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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2193 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 19, 2023

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A question for all of you:

What does it take - what qualities of character - does it take for someone to willingly and freely choose to sacrifice to be with someone? To freely endure visceral, biological disgust just to make someone happy? More importantly: what kind of person, if anyone, is worthy of this kind of sacrifice - whether for a night or a few years or a lifetime?

Have any of you personally known anyone that you believed was worthy of that kind of sacrifice? Do any of you have anyone in your lives that you would sleep with despite being disgusted by simply because they asked it of you as a favor, or because you felt they might benefit from it? If you do: why? I have...hmm. I knew a couple of people like this who I might sleep with, disgust be damned, because I admired their character that much. Honestly, I'd see it as kind of like a combination of acting and a gross, intimate medical procedure that needed to be performed well. Although I'm not any good at the first, I am no stranger to (limited) participation in the second. One of the guys...he's a fat dude who got hit by a drunk driver at 19, wound up crippled and on crutches for life, but is a hell of a dude: a West Virginia redneck son of a union construction foreman and a nurse that made good, went to Harvard, and then returned a decade later to own real estate in his hometown and live off the profits.

Women are quite different than men, and I can easily imagine some woman is going to be attracted to an able man even if he's on crutches and despite him being fat.

More importantly: what kind of person, if anyone, is worthy of this kind of sacrifice - whether for a night or a few years or a lifetime?

Could you live with yourself if you married someone you were attracted to, then they suffered serious injury so you then proceeded to abandon them and find a healthy partner? Senator McCain could, but he was a special kind of person.

Our crutch using hero wasn't ordinary, and even then, his frat brothers at Harvard told him more or less that finding someone that would be loyal to him would be extremely difficult if not impossible. The guy was a hell of a man, character wise, and it was a huge uphill battle. His own words: "I have a lot to offer. Admittedly, fat cripple is a tough sell."

McCain is...an interesting person. Perhaps an asshole for how he left his wife. I'll grant him a bit of latitude for having endured hell in a PoW camp though. I wouldn't leave my wife if something like that happened to her, though.

Another thing: In high school, I found myself attracted to a girl who liked to swim and hike. She was big into swimming, had a nice body and was fit, very blunt...and very bitter and cynical. She had been burned in a house fire as a baby. While the surgeons did amazing work, she was left missing an ear and with a third of her face looking like Freddy Krueger. It was her sadness that was more a turnoff than her face.

...and very bitter and cynical.

In these kinds of cases I've read that people often stop being that sad after finding a partner.

Perhaps an asshole for how he left his wife.

Well, he's believed to have been beating his new wife for years and having been blackmailed over it. I think he's instructive.

Both he and his father sold their souls in government service - McCain Sr. for helping cover up the Liberty incident, McCain Jr. for helping with the cover-up of the highly embarrassing POW/MIA scandal.

I don't know how my burned friend is doing. She has had a partner, now. She still seems rather bitter and cynical - and also nerdy and blunt.

As for McCain: certainly an interesting guy. You can't knock his strength of will in Vietnam; he refused early release and chose to keep getting tortured by the Vietnamese. Whatever else he did in life, that has to be admired. He was a strong-willed, wealthy man and very much a skilled politician. He was also an asshole in his personal life.

I wonder if this is some sort of implication: you can be an asshole, as long as you are extremely determined and also very socially skilled? I mean...almost everyone reading this will not even come close to McCain's level of political skill or power. Sure, he was born on third base, but the guy had to run home. And run he did.

I think @curious_straight_ca is right that people generally become attracted to ‘what they can get’. Our ancestors were fucking some disgusting toothless people who bathed a few times a year, but I imagine they were into it. You just acclimatize to that level. The fat guy’s fat wife is attracted to him and he to her because that’s where they’re at.

Or the toothless guy hit the toothless girl with a club to the head and ooga boogad that coochy in a dark cave.

Still at least implies the toothless guy was attracted to the toothless girl, even if the converse wasn't true.

I don't disagree in general though I'd say that some people don't ever acclimatise, or else it happens as a result of strong social pressure that allows them to rationalise the decision (I'm in my 30s and need to find a wife/husband before I get old!).

Some of my friends and I have had some long dry spells before we found women who we were really attracted to, of course there's social pressure against introducing an ugly partner to your friends so maybe that was in play too.

Your questions sound a little over abstracted. Some plainer questions you might have:

  • when would you pity fuck someone?
  • would you have sex out of a sense of duty?
  • can and when does an emotional connection lead to sexual desire?
  • can one manifest sexual desire where it doesn't exist?

That isn't what's happening when a 'disgusting' person gets love. When you see someone who's 'biologically disgusting' who has a partner, the partner just ... doesn't find them to be disgusting (potentially in a relative sense). Long-term social contact with someone can build affection that wasn't present from physical attraction! People, generally, just become physically and emotionally attracted to the kind of person who is available to them. If you're a diseased druggie without teeth and the only people who'll give you a second glance are other teethless druggies, you'll bang and develop genuine feelings for the opposite-sex junkies. And there are the rare 'perfectly attractive girl who dates someone with several congenital deformities' (they blow up on social media every so often) or the reverse, but they're just ... rare, people do all sorts of unlikely things for idiosyncratic reasons.

Now I'm gonna respond to your whole oeuvre here, because the question doesn't make too much sense and is probably a severe case of the XY problem ("how do I get people to make that sacrifice to sleep with me"). You're just, generally, comically wrong about the structure of dating / relationships.

From scott,

Second, I had yet another patient who –

(I feel obligated to say at this point that the specific details of these patient stories are made up, and several of them are composites of multiple different people, in order to protect confidentiality. I’m preserving the general gist, nothing more)

– I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife.

So I asked the obvious question: “What happened to your first four wives?”

“Oh,” said the patient, “Domestic violence issues. Two of them left me. One of them I got put in jail, and she’d moved on once I got out. One I just grew tired of.”

“You’ve beaten up all five of your wives?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yeah,” he said, without sounding very apologetic.

“And why, exactly, were you beating your wife this time?” I asked.

“She was yelling at me, because I was cheating on her with one of my exes.”

“With your ex-wife? One of the ones you beat up?”

“Yeah.”

“So you beat up your wife, she left you, you married someone else, and then she came back and had an affair on the side with you?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” said Henry.

I wish, I wish I wish, that Henry was an isolated case. But he’s interesting more for his anomalously high number of victims than for the particular pattern.

From secondhand anecdotes from lower-class friends of mine, Henry was not a model. He didn't eat well and go to the gym every week, he doesn't have perfect skin and hair and wardrobe, he doesn't have a top 10% job or great hobbies. He's not that charismatic. Google "arrested for domestic violence mugshot". I'm pretty sure several are uglier than you. I audibly laughed at a few of them.

And they're not particularly intelligent either. Sometimes significantly below average. Even if they have some instinctive social abilities that you don't, you're (just from your writing) smart enough by comparison that you could learn the basics by brute force if you wanted to.

What do they have that you don't have?

That isn't what's happening when a 'disgusting' person gets love. When you see someone who's 'biologically disgusting' who has a partner, the partner just ... doesn't find them to be disgusting (potentially in a relative sense).

I'll agree here. Habituation is a powerful thing. You see it every year with first-year medical students dissecting cadavers. This being said, I am not sure just how far habituation goes; I know that there are a lot of...unfortunate-looking people that choose not to have partners because they find most or all of the people available to them disgusting. You see this more often with middle-class and up people that aren't accustomed to choosing the least-bad option and accepting that they're going to get hosed. There is probably more social isolation there...toothless druggies are one thing, but there is a fairly large and fairly invisible segment of the population that is in and out of institutions of one kind or another. Hospitals, mental institutions, jails and prisons. Fussell's "bottom-out-of-sight" class.

On to our hero Henry.

I've googled "arrested for domestic violence mugshot". Most are more attractive than I am, physically: they're probably taller than my 5'6" and most have full heads of hair. This aside, I believe he is also a liar and con man. A good one. He sells bullshit and promises the world, and seems to deliver at first. He fills his victims' heads with extravagant promises, and may well have an idea of just what kind of vulnerable women will fall for his shit. He's also not averse to committing felony crimes: for a middle-class person like you and I, a felony conviction is a crippling blow. For Henry...well, I've heard that while blue-collar workers (especially minorities) get badly hurt by felony records, the construction industry is pretty open to hiring people with records and often doesn't do background checks.

I don't think that Henry is some kind of badass charismatic mid-level drug lord or gang leader, the kind profiled in Sudhir Venkatesh's book Gang Leader for a Day. Instead, he is a huckster who is able to lie his way into women's pants and prey on the isolated and vulnerable.

As for what Henry has that I do not: a willingness to outright lie and bullshit, being OK committing misdemeanors and maybe felonies that land him in jail multiple times. He is probably taller and better-looking. As for the social aspect: sure, autistic people may learn social skills almost as a second language. And some may become very...proficient, at least by certain metrics. However: in some ways, Henry the high-school dropout with a GED has better command of the English language than a foreigner that moved to the United States as an adult, learned English, and became a tenured professor of English. Sure, the university professor can dissect Jane Austen and Shakespeare and Dickens with the best of them...but is he able to create - not just understand - the same informal grammatical constructions as Henry? Social interactions are - at least in my experience - far more informal and fluid than writing or public speaking. And even so: my writing may be good, but it isn't that good. It is not good enough to inspire someone to overcome a visceral and difficult-to-articulate ick, an uncanny-valley sensation, a "creepiness" that exists in the absence of any kind of wrongdoing that can be put into words. I will concede that it may be possible for people to habituate or to become used to this sensation, either from having autistic friends and relatives; there are also people who lack the sensation I am talking about because of variations in psychological and biological makeup. I've known people that were completely lacking in empathy (but were decent human beings); I've read of people that didn't feel fear and others that barely felt pain.

I also don't think that moral virtue comes into it a whole hell of a lot. It would be rather absurd to ask "What kind of moral virtue does it take to convince someone to buy a dogshit car from a salesman simply to make him happy", although if that salesman or anyone had that kind of saintly character, determination, willpower, and virtue it would probably be enough to make him a good salesman. Attractiveness is about as correlated to moral virtue as something like basketball skill, in my opinion...the 6'6" asshole is probably beating the 5'6" saint in a game of one-on-one.

Google "arrested for domestic violence mugshot". I'm pretty sure several are uglier than you. I audibly laughed at a few of them.

I did so out of morbid curiosity, but all the results (other than the battered victims) seem to be absolutely normal looking, some verging on mildly attractive.

https://ibb.co/JjckSBs

The order seems to depend on who searches and at what time. And I'm claiming that many of them are ugly, not most, domestic violence (whether against a wife or children - many of the results seem to be for child abuse) happens all across society. I don't think domestic abusers are in total that below average, althoguh they seem to have strong representation from the very below-average due to the relationship between domestic abuse and generally being a criminal / lower class dysfunction.

But here are a few of the ones that I saw (notably these are different images than the ones I saw a few hours ago, and only one overlap on the 'first page', extending to 4 of overlap with your first page after scrolling for a while):

one two three four five

this one comes from 'domestic abuse' instead

If this is at all a representative sample, they're all more physically attractive than I am. They're probably taller (I'm 5'6; average US male height is 5'9 or 5'10) and three have full heads of hair.

I turned on incognito mode and got pretty much the same result as the first time. It certainly does seem like a fairly representative sampling of the kind of underclass that is particularly prone to that kind of behavior.

What do they have that you don't have?

Ah yes, a pivotal scene from The Wizard of Oz: “But they’ve got something you haven’t got…”

I think I need to rewatch that scene yearly, with my big goals in mind.

Came here to say this. If you respect someone then eventually you will not be physically disgusted by them.

I don’t really get where you’re going with this. Is it just about sleeping with people, or is it about making sacrifices in general?

Specifically with regards to sleeping with people, the answers you’ll get from men will be pretty uniform: “I’ll sleep with most women who aren’t physically deformed, and it wouldn’t even be a sacrifice. And if it’s another man… yeah sorry but you’re on your own.”

And what about if the women WERE physically deformed?

Hell. I'd find a way to clean out my buddy's septic tank or haul idk rotting livestock carcasses if he really needed someone and 'untrained semi competent DIY dude' was the best he could do. Sure, it would be literally shitty as hell and there's a good chance I'd puke my guts out. It's gross, but I will say there's something about being in healthcare in any capacity for any length of time that (at least for me) allowed me to just not give a fuck about any disgust that I felt. I was just a guy that had to watch a C section or lug pieces of still warm resected colon to the pathology lab or whatever...we (med students, residents, even attendings) were warming our hands on patients' intestines in the OR.

I don't know. Would most guys fuck a deformed female friend if she asked nicely and they really thought it would help? If they would, under what circumstances?

He's been posting about how he's too disgusting to be loved by anyone for the last 6 months or so.

The unfortunate irony of this is it's probably his conviction that this is true, more than anything else, that makes it so.

There is no reason to believe that it is so at all. These kinds of thoughts have a way of persisting against all logic and evidence. I often have thoughts about how disgusting I am, but when I go out I get plenty of attention from men. So it's possible that Skookum could be attractive.

Yeah I only realized that it was that same guy after reading the other replies lol.

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