domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
hydroacetylene
20hr ago
Confucianism as not-a-religion is a pretty modern frame; while westerners have been confused about it for a while it does include substantial ritual/preternatural commitments as traditionally practiced. See 'Chinese rites controversy' for further information.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
20hr ago
My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality; the only places that successfully curtail premarital sex do so explicitly through a religious point of view.
Confucianism. You could ad-hoc define it as a religion along with communism, liberalism, etc., but then the statement is tautologically true.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
What about people who collect guns to eat organic food(a good portion of hunters rambling on about the health benefits of venison) or who drink tea while they watch football?
Tribal tendencies are just tendencies. I think we all know that but I also think the causation goes the other way; people who think driving a pickup truck is a marker of a respectable man belong to a particular culture, and it's a culture that Trump appeals to. People who seek solace in Buddhist practices divorced from spirituality belong to a different culture that really cares about LGBT rights.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
But I will say, because it's quite an interesting detail, that violent, destructive riots by black people in the 20th century has been a largely northern phenomenon in the U.S. Southern law-and-order has been much less coddling of such things,
Southern cities are also much less segregated, that might have something to do with it.
WhiningCoil
21hr ago
Women could be pleasant.
If all you have to offer is what's between your legs, and men flee as soon as they get it, I mean, sure one option to create a pussy cartel. The other is women would just be pleasant. Be nice, be warm, be loving, create a positive atmosphere. And maybe change your preferences in men too.
But that codes too "Stepford Wives", and women have rejected it for the political prospect of being a boss bitch and unchecked neuroticism.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
I remember sex negative feminists growing up. Girlbosses but no bikinis, that sort of thing. I think it's just a generational barber pole.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
The middle ground is probably something like 'have sex after he meets your parents and they don't pitch a fit about him'. I don't think it's either a stable equilibrium or feminism compatible.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
The RCC's moral theology manuals actually condemn courting(a term used because in not every culture is this done by going on dates) for too long without engagement and require a bishop's permission for abstinence within marriage. Of course manualism is deeply unfashionable these days but there is nothing else to inform the zeitgeist; even Jesuits will recommend against teenaged but not college aged dating on those grounds, albeit only if asked and taking care not to outright condemn anything.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
Any good explanation of how they were converting it to USD?
They sell it to ghetto stores, who sell it to ghetto dwellers, probably using SNAP, unlawfully.
crushedoranges
21hr ago
Women laying with popular men is the feminine form of the 'nice guy' who orbits, hoping to transform a sexual relationship into an emotional one. Some of them do understand, eventually, that the sexual appeal is the stronger card they have to play (which is why they suddenly become frigid after a girlhood of being a slag) but a lifetime of using their strongest card has inflated their sense of self worth, and neglecting the other aspects of their personal lives hits home all at once.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
There is no law that a woman can enforce on the basis that her seducer had promised marriage.
There are laws still on the books in a few(mainly deep southern)states. But more to the point, statutory laws seem to get used as an implied threat behind this sometimes.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Didn't we have a previous article from this lady? A couple of points-
-
Serious mohammedanism seems worse for women than serious Christianity at any equivalent point along the fundy vs liberalism spectrum. Of course I would say that, but I suggest this woman talk to some ladies living in conservative Christianity.
-
It comes as no surprise to me that women are not by and large fans of low commitment sexual activities, nor that many women value the attention they get more than anything.
-
This is not a new problem. The age old refrain of the cad is 'I swear I'll marry you, I just can't wait'. This is just the modern iteration. Of course, when you reject men having the authority to protect women from this, you also reject them having the responsibility to do so.
-
There is, in fact, a middle ground between 'women are virgins until their wedding night' and 'sex then have a date if the man liked it'. I reject it entirely but it clearly exists. I don't consider any point on this continuum a stable equilibrium but lots of people wind up there.
As to what this woman's solution is, might I suggest that an onlyfans star writing about this on her substack might have motives other than sincerely seeking a solution to a problem?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21hr ago
right wing atheism is hedonic self indulgence.
Well, this right wing atheist isn't exactly generating a bunch of hedons these days, nor indulging in much of anything (except being poor and miserable)…
HighResolutionSleep
21hr ago
One word that has more or less dropped out of common parlance is seducer. It means, roughly, a man who lures women in on false pretenses.
Big problem with this analysis and those like it: these men don't seem to be promising anything, like at all, and these women are still laying with them.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21hr ago
Interesting quote; but isn't just copy-pasting a long quote (with a link to source), adding no comment of your own, pretty low-effort for the Motte?
gattsuru
21hr ago
He didn't really break out until mid-March of this year. He was getting some local coverage before that, and it's very interesting how much of that is puff pieces with little actual 'when what where why' behind them, but even the actually newsworthy stuff wasn't NYC-wide newsworthy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21hr ago
Where are you getting this? I’ve seen zero conservatives squarely blaming men for not getting married.
How much do you hand around old school church-going (Protestant) conservatives — typically age 50+ — IRL? Because that's the main place I've seen it. Also preacher blogs. (And some younger religious conservatives blogging from the Eastern European or Latin American country they moved to.)
gattsuru
21hr ago
I would recommend using, or picking up, a pair of decent work gloves. I've done four or five car door repairs, and every single time I've either cut up my hands or gloves. Even if it's miserably hot, they'll be worth making sure it's not your fingers.
Magusoflight
21hr ago
In my opinion and recollection feminist used to have a sex negative valence - it was associated with ugly women who hated men, bull dyke lesbians etc.
It seemed to switch valence in the 90s I think.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
21hr ago
The author is making the case that the current status quo privileges men’s interests at the expense of women’s.
I mean, of course she's wrong about this point. An unregulated sexual marketplace (assuming all individuals are as free as possible from physical and economic coercion) privileges women over men for much the same reason that an unregulated free market privileges large corporations over workers. I assume that most of the commentariat here is already familiar with this analysis.
But the thing is that you can know she's wrong without even doing a full analysis of why she's wrong, because you can see that she fundamentally doesn't understand why people around her act the way that they do. She admits that she's confused by the actions of both men and women around her and she doesn't have a comprehensive theory to explain their behavior, so she resorts to mystifying explanations that are grounded in morality and "mental illness" (a synonym for throwing your hands up and saying "idk"), instead of seeing the people around her as rational actors who are doing the best they can within the constraints laid out for them by biology and decision theory.
Also I have to comment on this:
the ‘male centered woman.’
because it's just so wild that she would use this phrase without even a hint of irony or reflection. Thanks to "J. Allen" for mentioning it in the comments under her post. ("Men don't worry about whether we're centering women--most of us are in some form or fashion." -- lol, exactly). She talks about the "male centered woman" like it's a unique affliction that only burdens women, but her friend from New York whose entire social life revolves around setting up and going on dates with women isn't a "female centered man" because...?
09milk
22hr ago
Traditionally, woman will be shamed for being sex-positive while man will be prided.
The first few waves of feminism (in the west) try to combat this contradiction by pushing woman's stand closer to the man's side, likly due to this appear to give more power to woman instead of stripping power from man.
I think this is a mistake, in practice, this casued a conflict of interest for womon. On one hand woman are now free to have sex without legal repercussions and too much socal slut naming, on the other hand woman are now finding out the biological difference between both sex, namely man can fuck and go now, while woman might need an abortion or get a 18 years liability.
Purhaps feminism should instead goes for shaming man of pre-marital sex, but it is too late now
kky
22hr ago
I’m not sure the author wants anything at all. I remember her from a while back, and get the same feeling of simple hatred from what she writes. She hates men for being wicked, she hates women for being stupid, and yet she’s still friends with them? Even though her darling mother is right, she frames it in a stupid religious way, and thus is not really worth closeness.
I don’t find a single piece of her writing that betrays an actual appreciation of a single other human being. Hell, she doesn’t even seem to like anything in the abstract. She’s happy enough to look data up, but only insofar as it justifies hate. And then there’s the OnlyFans deal on top of it. I suspect that the reason she’s still a virgin is less that there is something she is reserving it for, or out of a sense of chastity or self-denial, but instead that it’s a helpful way of hurting others by refusing herself to them. This, I’m guessing, is why she also is friends with the kind of men she explicitly hates. She has to understand they’re a very particular subculture, right? She could find men who aren’t like that. So why is she staying around lecherous men who only see value in having sex with women and then denying them - if not so that she can take her satisfaction by denying them first? In that light, this piece seems more a justification for why she enjoys staying friends with women who destroy themselves. It’s for a good cause, so it can’t be because she hates them. Right?
Enough amateur psychoanalysis. It suffices to say that I dislike this woman quite a lot. She’s not totally wrong on the specifics, but this bitter poison is better not tasted.
For the actual question: how does a woman avoid this? I think it’s much simpler than you let on. The men who get away with this nonsense only do because they get a truly disproportionate amount of female attention. A man who gets even modestly less attention will struggle to achieve the same feats. So: go for less popular men, more trustworthy men, or both. Less popular is sufficient to avoid this kind of behavior. More trustworthy gets what a woman actually wants.
One word that has more or less dropped out of common parlance is seducer. It means, roughly, a man who lures women in on false pretenses. What are those pretenses? In the olden days, it was marriage. Dickens’ Pickwick Papers has, as one of its droll episodes, the somewhat aged and unattractive landlady of the titular and rotund Pickwick misunderstanding a totally unrelated announcement of his to be a discussion of marriage. So far, so irrelevant: what matters is that the next chapter (issue) is her bringing him to court over the affair, on the grounds that he was leading her on, and as he did not intend to marry her, she was owed damages.
While the fictional event was intentionally absurd, we could not even write such a scenario today. There is no law that a woman can enforce on the basis that her seducer had promised marriage. The idea is nonsensical: sex is just sex, right? Love is free, so why tie it to marriage? And yet women still want commitment. But “boyfriend” is not something that can be legally enforced, and so a disappointed woman has no recourse.
It’s easy to forget, however, that the explicit law was far from the only protection against seducers. The first line of defense was the woman’s friends and family. There’s a rather enlightening scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace - spoilers, by the way - where the delightful, young, and severely naive Natasha is seduced by a ne’er-do-well from another noble family. He plans on eloping out of country with her, which will bring him entirely out of the grasp of the law. Natasha’s bosom friend finds out, informs the powerful matron who has lately been exercising godmother-like authority over them, and the whole thing falls apart. The would-be seducer goes to the site of their destined meeting and finds the huge manservant of the house cornering him, deeply rumbling “My mistress would like to speak with you,” manages to slip away and elopes rather more individually than initially planned. I believe “hell for leather” is how we describe that sort of ride. Nowhere in this equation is Natasha having sex, finding out he only wanted sex, and trying to get recompense after the fact. In reality, her friends and family were deeply involved with her and protected her from her worst mistakes. True, the law which made them matriarchal guardians of her made coercion possible, but the mechanism was preventative.
So if women want to stop being disappointed, they need people to help protect them from seducers: people who can sniff them out, stop a dalliance going too far without commitment, and stand up for and to them. And I suspect where this starts is, in fact, recognizing that women have a reasonable demand in commitment and that the man who leads her on and gets what he wants while giving nothing in return is a waste of time. I suppose the Facebook “are we dating the same guy” groups are an awkward attempt at this, but frankly they’re sunk because it’s all women of the roughly same age, and the dynamics devolve to the usual gossipy mess of women’s worst elements unrestrained. What you actually need is a connection to older, married women and good men. They aren’t competing for men’s attention and can give some real advice. And probably, the women who wind up happy will be the ones who manage this in one way or another.
Anyway, things like this make me glad I ain’t a dame. Seems hard!
OliveTapenade
22hr ago
I don't accept your definition of "anti-semitism". "Anti-semitic" is an emotionally-loaded slur intended to denounce and pathologize any criticism of Jewish identity, religion, or culture whether it's rational or irrational, true or false.
Is there a definition of 'anti-semite' that you do accept as applying to yourself?
Would you agree with a statement like, "SecureSignals opposes and dislikes Jews?", absent any comment about whether or not you are rational in doing so?
Anti-Semitism can be rational or irrational, true or false. All it requires is engaging in criticism of Jewish behavior, culture, and identity, and there's no word for when Jews do the same to Gentile race, religion, or culture. And I do those things, so I accept the label, although I don't accept that label denotes irrationality- that's just a vain attempt to pathologize rational criticism as being crazy-talk.
All right, let's accept this. You would presumably say that you are a rational anti-semite, in that you are rationally opposed to Jews?
This is progress, because this means that our disagreement has now been precisified. We no longer need to argue about whether you are opposed to ('dislike', 'hate', etc.) Jews. We only need to argue about whether it is rational for you to do so.
(I do think there are clear ways to express the idea of a Jew who hates Gentiles - Jewish supremacism definitely exists. You can find Jews who hate non-Jews. But I don't want to get sidetracked. We're talking about you.)
I also don't accept "you hate the Jews" that's just a proto-woke slur also intended to intrinsically attach irrationality to a critical perspective of Jewish behavior and identity.
I think it's fair to say that your posting on the Motte displays, at the very least, a pathological interest in Jews. You keep bringing them up all the time, and always do so in the context of opposing or criticising them.
Rounding that off to 'you hate Jews' seems like a reasonable use of language to me. You certainly regard Jews with a great deal of hostility.
Which is why I don't respond to it, those accusations very conveniently derail from the arguments I'm making (by design), so if you just get bogged down in trying to convince everyone you aren't a neo-Nazi or you don't want to kill all the Jews you are just operating within the same consensus that I reject.
Will you respond to the question, "What do you want to do about Jews?"
There's no hidden agenda there. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that everything you've argued in the past about Jews is correct. What follows from that? What policies would you recommend? You've clearly indicated that you regard Jews as opponents - what, then, would you do?
I don't think that's an unfair gotcha. There are certainly groups that I regard as 'political and cultural opposition' to myself, so it would be fair game to ask me, "Olive, what do you want to do about the communists?" If I tried to avoid answering that, or if I treated that question as being inherently in bad faith, it would reflect badly on me. So too with you.
(I want to discredit communism as an ideological position in public debate and defeat communists in elections. There, see, it's easy.)
self_made_human
C'est la vie
22hr ago
I have pointed questions about the kind of men she's "friends" with. They're so far from a representative sample that it's farcical.
It's clearly possible to dangle a relationship in front of a girl who likes you without referring to the possibility directly, men do it on accident all the time.
More options
Context Copy link