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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4271 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all? Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing, which I have heard legitimately compared to frontline infantry combat in its level of hardship. Therefore, what good is a man, in a relationship, if he is not willing and able to endure a hardship or challenge of similar difficulty? Chad compensates for this by being very good-looking and very determined; there is a good chance he would do well in a war, too. But for us mere mortals? Our existence is legitimized and our desire for romantic relationships stops being completely base, disgusting, and hypocritical when we have proven ourselves worthy through being conscientious, dedicated, and determined enough to suffer greatly for no damn reason - even, perhaps, to die for no good reason. The poets of the First World War, and the soldiers there, died pointlessly but admirably for a few inches of mud; they embodied all that is admirable about masculinity and lost their lives in the mud of Passchendaele and Verdun and the Somme.

Every man, now, needs to choose their own struggle. It's like Fight Club, except you expect and are prepared for - as much as anyone can be prepared for, which may not be much - entering what is essentially Hell on Earth and surviving it. Once you survive, you are now worthy: you have endured, you are willing to endure, therefore you now have business asking someone to endure a deep visceral biological disgust day after day to make you happy, and for the good of the next generation. And you, too, will suffer, or may suffer. Maybe it's a dangerous job, maybe it's your wife shooting you and putting you in the ICU, maybe it's figuring out how to deal with it when your wife becomes a raging alcoholic, maybe you really do get the life of domestic bliss. But probably not - you're not Chad, and as such you do not deserve domestic bliss, much as your wife is very likely to be deeply disgusted with you and chooses this as her least-bad option, making peace with her inability or unwillingness to be Stacy.

  • -16

You keep posting the same thing. The fact is, there are many happy couples with very below-average looks. The wife of an ugly man is not, on average, 'deeply disgusted' with him. (I'm not sure what effect this has on e.g. cheating, any observations will be very confounded by the association of unattractiveness with other things).

You're a decent writer, you seem capable of having interesting ideas. Do you have anything else you might be moved to write about? Why not try that? Maybe just vignettes from your life like george_e_hale, maybe some interesting technicality from your job, perhaps a commentary on ancient philosophy. Just anything else.

Unattractiveness isn't just physical. And it isn't always the case... it's just a good deal more likely that an incapable chump has a partner that is disgusted by them.

Its almost entirely physical.

Consider Elliot Rodger.

Imagine if he was 6'2". With the same personality.

Is our hero now average?

He wasn’t ugly even at his height, his own manifesto makes clear that the reason for his loneliness was that he never spoke to women his age and so never created or found the possibility of dating one.

Yeah, agreed.

EDIT: I do think that he would probably have been better off had he attempted and survived the Hock. He at least would grok that he needed to work for things, confronted his own mortality, learned that Nature doesn't give a rat's ass about Daddy's money, and become physically fit and determined. Military service might have been even better - especially if he saw combat and got back in one piece and able to hold down a job. These things only work well if they're more or less freely chosen...I don't know how well drafting this dude for Vietnam or something would have worked out.

Disagreed, unless your definition of physical is very literal.

Rather abstracted to unattractive/gross behavioral tendencies plus or minus mental illnesses like schizophrenia and...pretty much every invisible disability to boot. Pretty conceivable that you might look pretty decent on the outside but be garbage on the inside. Case in point: Elliot Rodger. I don't think he'd have done that much better if he was 6' tall, either.

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