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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 3, 2024

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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A close friend (Bob) is considering proposing to his girlfriend (Alice). Alice is an ex-prostitute. I am trying to talk him out of it.

By Bob's account (which I presume in turn is him parroting Alice's account), Alice's stint in the oldest profession was a regretted youthful indiscression perpetrated in her teens, for a couple of months. She wasn't groomed, she wasn't coerced, she wasn't doing what she had to do to feed her starving family: she was just horny and kinky and thought it would be hot. After it proved less hot than she anticipated, Alice got out of there and never did it again, and since had the 'normie' sex life of a 21st century young woman: (uncompensated) app hookups interspersed with long term monogamous relationships, most lately Bob.

My gut-level revulsion at the prospect of wife-ing a ho makes my effort to talk Bob out of it difficult, as my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than, in so many words, just yelling "CUCK CUCK CUCK" at him. Perhaps with a side of "If you're not part of the solution for deterring teen whorishness by making it's practitioners persona non grata in polite society, then that's how you get more teen whores".

I am wondering if the astute minds of The Motte can help me think up any more coherent arguments to deploy.

If I were Bob, I would want to know that you feel this way so that I could excise you from my life. Who wants to be friends with a guy that has contempt for your wife and thinks you're a cuck for marrying her? Even if your instincts about her turn out to be correct, nothing about this sounds like it's coming from a place of genuine care, it all sounds like playacting as the most toxic strains of the online right.

Who wants to be friends with a guy that has contempt for your wife and thinks you're a cuck for marrying her?

I think this might be going down a dangerous path. The road from this to "build yourself a bubble and shun all unbelievers" is shorter than it looks, and the latter universalises as civil war.

I don't buy it. The slope would have to be pretty slippery to go from, "I don't want to be friends with people that despise my wife" to "I refuse to be friends with people I disagree with".

Given how many people have slid down it, I'd say it's pretty slippery. Even then, I did say "might".

If Butlerian were actively acting against her outside of his advice to Bob, that's a legit reason, but if mere disapproval is enough then you're edging toward "friendship is transitive" which sorts people into bubbles (proof: assume by contradiction that a connected subgraph contains a prude and a prostitute. Then the prude and prostitute must be friends because friendship is transitive and (because there are finitely many people) there is a finite-length path between them. But they're not. -><-). Like I said, shorter than it looks.

If you think you can avoid sliding down, fine, whatever, it's your life. Just pointing out the pitfall.

You’re smuggling in the assumption that it’s symmetric in the first place. Model as a directed graph imo.