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Celebs, boundaries and emotional abuse
So two stories have popped up around the same topic recently: how much men have the right to complain about or police their women's public behavior.
First off: recent mother Keke Palmer finally got to go out and enjoy herself, and her outing involved being serenaded by R&B star and notorious hound Usher Raymond. Her "baby daddy" decided to come out and complain that: "A man of the family doesn’t want the wife & mother to his kids to showcase booty cheeks to please others".
Well, that didn't go well. The feminist-aligned internet tore into him and he appeared to have been promptly dumped and, insult to injury, merch clowning him is now being sold
At the same time, "toxic masculinity" has a white representative to balance it out: Jonah Hill is now being attacked for being a misogynistic narcissist. Soon after the birth of his child, his ex decided to post texts showing his demand that she stops sexy photo shoots or overly close relationships with men or hanging out with women from her "wild past"
Hill is also facing a backlash from the DM women for "emotionally abusing" his ex via his boundaries and non-negotiables and his exploiting of "therapyspeak" to sanctify controlling behavior.
In both stories both men are excoriated for hypocrisy because these women behaved this way when they met, and expecting them to change (including after childbirth) is inconsistency.
So, what culture war implications to take from this?
Keke Palmer's boyfriend had a very standard male reaction, regardless of charges of hypocrisy. Making it public that way was unwise, especially since he was the comparative minnow in the status competition. Times have changed. Maybe men like that should reconcile themselves to playing the role of the honorable wife who conveniently never sees any of these shenanigans, for everyone's sake. Of course, that would suggest some more restraint on Palmer's part...
The situation is reversed with Hill. He has the status. Which I suspect is a significant part of the motive to release it now and draw in Deuxmoi-reading women to help win a battle that she couldn't have won in the relationship. As many people asked: why did she put up with his absurd demands (asking her to not post risque surfing photos when he met her through them) for any time whatsoever? Well, because he was Jonah Hill, presumably.
No pretense to even wrestle with why men don't want the mother of their kids publicly on display. Just near-total lack of care.
Obviously the concept creep on abuse continues.
Is the celebrity (and wannabe celebrity) class just going to litigate every relationship online now for fans and political affinity group points...forever? The Hill thing happened a while ago and now it's supposed to be a thing? I suspect part of the push to call some of this "abuse" is precisely that there's a realization that no one should care about messy personal business. I assume the word game is retarding us coming to the conclusion one should in a panopticon: to stop caring. I wonder how long it'll hold.
The prophecy fulfilled.
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It’s pretty funny how half-decent looking chicks and greater can summon a simp army at a moment’s notice by playing damsel in distress. It reminds me of a possibly-15-year-old-by-now meme of a chick posting a Facebook status update of “feeling sad :(“ and getting a ton of likes and comments to the tune of “omg are you okay?” “what happened?!” juxtaposed against a guy’s status update of “just found a cure for cancer!” that got one like and one comment from a male friend saying “cool dude”. What innocent times those were.
But yeah, nowadays in mainstream online discourse, it’s fairly a given that any male expectation of their girlfriends/wives to not do things like wear slutty outfits, go clubbing, post bikini pics, flirt with other men, grind up against other men will be denounced as toxic, insecure, and controlling. Because such expectations compromise the sacred right of women to have FUN, and anything that impedes a queen’s ability to have FUN must be wrong in and of itself. Men’s preferences are toxic and problematic, in contrast to women’s which are brave and valid. Men’s feelings are fundamentally illegitimate and they’re the problem if they’re compromising their girlfriends’/wives’ ability to feel fun, flirty, stunning, beautiful, brave, wonderful, and empowered.
A bizarre but amusing manifestation of this is pregnant women and alcohol. Whenever a hint of the topic comes up on subreddits such as AmItheAsshole or BestofRedditorUpdates, there’s a vocal contingent that insists pregnant women can have alcohol in moderation and should feel free to exercise that right. Boyfriends/husbands who don’t want their pregnant girlfriends/wives drinking are just being selfish, paranoid, and controlling. Any third-parties who discourage pregnant women from drinking are just invasive, misogynistic naysayers who want to control women’s bodies. I suppose it’s too much to ask a woman to abstain from alcohol for nine months.
While there's probably no level of alcohol consumption that's good for a developing fetus, there really is a medical controversy over what level is harmful. Obviously experimentation is unethical(and humans metabolize alcohol differently from other animals, so you can't just test it on rats or monkeys or whatever), so it's impossible to fully resolve. Reddit coming down entirely on one side of the matter is just what reddit does.
If there's genuine medical uncertainty the only responsible choice for an expectant mother is total abstinence and an expectant father is completely justified in requesting that from his partner
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And of course, a father may say “I don’t want my wife taking that risk with my child” without being a jerk.
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Eye-opening event. Seeing some mantras being repeated that I simply can't believe:
You're not allowed to set boundaries regarding other's behavior in a relationship (excuse me, what the fuck?)
You can't expect her to stop being a bachelorette simply because you married her.
It's "controlling behavior" to have standards in a relationship.
It's insecurity, and you can't expect your partner to accomodate that even a little. (women do not have insecurities)
Anyways, shoutouts to this whole debacle for rekindling my fear of women, and quenching my fear of missing out.
Meet women in real life, they're not crazy IRL like they are on reddit.
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This kind of stuff is only really a major problem with a very specific western, educated, secular, metropolitan, young, trendy demographic. Unfortunately, most people here fall into many of those same baskets. However, there’s no reason not to branch out. I’ve been urging people here for years to broaden their dating horizons. Dating across class and education boundaries never worked for me, but I’ve had great romantic relationships with women from Russia, Japan, and Pakistan, and my wife is Filipina.
It's always hilarious when the topic of Western men geographically broadening their dating horizons comes up in mixed company online. The normally extremely anti-racist "western, educated, secular, metropolitan, young, trendy" women become the most virulent racists and reach for the most offensive stereotypes in their seething. Gross, if you stupid incels find better success and happiness with foreign women like Russians or Filipinas, it's only because Russian women are soulless sex-doll gold-diggers and Filipinas are just midgets desperate to escape their boondock huts. Have fun exploiting your mail-order brides, you losers.
Sailer's Law of Female Journalism also applies to women more generally. Women are gripped by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be more attractive than they are.
Even liberal and progressive people will agree with this when it applies only to teenage girls. So, we get all these articles about how instagram needs to be banned; because, otherwise, teenage girls will inevitably fall into a deep depression from the mere fact they see more attractive and popular girls on their screens. That this fragility only applies to girls and boys are immune to this effect is unnoticed and uninteresting to them.
Funnily enough, I also thought of Sailer's Law of Female Journalism while I was writing the above comment, as I had a permutation in mind. Mainstream lipstick feminism: The haunting fear that somewhere, a Western man might be happy without it benefitting Western women.
Indeed, the socially progressive left often horseshoes with the socially conservative right when it comes to the agency of young women. Hence the "Fight for 25" meme, the semi-ironic notion that if young women can't consent to relationships with older men, nor do they have the agency and accountability to participate in other aspects of adult society.
Of course, older women have ample motivation for applying shaming tactics and maintaining barriers to entry when it comes to men dating younger women. Eighteen or 20-year-old women destroy 28-year-old women on the dating markets, much less 38-year-old women (see, for example, Dataclysm or Bruch and Newman [2018]).
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Such women appear to have no capacity for theory of mind when it comes to men. They accuse men like Jonah of being unable to fit a whole woman in their heads, but they can’t even fit part of a man in theirs.
Ugh, stupid men. Why are they so possessive and controlling about sexual exclusivity? Why do they expect their girlfriends/wives to act differently once in a relationship/marriage than before? Why can’t they just let their girlfriends and wives live their best single lives? Women’s existence and inherent wonderfulness should be enough for them to want to commit and stay committed.
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Based wizard.
I wish him well in pondering his two orbs.
I'm entirely too fond of pondering the pair attached to someone else for the same, albeit I have been tempted heh
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Also throw in the mix https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12275645/Porn-star-Adam22s-wife-Lena-says-pain-days-doing-sex-scene-man.html
Adam, the 39-year-old podcast host of No Jumper - who recently came under fire for allowing his spouse Lena, also known as Lena The Plug, to perform on camera with a man for the first time in their seven-year relationship - has brought further attention to the sex scene by noting that they may engage in a threesome.
Two weeks after Lena, 32, filmed the scene, she said that she was in pain for 'three or four days' because she had sex for '40 minutes' with a man whose penis was 'bigger' than Adam's.
The more right leaning part of the toxic sphere is having field day with that.
I think most of those are carefully engineered publicity stunts.
It's porn, it's a gimmick to get publicity. Porn thrives on, and indeed needs, shock factor, and what better than "Wow, this guy is so hung even a professional couldn't handle him?" plus the threesome of "Two big-dicked guys make woman cry and beg" for the fantasy appeal to potential viewers.
It's all trash but trash calculated to the last gram to target the particular audience.
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Yeah, but there's "joke's on them, I was only pretending to be retarded", and then there's this...
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Yes, the failure of many men was in not screening the mothers of their children for acceptable behaviour before knocking them up.
After doing a bit of reading it seems that Jonah Hill actually just dated the surfer girl for a year, stated his boundaries after observing unwanted behaviour, and they broke up for that reason (good for him). He then moved onto his current partner with whom he now has a child.
I don't blame Jonah for saying what he said in the way he said it. He said 'if you need to do these things, happy to support you, but I'm not the partner for you'. He was probably mildly insecure, but if stating those insecurities as boundaries is classified as abuse in a relationship then I would say 80%+ of women are guilty too (and a large percentage of men). I doubt he was talking about staying away from 'any friend he hadn't pre-approved of' (additional link with more texts giving context). From the additional texts it seems likely he was talking about guys hitting on her while she was surfing and her not extricating herself from the situation. She was 25 when they were dating, so pretty fair if she didn't know how to handle overly flirtatious men yet.
In contrast Keke's partner kind of brought it on himself by criticising her behaviour on Twitter. I don't know what he was thinking I think posting private relationship discussions publicly pretty much destroys your own reputation as someone safe to date by a large percentage of the population.
You shouldn't need to tell your partner what is acceptable behaviour regarding other men. Trying to change people is a recipe for disaster. Even if wild players/playettes change their behaviour in the early phase of a relationship (perhaps due to limerance or pair bonding), they're likely to eventually revert back to their old ways. As the old PUA saw goes 'you can't turn a ho into a housewife'.
And what would you advise they do: be celibate for life? Not have children at all? Being cheated on sucks, I will agree. So does divorce. But that isn't the worst thing that can happen. I've seen plenty of things just as bad or worse. Food addiction, drug addiction, attempted murder, physical abuse...
No, you date women, have sex with them (with protection) and observe their behaviour. If they are not 'wife material' (whatever that is according to you) then you move on to someone that is. You don't try to change them, you just move on. Nothing about this method has anything to do with celibacy. If you are talking about the low % chance of a condom breakage and then an actual conception happening, well I would mitigate this by either accepting the risk or not sticking my dick in obvious crazy.
Jonah (for all the faults I have with him as a typical Hollywood progressive) did it the right way. All the Twitter noise is just nonsense that will blow over quickly. I think the fact she needed to post their text history a year after their breakup for 'mental health reasons' is a sign that she regrets him getting away and needs validation from others to stop her bad feelings.
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Date the sort of woman who might be described as "modest." Who is pretty enough, but not a performer or surf instructor and model. This, of course, comes with its own drawbacks; she'll be harder to bring to the film premier, and maybe won't make your friends jealous or know anything in bed.
It sounds like the hope and expectation was to date a performer who loves attention, and that she would come around to increased modesty based on conversations/love/childbirth, but it's not too surprising that didn't work out, especially when these were full grown women of 30 or so.
There's a stereotype that it's highly conventionally attractive people that aren't good at sex
I'd love to know if someone has formally investigated this. It doesn't jibe with my personal experiences very well at all.
Pickup Artists had a lot of anecdotal data about this, but it never panned out into solid knowledge. There's no surety that having sex with an uglier girl with better 'skills', is a more enjoyable experience than a model (of your type) that acts like a starfish (due to limerence or your hormonal/nervous system firing on all cylinders)
Completely agree. But even on the original question I'm not persuaded the correlation is all that (inversely?) strong. I've had sex with mid or ugly women who were crap in bed, and with gorgeous women who were enthusiastic and passionate.
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Hmm. If you have a lot of something, you can get away with not learning the things that other people need to learn. Many beautiful people get away with being assholes or not as competent. Trust fund babies born with silver spoons in their mouths sometimes misuse their privilege in ways that peasants like you and I that must work for a living can't pull off. Not every rich person goes to Yale, gets trashed at parties, and urinates off of balconies onto the peasants below...but a few do. When you have the same peasants you just pissed on at midnight sucking up to you the next day because your dad's a billionaire and you've got connections...you can be an asshole if you like.
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I'm glad to see that you're coming around, if this comment says what I think it says.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time we spoke you acted as if you'd rather be celibate than take a chance on women! I'm not being rude here, I think it's a good change.
Hmm.
I have heard that there was some kind of unique wisdom that you could only get from sex and relationships. As such, it makes sense to be less choosy about your first relationship than subsequent ones. I am very aware that if you are quite unattractive or autistic, sex and relationships for both men and women can be a kind of Faustian bargain. It's up to each individual to decide what they're OK with; as long as they're not being evil, it's their choice.
Bringing children into a situation like this makes things more...complicated, though.
Also, the Devil generally holds up his end of the bargain, but gets his pound of flesh in the end.
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To be fair though, there aren't exactly as many innocent virgin women without an instagram account as there are men. Men have to compromise on something, looks, virginity, Iq, personality, tattoos, mental health, weight etc. Most people are forced to settle rather than are able to chose whatever they dream of.
I believe that one of the reasons why so many people are single today is because too many people are unattractive. Lots of people are obese, many women have tonnes of bagage, there are men who can't do a single pull up or survive three days without electricity. Partially due to the housing market a lot of young men live with their parents. People are remaining single because they can't find someone decent while they themselves aren't decent.
Yeah. Also there is the fact that the things that men were/are traditionally good at (heavy labor and war) aren't nearly as important in the modern world, while the traditional male failure modes of essentially being a violent/drug addicted/game addicted jackass are still just as bad. It's pretty arguable that Joe Median isn't a good deal for Jane Median these days. I'm not at all saying that this is a bad thing; there's been plenty of arguments that patriarchy was a sheltered workshop for unattractive dudes.
imma push back on that because let me just say that if men stopped doing all the things you could reasonably consider "heavy labor" for a week then entire industries and nations would be brought to the brink of collapse.
The modern world has definitely freed up large swathes of the population to do things that don't require lifting the equivalent of their body weight from parallel multiple times a day, and shoved those jobs where it is still expected off to the periphery. But the stuff that DOES require heavy labor as an input (agriculture, construction, energy production) are all FOUNDATIONAL for civilization.
But, from a cultural perspective, the physical and personality traits associated with engaging in heavy labor have certainly fallen out of fashion, so such guys are probably disadvantaged when it comes to finding mates. since a woman might have to take a status hit to be seen associated with such a man.
Fair enough. But...suppose that something (a virus maybe) just nerfed the shit out of male strength, leaving most dudes as weak as the average woman. This would suck, but we'd learn to adapt and even if there was no cure, 10 years after that virus hit we'd be doing OK. This being said, I'm not sure that greater male physical strength is required for agriculture or construction. I will say that construction would be more expensive and less efficient if you only had women working it. This being said, if we had a good deal of warning that dudes doing heavy labor would down tools and stop working we could most definitely keep things going. Designing tools to be smaller and more readily used, building machinery to automate certain parts of processes, and having more people on work crews could allow civilization to keep chugging along.
The median man, as you said, doesn't need to be swole in order to earn a living.
This has already happened. It's called "mass industrialization" (even the swolest man is absolutely nothing compared to the power of the three-phase induction motor, the air compressor, the internal combustion engine, and the thinking machines though those would come much later), and had completed its takeover of the United States by about 1920 (other nations would be slightly ahead or behind); the negative effects of this would be temporarily reversed by an economic golden age from about 1950 through 1970.
It's worth noting that though some societies have had these conditions (the Peoples of the Longhouse being the most relevant example, as those societies never needed to develop agriculture or industry in the 10,000 years between running into a more advanced civilization), it has never been the case that these conditions were true for the most advanced society on the planet. I don't believe that 4 generations of people is enough time to change underlying biological realities though admittedly technology will eventually be good enough to obsolete women just as hard (if that technology is not banned... but it probably will be, with the usual bullshit justifications).
And now you know why male interests have no representation in the halls of power today, and why progressivism lacks the concept of positive-sum economic growth entirely. Countries that are less industrialized, meaning "men are more required to create primary goods", tend to (need to) afford men more political power.
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I don’t think this is true, and if it is it’s leaning pretty heavily on ‘without an instagram account’. Pretty sure that men are less likely to wait til the wedding night in every population, everywhere, even when age adjusted. Men are dramatically more promiscuous when you restrict things to the subset of sexually active adults, as well. Even if you put a lot of stock into instagram being bad(and I won’t dispute that- it seems like insta is pretty bad, especially for teen girls), it’s not entirely fair to only be concerned about instagram and not male typical vices.
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Nothing new here, it seems to me. I might be wrong, but from my reading of history it seems to me that for all of history, rich people of both sexes have often left the boring aspects of raising kids to their servants. Of course it is probably better for the kids to be raised closely by their biological relatives, but historically this is something that has probably been more common among the poor who had no choice but to do it than among the rich of both sexes who could just get others to do the childrearing for them while they went off to do things that they found more interesting, including pursuing new sexual relationships. It is nice to think that there is some deep psychological force that compels all parents to devote themselves to their children beyond the bare minimum, but I think that objectively speaking this is not true. Most people do feel emotionally compelled to provide to some extent for their children, but historically speaking this has never been something that one could rely on beyond a certain bare minimum, and it still is not.
Men should understand that their madonna/whore complexes, their simplistic notions of saintly mothers, and their "women are wonderful" psychological delusions are just that, delusions. Women, just like men, are complex monkeys with their own desires. When a man becomes a father or a woman becomes a mother, they do not stop being complex monkeys with their own desires. Humans are biologically programmed to devote some degree of attention to their children, but it only goes so far.
I don't know why you are so focused on the child rearing aspect of this, but this statement seems bizarrely anachronistic in the year of our lord twenty twenty three. The song I am woman (Hear me roar) came out fifty years ago. The men who don't understand that women are complex monkeys are never going to understand it at this point. Not that I think this Darius guy or Jonah Hill can't understand that women have their own desires - they do, but like everyone else on the planet they value their own desires higher, and attempted to negotiate with their partner over the specifics, only to discover that their partner can summon a fricking army to her side of the table with an emotionally loaded tweet.
Also Madonna/whore complexes and the women are wonderful effect are propagated and enforced at least as much by other women as they are men, if not more so.
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"Any man who must say, 'I am the king' is no true king"
There is no way to not appear weak when complaining that the mother of your child went clubbing with Usher, the war was already lost when that dude decided to make someone like Keke the mother of his child. This sort of thing can only be enforced through the cultivation of respect, never becoming explicit, otherwise it's like your boss explicitly demanding you call him "sir", or a PhD reminding you to call him "doctor". Just unbelievably cringy and weak. Your gf/wife is just supposed to know, without you telling her, that sending nude photos to other dudes is a big no-no. If she doesn't understand that automatically, there's no fixing her without sacrificing significant amounts of your own authority and generally ruining the relationship.
... no, it's like the manager of a store giving all of the employees a lecture on minimum acceptable behavior - wear the uniform, look clean, speak respectfully to customers, come to work at these hours, you have this many vacation days but have to register them in advance, etc. Which is a good idea when working with people of lower socioeconomic status, and is entirely different from screaming 'I AM THE BOSS! RESPECT ME'
Like, your 'don't say anything' relies on everyone getting those instructions from somewhere else, the knowledge has to come from somewhere. And how do you know your new gf absorbed the same implicit social expectations that you did, 60 year post sexual revolution? Your post feels like - "everyone implicitly understands [specific centrist claims about sexual morality], not following them is a sign of disrespect". But there's a ton of disagreement about sexual morality!
(note this is a narrow disagreement and i'm not signaling anything about my opinion on OP)
I think this is why I’m kinda with these guys even if they’re a bit unhinged in delivery. There are and should be behavior expectations of your spouse as a spouse. They are not just roommates living together, they are husband and wife. And this implies a few things that should be a given: sexual exclusivity, emotional exclusivity, not displaying secondary sex characteristics n front of members of the opposite sex, and not frequenting places that are commonly used to meet potential mates. It’s bad form to say it the way Jonah Hill or Usher did, but I can’t wrap my head around people seeing sexism around the very simple concept that marriage means something that Friends-with-benefits doesn’t.
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I mean, the relationship ended up ruined.
I wonder if he had any inkling that he was burning his bridges and the pressure to disavow certain forms of behavior publicly, even if it potentially wrecked a relationship with a higher status woman, was simply too great.
He probably just got emotional and overestimated his position though.
Or it was over and he was laying down a marker for the next relationship?
Sounds plausible.
The humiliation was too much and he wants to break up, might as well cast a parting thot-patrolling shot and burn the ships behind him.
After all, he’s already been banging her and knocked her up with a kid; he may have lost the most recent battle, but won the war. And now he can take advantage of fame and female mate-choice copying to move onto the next girl(s).
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