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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34927 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Well, looking for advice on Reddit is unhappily going to result in the idiots coming on to call you all sorts of names.

And now I'm going to prove myself one of the idiots, because hey! "literal virgin (despite being 21 years old)".

Now, I realise that 21 is over the age of consent and that today's youth engage in fornication outside of marriage, and that this is now socially acceptable, but still. Why should his age have anything to do with it? At what age is it no longer acceptable to be a literal virgin? At what age should he have lost his virginity? Is the new rule that once you hit 14, you should be banging everything with a pulse, be you male, female, or one of the Heinz 57 genders?

I am sympathetic to the guy, even though his approach was the worst possible, but as you say, that's down to cluelessness rather than caddishness. At the same time, I don't think "21 and still not dipped his wick" isn't an attitude to help people like him be confident or reduce self-loathing. "Oh great, another person on the Internet telling me I'm a loser failure fuckup".

I'm glad you point out that virgin-shaming is bad and that blaming the guy for not being a Don Juan is wrong. And yeah, this is exactly the way to drive guys into being incels.

At what age is it no longer acceptable to be a literal virgin? At what age should he have lost his virginity?

I know you're not asking literally, just hypothetically, but still, from my experience, the general societal attitude is that guys should probably lose their virginity by age 18 or 19, or else they're probably doing something wrong, or they're weird, or something. Also, they probably should have at least touched a girl's breasts by like 16 or 17 and kissed a girl by 15. Personally, I don't judge anyone who is older and is a virgin, and I understand that every is different and should take things at their own pace, but there's some part of me that believes that if a guy hasn't done it by 20 or 21, he's probably trying but failing and not going about it the right way.

Huh, reading these general social expectations now is similarly irritating to what it would have been 15-20 years ago. I think I'd've been better at articulating why back then, though in an annoying self-righteous way that is just cringy, but still... this somehow summoned my early 2000s teenaged rebellion mode. I'm not sure what to make of this.

To clarify, by "literal virgin (despite being 21 years old)", I meant to convey:

  • "virgin" is sometimes used colloquially and insultingly online to just mean "awkward around women", but in this case the guy is a "literal" virgin.

  • I mentioned 21 years old because it is an unusual age to still be a virgin and highlights likely social awkwardness, I didn't mean to imply any moral failing on his part for that.

Is English your first language? 'Literally' these days is often used for derisive emphasis. "My boss is literally a jackass", "What a literal retard you are", etc.

To be clear, your English writing is perfect and I wouldn't suspect anything usually. But literally does not mean literally literally, literally.

English is my first language, and @Testing123 is using the word correctly (and the people you mention are using the word wrong regardless of if they are a native speaker). People are shockingly bad at English, but that doesn't make "literally" mean something different just because they're shit at the language.

I can be somewhat accepting of the Valley Girl usage as a kind of emphatic hyperbole -- but this is the first I've seen someone argue that this means the normal usage is deprecated.

Concerning.

Man, I wish you were right, but it's time to give up the ghost. "Literally" is used for emphasis much more than for its original meaning. The fact @FarNearEverywhere assumed @Testing123 was using "literal virgin" as an expression of disgust shows that even highly literate people are using sense two as the primary definition these days.

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