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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9963 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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Yeah, I think the closest thing to a solution would involve substantial government pressure to form heterosexual couples, potentially including criminal punishment for cheating.

This might not work and might have bad side effects, but every other proposed solution also wouldn’t work and would have bad side effects.

Last weekend, Aella and friends hosted SlutCon at Lighthaven in Berkeley. Described charitably, SlutCon seeks to heal gender relations by teaching socially awkward nerds how to flirt by giving them a sandbox of semi-professional “flirt girls” to practice on. This caused a lot of controversy in the community for reasons which people tended to dance around, but which boiled down to, “I don’t want the socially awkward nerds in the community to be trained to flirt with me.”

Uh, isn't slutcon basically just whoring routed through a different payment structure that isn't illegal?

It's hard to say. All first-hand accounts of the event deny it, but of course that's what one would expect them to say. Keep in mind that we are dealing with levels of autism that shouldn't even be possible.

Your link is a wall of text, but this bit certainly sticks out:

Obviously, it's not slutcon's job to 'fix' any overly-pushy men. It wouldn't be possible to. But is slutcon making things better in teaching them skills, or worse in emboldening them to try in the first place?

Yeah, that's the problem: there are some men who are "overly pushy" but are also so timid that they aren't trying at all. LOL.

I feel there is a non-zero group of very vocal women who's core argument against stuff like this basically boils down to that they hate the idea of men having to 'learn' to be 'chads'.

They don't want to find out that the man who managed to get with them used to be a socially messed up and worked hard to be charismatically smooth. They want a natural. The guy who just 'gets it'. Like, how the hell do they expect regular and/or awkward guys to learn this stuff? Yeah, I know socially extroverted people who make connections as easily as fucking breathing, but the rest of us have to put in the effort at it to atleast pretend to be normal, or atleast not an asocial retard.

Ozy agrees with you.

Autistic people I know are vastly more likely to make the opposite error: to become so self-effacing romantically and sexually that they never express romantic or sexual interest in anyone, and end up loveshy.

In general, sexual harassment is caused by:

(1) A person believes incorrect things about dating in general (“women secretly like it when you crudely compliment them”) or about this situation in specific (“that person is so into me that they want me to hit on them even though I’m their boss”).

(2) A person knows they’re coercing someone else into sex or a relationship, or knows that they’re making someone uncomfortable, and is doing that on purpose because they want to.

Now, you might assume that #1 is a thing autistic people do, because it involves misunderstanding social situations. It is mostly not. Autistic people like following clearly laid out rules for social interaction. “My illegible social intuition says I can override the clearly laid out rules for this social interaction and it’ll be fine” is an allistic social problem.

@Quantumfreakonomics

It's literally me.

Being a homeschooled kid for everything before college already put me on poor footing, but attending college in the mid-2010's meant:

  1. exposure to university- and media-driven feminist messaging implying that all approaches were inherently [suspect, predatory, unwanted; from hereon out, "predatory"]
  2. the looming threat of turbocharged MeToo accusations for any fumbled encounter Additionally, I made the mistakes of:
  3. listening to a shrink who I now would classify as "body-positive" who told me looks didn't matter much (I wish I had embraced self-hate earlier instead of accepting affirmations from deluded authorities; at least I'm not fat anymore)
  4. hanging out with a D&D group for my social needs, a group that, on retrospect, I realize was socially policed with terminally Tumblr-brained women who collected left-coded quirks like the cowed men who dated them collected Magic cards; this group introduced me to the memeplexes surrounding subreddits like /r/niceguys and /r/inceltears, which led me to believe that there was no winning, since per those memeplexes, things like "trying to not be a predator" and "complaining that there's no winning because you are branded a predator no matter what you do" are also reasons to be mocked and branded a predator. I still catch myself thinking like this.

Thanks to all these factors, the risks of any approach were exaggerated (or more conservatively, were implied to be exaggerated) by authorities and by the groups I chose to associate with.

At this point I'm a wizard and just hoping I'll get over the hurdle of self-preservation soon; I can't talk with shrinks about this because despite the seeming pointlessness of life, assuming I do find a purpose to living I am provisionally maintaining a stable job, and I'd like to keep it stable with no employment gaps or institutionalizations to my name.

If any staff member would like to ban me, I think I'm going to keep using this forum for venting, at least as context and drive permits, and that is trite.

If any staff member would like to ban me, I think I'm going to keep using this forum for venting, at least as context and drive permits, and that is trite.

Why? Nothing you said seems remotely objectionable. You are sharing your experience, which is not against the rules.

Single-issue posting is against the rules, even if it's intermittent rather than constant. 1 2

You have to really stand out and be persistently obnoxious about it for us to invoke that rule. Everyone has their "thing" that they like to talk about - that is not what the single-issue posting rule prohibits.

Fascinating, so rules as written yes, but rules as intended? Haven't the mods clarified many a time that they define single-issue posters as "obnoxious" and "non-stop". My model for this is that you'd have to cluster closer the SS, or EC (might be remembering wrong) style of posting rather than this fairly timid mostly-lurker that occasionally comes in to vent about how homeschooling + feminism + Leftism fucked up his brain. He is essentially not prolific enough, aggressive enough, or obnoxious enough to seriously catch mod attention on the topic.

Seems like a case of: "Rules are a blunt hammer, sometimes you need the enforcer to recognize when they should be applied" or that you can't make rules for every situation that are 100% effective.

the seeming pointlessness of life

This comment seems relevant.

I linked the wall of text because it recaps most of the better arguments that were had. I probably won’t make a full post on the subject since everyone’s getting in their dating takes in this one, and a separate thread would just be dunking on Aella.

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