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Oh no not at all, Aella is not like the vast majority of human beings, she has the innate ability to fully decouple the consequence of sleeping around with dozens of people and the long term effect it has on her mental state. For someone like her who has complete control over herself, sex really is little more than friction that feels good, unless she chooses to make it be something more for herself. For people like her the sacredness does not matter because she is capable of fashioning her own social reality and dealing with the consequences of her actions without them destroying her.
The vast majority of people though do not have this power, and when they fly too close to the sun they get burned and then go splat as they fall back to the ground. The point I wish to make is not "don't fly close to the sun", it's "don't fly close to the sun unless you have high end heat protection and have made sure your wings are not made of wax". I believe that the vast majority of people don't have this protection so society as a whole should be based on a set of values that lead to decent outcomes for them as a whole, but if they complain and say they want a set of values that work really well for a small set of people who really, absolutely know what they are doing, and errenously believe themselves to be in this set of people, then they should be fully accepting of the consequences for when things go bad for those people who it turns out don't really know what they are up to (which is most of them, but nobody likes to think of themselves in this way).
It's like accreddited investors in finance, if you are accredited you are free to spend your life savings on private companies that probably will go bust but may give you an x100 return. If someone is fully qualified and understands the risks I support them being able to invest their money this way, but for ordinary people what will normally happen is that they put their children's college trust fund into a company that burns its capital and goes bust within the year, and then these very same people will complain about evil capitalism leaving them bankrupt. Of course if you legislate in a way to prevent ordinary people being able to invest in this way, those same people complain about evil capitalism preventing the ordinary man from getting a x100 return like "insert big investor here" did.
The best thing about the "accredited investor" status is if you get a solicitation targeted for accredited investors (whether you are or are not one), you know right up front it's a scam. It may as well start out "Dear Suckers with Money:"
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I do wonder whether prolonged exposure to tragedy, suffering, and death helps people (Westerners? First Worlders?) decouple things better. There's a stereotype that soldiers, nurses, and adrenaline junkies get around a lot; I can't speak to the first two but the third has been true enough in my experience. I'd like to ask the Indian physician @self_made_human and the American combat veteran @JTarrou whether this has been true for them. [EDIT: "have you become a better decoupler, or less averse to the idea of casual sex because of your experiences"] While I'll definitely contend that extended exposure to the hospital system as a healthcare provider or worker (rather than as a patient) isn't quite as bad as war, I will say that you see some shit and that it is difficult to describe in words.
I'll agree with you there. A lot of this stuff - like those bespoke queer poly communes - is a lot like 'building your own airplane out of a lawnmower or motorcycle engine and a bunch of stuff from the local Home Depot'. If you're a skilled enough airplane designer, woodworker, and amateur engineer...you can pull it off and build something airworthy. However, you had better be very, very careful and know that you're venturing off the beaten path and might just fall out of the goddamn sky.
Fair enough - FAFO. For what it's worth, I think that the accredited-investor bar should be quite a bit lower. IIRC there are ways to get around this, companies offering special shares to ordinary investors through some relatively nontrivial method. People trying this know damn well that this is "go big or go home" territory and that they might lose everything. These are high risk, potentially high reward lottery tickets. It's like backcountry skiing signs. Ideally we'd mark things a bit more clearly...
I would say the stereotype is broadly correct, though individuals vary wildly. I am a far less sexually adventurous person than most of my compadres, but my experience there both psychologically and training/observation of technique did vastly increase my success and dabbling in casual sexual encounters, but "vastly increase" is a nice way of saying "started from shit". Frankly, that period of my life wasn't particularly fulfilling sexually, I much prefer longer term relationships.
The question is more about your desire for casual sex and your attitude towards it - not how competent you were at getting it. If Johnny McHorndog enters nursing school or the Army hell-bent on casual encounters and piss-poor at achieving them, then spends a few years as a soldier or nurse, gets good at having casual sex, but desires it much less due to viewing sex as sacred or meaningful to him personally...Mr. McHorndog didn't become a higher decoupler from the experience. It's Mr. Prude (and maybe Mrs. Prude), very sociosexually restricted, little to no interest in casual sex...until they see some shit and aren't deeply disinterested in it.
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My experience as a front-line doctor in a 3rd World Country, an essay initially posted on the Motte subreddit as I was delirious from an ortho rotation tied with gyne for the worst months of my life. I'm still proud that the original prompted Scott himself to show up in the sub to respond with positive encouragement! (In the unlikely event he's reading this, I'm doing much better, it's a wonder what working in a service with a budget more than lost change behind the couch can do haha).
Was it fucking awful? If you're someone who doesn't particularly like reading (what are you doing here again?), then yes, it was fucking awful, and I struggle to imagine an American/Western doc will see anything this bad unless they volunteer for a mission to Haiti or some other hell-hole. Still better than working in the ER during a war, but all the worse for being a represenation of the status-quo for a billion people who can't afford better.
I'm not a soft person, but my heart is thoroughly sclerosed after the whole ordeal, not that I suffer from anything like PTSD or the like. Humans can get used to almost anything, and fast.
While I didn't see the kind of shit that you saw, I saw a different flavor of shit for a month as an Eaglelandian medical student. Terminally ill children, and kids in crisis from sickle cell anemia. Working conditions were good to excellent: 9 to 5, sometimes a four-hour weekend shift. Emotionally: I write about this a lot, but can't do it justice. It was ordinary dumbfucks in hell: most parents, even good ones, just fuck 'dealing with terminally ill child' up mildly to moderately bad. Only maybe five or ten percent of the parents weren't - as the doctors and nurses judged them - weren't some flavor or other of bush league dipshit or dumbass.
I will say that I did not have a traumatic or emotionally difficult or even unpleasant experience! If forced to rate it: 4/10, mildly unpleasant but I don't regret having done it, nor would I mind doing it again.
With war - although I've never been - I think that the thing at play is constant personal, physical danger, seeing your friends killed, and maybe a bit of moral injury from making mistakes in war that cost people their lives. In the cancer ward, there were a lot of eyes on things and relatively few (maybe 1x/week/attending at most) opportunities to make minor fuckups and kill patients.
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