnation. Probably both). I still don't have a convincing reply to this dilemma, but I also note that my chief goal in life at that time was clearing all the vaults in Fallout 3, so my true motives may not have been entirely theological, but the point is that my "I don't want kids" cred is legit.

I eventually caved because my wife was so annoying about it, and we had a kid.

I hated my own kid so much that I spent a while desperately trying to unearth evidence of infidelity on my wife's part so that I could abandon my wife and kid with a clear conscience (remember, my cred is legit). I might have changed 2 diapers (ever- my cred is legit), so I don't even have that to complain about, but my kid screamed all the time, and my wife basically opted out of marriage for like a year and half because she was a mother now. Being home with my kid and de facto ex wife made me bitterly regret every choice that had led me to that path. My kid also hated me. It was breast-fed for years, so I could not provide anything it wanted. It would only sleep with my wife. I just went around raging all the time. All in all, it was absolutely the worst years of my life. And worst of all, there was no evidence of infidelity.

Then it turned two. It could eat crackers, which I could provide. It could go on little walks to look for ladybugs. You could do the Louis CK thing at the grocery store (not that thing) and say "Look! A watermelon!" and know you had just expanded the kid's mind. You could push it down the slide and be a big hero. Even weirder was the first time the kid knew something I didn't, which was only "where the hammer is," but was a qualitative shift in the relation. It was becoming a full human. It could read. It could be taught math. It made jokes. Just to be present while this kid did anything at all was a gift from God or the universe or luck or whatever. I built my life around reading stories to it every night.

Moreover, I was also becoming a full human. A life spent playing Fallout and eating pizza is, if not a waste, merely the life of an animal. Cattle look for food and scratch itches and avoid pain, which is all I had been doing up to that point. I justified my life by telling myself I was working out and learning music and studying philosophy, and I really was doing all those things a little, but mainly I was playing Fallout. Or KOTOR. Or Arkham Asylum. All the other perfunctory efforts were somewhere on the line between cope and delusion. With the kid I had to reduce that and think about someone else basically all the time, but also admit that I had basically been thinking only about myself all the time. Just as it's hard to explain the value of education to an uneducated person without sounding like a smug tool, it's hard to explain the value of abandoning selfishness to someone who hasn't had it forced upon them. But I would say that I wasn't really an adult until 4 or 5 years into parenthood. (That may be normal, but it's abnormal for that to come at 35 instead of 23)

It wasn't an instant switch being flipped- it was gradual, but love for this kid grew to the point that I only agreed to have a second kid because I knew it would occupy all my wife's time and I would be able to spend even more time with my first kid. Not a great reason, but better than what had convinced me the first time. With the second kid, I knew what to expect and my wife had also grown a lot, and so it was much better, and rather than split the family into factions like I had hoped, everyone drew together, because the first kid also got to watch this baby develop into a full human and the new baby became part of all of our development.

Nowadays, if my kids died in an accident or something, it's a coin toss on whether I'd literally kill myself, because it's not at all clear what the point of living would be without them. I guess I could start over. But once you have kids that you like (not love- everyone "loves" their kids), nothing else is comparable. There is no Fallout or restaurant or vacation that could ever do anything other than remind you that this would be better if your kids were here. So in this sense, saying "kids are gross" is like saying "girls are gross" -only someone who has never experienced a good one would say that. The difference is that "girls are gross" expires on a timer (age), but "kids are gross" only expires on a trigger (getting to know your kids). Pull the trigger.

Finally, my kids are statistical outliers. They are intelligent, but also agreeable and social. Through my extreme weirdness, they have been educated and disciplined far above the standards of the age. I'm not a huge Jordan Peterson fan, but his advice to not allow your kids to do things that make you dislike them seems to have really paid off for my family. This skews my perception of the entire issue. Maybe your kids will be terrors. Certainly, most kids I meet are disliked by their parents and other adults, but in most cases it's the parents' fault for letting the kid get like that- with enough attention and self-discipline (of your self), you can usually discipline your kids into people that you, and everyone else, want to be around.

So you're right but everyone else, but wrong about yourself. Have some kids.

Wow beautiful story, you don't hear this type of thing often. Thanks for sharing. Gives me more confidence about the whole babies thing ahaha.

Good on you and your wife for sticking it out.

Certainly, most kids I meet are disliked by their parents and other adults, but in most cases it's the parents' fault for letting the kid get like that

This is an interesting perspective, but if we take this at a population level, it does indicate that on the average case, though maybe not your own, that kids will be a disaster to the parents. Maybe your tricks as well as other effective parenting techniques need to be disseminated more, but that's not happening right now.

There's no trick. You just punish your child when he does things you don't want him to do. My buddy has a terror of a kid, and they struggled for years until they finally got an ADHD diagnosis and put him on brain-zapping drugs. Right before they put him on the pills, I said "Have you tried swatting him?" and my buddy reacted with utter horror- that would be abuse! Better to pharmaceutically alter his mind, probably for the rest of his life, than to cuff him a couple of times. This attitude is extremely widespread- "I tried to take away the iPad, but he got mad," etc. This parenting hack is available to everyone except those who will cross into actual beatings, and even they can get the wife to do it.

As someone who had ADHD (obvious even as a kid, the diagnosis was delayed by willful ignorance on my parent's part, though I've forgiven them now) and was subject to corporal punishment for doing ADHD things, I assure you that the drugs are more effective, and better in the longterm.

(I also happen to think that mild corporal punishment is fine, and that society overreacted when it came to bands. It was just more socially acceptable to the point of being unremarkable when I was growing up)

In a different era I might agree with you, but I’m a teacher and have never seen an unsuccessful bid to get an ADHD diagnosis, which suggests to me that doctors now consider “child is difficult” to be sufficient evidence of ADHD. We tell gymbros to stay away from roids until their training, sleep, and diet are dialed-in. We should tell parents the same thing.

It can be simultaneously true that ADHD is overdiagnosed (in the US) and that it is a "real" condition. My point is that corporal punishment is still the inferior option, though I recognize it as a valid option.

The symptoms of ADHD have enormous overlap with being a "difficult child". What else better sums up absent-mindedness, hyperactivity etc? Stimulants aren't a class of drug that only helps people with ADHD, not like antipsychotics being of minimal benefit to the average person (it can make the insane sane, but it can't make the sane supersane).

In general, they can be quite effective for anyone. They're popular as study-aids for a reason, there are few people who don't benefit from increased attention and focus, even if their baseline is adequate. They are also quite safe, especially when used as prescribed. A world where the tradeoff is children who don't quite meet the ideal cutoff for ADHD (a highly clinical and discretionary diagnosis already) end up on meds while those who also "actually" need them also do is fine. It's not going to burn out their brain or give them cancer fifty years down the line. They probably end up getting better grades.

In other words, drift and expansion of ADHD diagnosis and treatment is about as benign as it gets. It's nowhere near as bad as a hypothetical world where every sad kid gets a diagnosis of depression and receives SSRIs, or is diagnosed with schizophrenia after mentioning an imaginary friend. The reader may substitute their own feels on gender dysphoria and affirmative care.

My understanding is that taking ADHD meds can complicate your career in the United States if you're interested in going into the military, so there's some considerations there that can come as an unpleasant surprise to people who see the meds as pure upside. Obviously that's not necessarily a consideration for everyone.

Not to blow up your replies here, but gog has it right. Millenial parents are really fucking up a lot, IME.

Kids are given tablets and television, so many toys that they fill entire rooms, wall-to-wall activities that require dozens of hours of investment per week, pharmaceutical drugs, spots in the marital bed at 3,4,5,6,7 years old because they just can't say no....

Any fool can make their job insanely difficult, given a weak enough backbone and poor decision-making abilities. If you figure out how to get good advice and think long-term about your children you're going to have a far better time.

(Also note - once your children become a whole person [pre-teen age] your amount of control will diminish. I won't rate myself as a parent until they are in their early 20s, but I can tell you that as of this moment I can judge parental skill for kids under 10)

Absolutely love this comment. Agreed on almost all counts, though I agreed to subsequent kids because I liked their predecessors so much (whie dreading the lack of bandwidth for each one it would entail).

Have things improved with your wife post-kid-2?

Things have improved.

The beginning of your story absolutely horrifies me. I've always thought that "I dont want kids" is a pretty good reason for not having kids. And a difference in preferences for kids is a valid breakup reason at any time in a romantic relationship.

I have three kids myself. I think I've wanted kids for about as long as I've been sexually aware. Before that I just wanted to find out I'd had a secret twin all along that my parents hadn't told me about. I married someone that always wanted kids.

I'm glad you came around, for your sake and your kid's sake. The advice is great, I just can't imagine going into this without wanting it in the first place.

I've had these points on my mind for a while now, but I guess now is a good time to write about it.

Imo there are two broad issues in modern culture closely related to this. Actually more, but these two are quite fundamental and thus especially hard to fix.

First the issue of what happiness even is. Modern culture is very fuzzy on it, and as such, has a tendency to default to the easiest-to-achieve, lowest common denominator: Fun and the avoidance of pain. Fun is being on a roller coaster. Fun is sitting on the couch watching Netflix. Fun is anything that doesn't challenge and doesn't create anything but keeps your mind occupied, even excited. I don't think I need to explain what the avoidance of pain is; But intrinsically it's a negative, and you can't built up a functioning society from a negative. Neither of these are wrong per se, they're just not sufficient for "the good life", they feel empty on their own. There are probably even more that I'm not aware of, but two major kinds of happiness are imo necessary to really feel good about yourself: Flow and Satisfaction.

Flow is about being challenged, and rising to the challenge. It's the state of mind when you have sufficiently trained something, say, Tennis, and play against a roughly equally skilled opponent. You may eventually lose, or you may win, the game itself might be mostly pointless (or might not), but the important part is this fundamental knowledge: You really feel deep in your bones you are good at this. The thing itself absolutely needs to a have some appropriate level of difficulty, or else you can't feel the flow.

Satisfaction is when you (either alone or in a group; sometimes even not you yourself but someone very closely related to you) have created something lasting, look back on it and, to quote a well known book: And He saw that it was good. It's having build a house, or planted a tree.

Sexuality gives a nice example of all three: Masturbation is fun; Seduction and sex is flow; Being in a relationship and having kids is satisfaction.

The good life, in my opinion, consists of waking up and immediately being satisfied about everything you see around; Then you do your job and naturally, automatically feel the flow, until you're finished and feel satisfaction again about a job well done. Tired, you indulge yourself with a little bit of fun in the afternoon and do some chores, and then fall asleep, satisfied about a good day and, again, everything you see around you. You can see what the relative priorities in my view are based on how much time is spent on each.

It's easy to see how hunter-gatherer societies effortlessly do this without even being aware: You wake up in a hut/tent which you necessarily must have crafted yourself or someone close to you, and the same goes for literally every piece of furniture and equipment present in it. You go hunting and feel the flow. Ideally, you successfully bring back game satisfied, cook it, enjoy it, and finally fall asleep. Very simplified, I know, but you get the gist. I'm also not claiming that life was necessarily great back then, since fear, despair and death were constant companions. But these positives were downright unavoidable if you did survive.

In modern life, we have successfully conquered those negatives. But on the positive side, everything tends to be the wrong way around: Nothing I have around me I have built myself; It's all just bought. Some work at least involves flow, but since flow requires difficulty it also implies things can go wrong with some regularity. More efficient is when nothing can really go wrong. Having successfully optimized everything, a lot of modern work is largely flow-less, rubber-stamping documents, endless meetings with decisions by committee, or supervising a machine that makes every product exactly the same in a way no human ever could.

But fun, oh fun! Fun is overflowing. Many people who nominally work full-time actually mostly indulge their fun for most of it. Plenty of people just flat-out do not work and you can guess what they do for most of the day. You absolutely can go through an entire modern life without ever really creating anything at all nor being meaningfully challenged.

The second is on the nature of close, especially romantic, relationships. The primary modern narrative is one of matching: You find people who share your views, preferences and inclinations, so any time spent together is automatically fun. People who don't match with you should be avoided. Reddit liberalism is the purest form; Any conflict results in a recommendation of "just break up and find a better match". Worst, in a certain sense, are not only the endless options, but the appeal to identify with those options. You don't enjoy gaming among other things, you're a gamer. You don't just like meat-less cuisine, you're a vegan. Remember the toaster-fucker problem.

The reality, in my view, certainly includes matching, but also involves skill and work, and most of all, adaption and the change of self, letting go of yourself. A lot, in fact. Again, harkening back to hunter-gatherers makes this painfully obvious: The choices in your tribe, maybe also a few other friendly tribes around you, are very limited. Childhood friendships will likely last for life, and should be invested in and adapted to appropriately. You may actually get the girl that suits you the most, but there will still be some points of conflict. Fortunately, options for views and preferences are rather limited to begin with as well, reducing some tensions. But you will have to change the person you are for her, and she for you. And when it comes to kids, you probably already get forced to look after those of other people anyway (and yes, also do the bad parts), so having your own adds not too much extra work.

As an only-child, I've grown up with literally nobody helping me how to manage a close relationship, let alone get a girl in the first place. Or at least putting me in my place, telling me to get better and put in the work. I've spent a large part of my teenage years resenting the fact that I'm supposed to be the active suitor, as opposed to be pursued. Aren't we in a feminist society? If a girl wants me, she can hit on me the same way I can hit on her! Certainly, at least, she should put in the same amount of work during dating! And anyway, no girls have the same interests as me, so why should I even attempt dating them? A few same-age boys and girls correctly told me I'm stupid, but the culture overall indulged me instead. Mostly through indifference, but I even got some approving nods from some older woman who said my attitude was mature and society will move that way eventually, you just have to find the perfect person for yourself!

And for friendships and relationships it even kind of works for enough people. We do meet so many people that it's true we can get much better matches than in the past. And already as kids we regularly get told friendships don't matter, we can always find new ones. So a lot of the social skills for close relationships (which are different from the social skills for early/superficial friendships - I was always good at those!) either never get developed, or atrophy. Few feel the need to ever put in work, and rather just get a whole new friend instead. If you train a skill, it's the one to cycle through people and find good matches.

Kids now are the perfect storm of everything that you did learn being useless, needing all the skills that you didn't learn and were told are useless, being challenged and requiring work in a way you probably never have been before, and the only reward is something that you might not even be aware you want or like. You don't get to choose your kids, you roll the dice with your partner and that's that (though at least they have some predisposition towards being similar to you; adoption is accordingly actually worse in that sense). All the skills you developed to find new friends and explore how well you match are pointless. Instead you have to do a lot of stuff you would never like and you don't even get paid for it. Months of sleep deprivation, changing diapers and reading toddler books.

I'm also increasingly convinced - courtesy of my wife hammering it all the time - that one of the most important parts of parenthood is teaching your children relationship management techniques from a young age on so that as older siblings they naturally have a good relationship in the first place and effortlessly keep it that way. Stuff like, when one gets a cookie, you always break up some part and give it to the other. Or you just sit there when they fight over a toy, and force them to repeatedly give it to the other back and forth until they have internalised that you don't need to fear that the other will keep it for themselves, so you can give away a toy freely, you'll get it again. And, the only part modern life somewhat teaches you, identifying when the other really needs some space and giving it, and to just play on your own without needing constant feedback. Maybe I'm naive and probably we will run into problems again as they get older, but generally they just do this stuff automatically now, simply get along for the most part and when not they also can just play by themselves for an hour or more, despite still being quite small.

And it's obvious to me that plenty of parents lack a certain introspection that allows them to see how deficient their skills in this respect are, and just try to press their square peg modern adult life intuitions into the round hole of relationship management for kids. They may do some things admirably competently, getting their kids into bed at seven sharp, managing screen time perfectly, juggling a million play-dates, working full-time and regularly getting date-nights with the wife through a babysitter. But it's obvious that they mostly resent the intrusion into the individuality they are used to, they don't really teach their kids (if they even have more than one) how to manage the sibling relationship or any other close one, they maximize their childless time on every occasion and worst of all, the kids feel that and correctly identify it as rejection. At the other end parents go crazy indulging every whim because, again, they have never learned how to manage a close relationship in a reasonable way and are so deathly afraid that their kid might not end up liking them that they rather give up absolutely everything. Sometimes parents manage to combine those two, somehow.

So, what is one to do? The first, and most important is the constant satisfaction you can feel every time you have your kids around you. Especially if you're not used to that you may need to concentrate a bit on it. But it's always present, indescribable, and at least for me far beyond what I feel for anything I have ever created otherwise. The next, often near-unimaginable part is that you can actually enjoy things you don't through empathy. I certainly don't enjoy reading toddler books on my own. But I do enjoy watching my toddler, feeling what he feels, (trying to) think what he thinks, and through that even toddler books become great. For this, you need to let go of your individuality a bit however, which not everyone is willing to do. From there, advanced techniques are possible: Changing diapers can be enjoyable, by concentrating on how the baby feels better afterwards, and on the fact that it is a necessary for your children. Even the sleep can be, as you cuddle with your child and concentrate on how happy it is to be with you, on how happy you are that it exists, and waking up a few times in the night is a small price to pay for that. But again, if you do that you are literally re-modelling your entire mental structure and let go of the person you used to be to the degree that "dead" becomes an apt description for that person. As you see, even happiness itself can be a skill issue.

On the other side, the same way you need to teach your kids how to get and give space from and to each other, you need to set boundaries to not go crazy and lose your individuality entirely. Changing diapers is necessary; Making the third dinner because they suddenly say they don't want the first two dinner options you made is not. If they're hungry, they'll eat. You probably screwed up earlier by letting them snack too much and indulging them too often before, otherwise they wouldn't even get the idea that making a third dinner is a possibility. That behaviour is not even good for them, let alone for you.

Again, since you haven't been taught how to properly give up a part of your individuality in the first place, that means you also haven't been taught how stop at some point. I'd echo some other posters here that now with kids, I look back on my pre-parenthood self with cringe; I only really have become an adult after becoming a parent.

Also, not to mention, kids are also lots of fun as well. They just do so much random shit you don't expect, you can't help but feel good. But the fun really isn't the reason why you should have them.

This got quite long, and probably a bit meandering. The TL;DR is, I guess: Children are everything modern life isn't, and hence, it anti-prepares you for it. This is what I mean with "it's cultural"; Even if we gave everyone huge stacks of money for having kids, I'm unsure how much it will change for the better. Ultimately, those that really want them will get them anyway, and for those that don't, I'm not sure it's an improvement if they do. And in our world, the future belongs to those who show up, so evolution will sort it out longterm anyway. We'll just have to muddle through, and maybe try to teach our kids those skills so that they have an easier time.

Nothing I have around me I have built myself; It's all just bought.

Satisfaction is when you (either alone or in a group; sometimes even not you yourself but someone very closely related to you) have created something lasting, look back on it and, to quote a well known book: And He saw that it was good. It's having build a house, or planted a tree.

Disagree here on 2 points.

First, a lot of people (myself as an example) really DGAF that they buy most of the things they own. I might get a sense of accomplishment from building something, but it's more from the skill expression of having done it (and the convenience it will bring me, but that's a different discussion) than the fact that "I" made "the thing".

Second, you're overestimating how much our ancestors made themselves. Barter amongst the tribe was a constant occurrence, and there was even a decent amount of trade between tribes although that was less important on a day-to-day basis. "As long as there have been humans, there has been trade" is as close to a universal as you can get. It would be weird for a species that got a lot of satisfaction from making things themselves to have a big emphasis on specialization even in the archeological record.

Our views might not be in as much tension as you think.

First, satisfaction is a positive feeling in my framework, so having many things you didn't build doesn't feel bad. I also don't suffer due buying almost everything per se. What matters is that you have enough things to feel satisfied about, ideally regularly in your direct environment. And also, there are many ways how you can feel satisfaction. For me, it's definitely my kids. And it's also my wife, or more specifically, the relationship with her; We've had our up and downs (still do) and it was hard work to keep it together at times. But we've adapted to each other so much that the entire idea of ever breaking up seems utterly silly, and we've found a way of being that makes us both happy. I also have academic degrees, especially my doctoral thesis, but honestly it all didn't quite turn out the way I wanted, and I'm not sure how satisfied I am with it. Some of the papers I was involved in or even main author are nice, though, and I certainly feel satisfaction when reading them again - but I have to make a conscious decision to do it, it's not automatically present daily the way my kids are.

On the second, I explicitly mentioned that satisfaction can even be felt for people close to you, not just only yourself (which is part of the reason why I call it satisfaction as opposed to pride). I used to be the kind of disagreeable materialist atheist who made fun of the idea of feeling pride for the accomplishments of one's ancestor or vice-versa one's kids. After having children myself however I get it at least partially: Not quite pride, but I do feel a deep satisfaction every time my kids accomplish something. And I can then at least imagine how someone in the past might feel the same about his, say, close-knit warband. It's not implausible to me that with all the hard challenges one might have gone through with them, such feelings might include a large part of the fellow tribesmen, maybe even the tribe as a whole. Of course, even if you're very self-focused and the, say, bow-maker of your tribe, you can still feel a lot of satisfaction every time you see someone else with your own handiwork, which you do constantly, every day.

Great response, captures the feeling I had but didn't want to write.


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