domain:aporiamagazine.com
jkf
2d ago
"This is the abuse conciliatory encouragement department -- arguments is across the hall"
There are tons of anime romcoms aimed at men where the relationship between MC and FMC is the primary draw, rather than being a subplot of another genre. In fact, most of them take place in the standard high school setting and have no speculative elements. Toradora!, Komi Can't Communicate, Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro, Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!, Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie, Tomo-chan Is a Girl!, My Dress-Up Darling, Teasing Master Takagi-san...
I am specially fond of Nagatoro; my heart melted when I read chapter 114. I was so proud of Senpai for svanyyl univat gur onyyf gb nfx Antngbeb gb cbfr ahqr sbe uvz; it's a very beautiful scene that is the culmination of six years of character and relationship development. Likewise, the scene that sold me on Komi was the blackboard conversation in episode 1; I was blown away by the music and the animation and the way Tadano and Komi connected. These are not scenes about something else that happen to include romance; they are romance scenes.
I don't see why you couldn't write romance books aimed at men that were similar. Indeed, some of these titles started out as light novels, and to the extent that the novels on /r/romance_for_men successfully appeal to their target demographic, that seems to be exactly what they are doing.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
Or in Britain they take on the role of Gosplan, issuing decrees on worker's wages under the equality act and wrecking local governments with huge payout bills. There's a pattern of naive/stupid legislators giving judges the right to interpret laws reasonably a
He must have died while writing this. Perhaps he was dictating?
How many Japanese nationals are there who get involved in a custody dispute in a foreign country? A surprising number of people avail themselves of the option when it is available to them. Japan is just the most notorious example, plenty of countries will drag out an international custody dispute for years until the issue is effectively moot. Once a child is 12 or so years old, it becomes very hard to force them to live with an estranged parent they have not seen in years, who lives in a foreign country.
I get your overall point though, most people who disobey custody orders are not exactly masterminds, and likely don't have a foreign abscondment planned.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
Well, I can’t speak for what most men would want. Maybe it’s just me and… maybe @Primaprimaprima and like a guy I know from school in the corner, but no, I’d want romance content as the main enchilada.
Basically, “guy is going about life, meets woman, forms connection with woman, the two understand each other on a deep level, passion ensues.” When you wrote this: “scenes with the girl being cute and sexy and falling in love with him, the two of them having intimate encounters and emotional conversations”, well I guess I like the last bit the most. I find myself bored in some action movies waiting for the emotional character moments to happen.
I like romance stories because I like romance, I like thinking about romance not as a reward for what’s actually important, but as something that itself forms people into who they are and is one of the keys that makes life meaningful. Not “I became the best version of myself to gain you,” but “I became the best version of myself because I met you.” Romance isn’t about reward but about recognition; seeing yourself in the other. Becoming complete through intimate union.
But I am literally the guy who will be at a party and go, “hey, these video games are fun, but what if we sat in a circle and talked about our feelings?” So if you’re looking to me to find out what “men” are into, god help ya.
Also — immediately after I wrote my first message I went to cuddle with my girlfriend, and she was telling me she’s been reading a romance novel, “but not like those romantasy books, I don’t understand the non-human thing.” Well, I don’t either honey.
somethingsomething
2d ago
It's not 1:1 with your example, because he's not swinging while he is hefting it. He would heft it first, then swing. So it would be more similar to "going for a run, he showered off the sweat and went to sleep".
erwgv3g34
2d ago
It has happened to western authors, too. Andy Weir and E. L. James both started out writing web fiction (literally fanfiction in the latter's case) before getting acquired by a mainstream publisher and making it big. But that was 14 years ago.
Judges do all kinds of dubious things beyond their social remit. Just today I was reading a long book-screenshot thread from arctotherium that touched on this: https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/1956872568637739354/photo/1
"Racially and socially homogenous schools damage the minds of children who attend them" per the judge. And so there was all this white flight and bussing because some judge was allowed to run rampant.
In Australia we had a judge ruling that a minister handling approvals for a coal mine had a duty of care to teenagers who would be affected by the 'climate crisis'. This was later overruled as the Federal Court decided that this was really a matter for legislation and the government rather than judges. But the fact it was even considered is bad. Judges should be limited to obviously legal cases like crimes and straightforward application of law. You can introduce a duty of care argument for any policy if you really try. Duty of care should be restricted to more direct, obvious examples like making sure that stairs in a supermarket aren't slippery and hazardous, not social or economic engineering.
In the Netherlands, courts order Shell to reduce emissions under duty of care and EU human rights regarding 'right to life and the right to family life': https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57257982
Or in Britain they take on the role of Gosplan, issuing decrees on worker's wages under the equality act and wrecking local governments with huge payout bills. There's a pattern of naive/stupid legislators giving judges the right to interpret laws reasonably a
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2d ago
Well, what would a male romance look like to you? For most men, I'm going to guess it would be something like the classic "Hero goes on a quest and gets the girl in the end." Do men want more "romantic" content (scenes with the girl being cute and sexy and falling in love with him, the two of them having intimate encounters and emotional conversations) or do they want action with the girl naturally falling in love with him because he's so cool and brave?
Basically I think what male-oriented romance exists would mostly be found under another label.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
No, that doesn't leave much for the male reader, but I will say that if you want cute love stories with actual functional couples, there seem to be quite a few that do not feature Chad Thundercock or BDSM.
Well, the main point is that “romance for men” would be about a male protagonist who meets a woman and they have a romance. It’s not just about what the male character is like, but about whose perspective the plot is written from.
Unironically, there’s more romance stories for gay men than there are for straight ones. Presumably this is just a market thing, but I don’t know why it doesn’t even seem to exist. Are there a lot of lesbian romance stories?
I’d probably be a reader of this genre if it actually existed. As it is, occasionally I read fanfiction about male protagonists (probably 80% written by women, but occasionally not bad), and take what I can get from the scraps of media that incidentally have romantic content. Japan has visual novels, but they’re too weird and too Japanese for me, but I liked Katawa Shoujo and some western fan VNs are tolerable.
So you say “men don’t buy romance”, but this is a chicken-egg problem: I can’t buy it if it doesn’t exist.
anon_
2d ago
If you want people to write plainly, you ought to read plainly too.
Moreover, it's not false (let alone obviously false), any more than any statement that has an exception, no matter how non central & inconsequential, is false. Applying this level of pedantic precision requires also rejecting as false the statement that "smoking causes cancer" because it not every smoker gets cancer or "summers are hotter than winters" because one July was January. Or if you want an SSC example, to object to "criminals harm society" by pointing out that MLK was a criminal.
If you want to consider this a "retraction" rather than "a clarification that in most polite conversation it would be considered peevish of a listener to insist upon" that's fine. But it's probably among the least enjoyable aspects of discussion on the internet when readers do that.
anon_
2d ago
Do you think those cases are even remotely representative?
Granted they exist, they are the exception that proves the rule applies to the rest of cases.
odd_primes
2d ago
It's pretty trivial in some cases, depending on the citizenship of the parent. Japan is notorious for example, there have been hundreds of cases where a parent takes their child to Japan in violation of a custody agreement, and then just refuse to go back. Japanese courts do not take into consideration foreign custody agreements, and strongly favor Japanese parents.
To date, no child has been returned to his/her country of habitual residence as a result of any action taken by the government of Japan.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101122071433/http://tokyo.usembassy.gov/e/p/tp-20100122-85.html
ulyssessword
2d ago
Canadian judges routinely give lighter sentences to immigrants than citizens for the same crimes. This started in 2013, when an immigrant was convicted and sentenced to 2 years for drug trafficking, and successfully argued that it should be two years less a day to avoid extra immigration consequences. Now, a sex offender gets discharged instead of sentenced after being found guilty.
From another case:
“Mr. Khant [accused of arranging sex with a 15-year old] is a permanent resident seeking Canadian citizenship and professional licensing,” wrote the judge. “A conviction would not only delay his citizenship by four years but could also prevent him from sponsoring his wife and obtaining his engineering licence.
To which I respond: Good. The tests for citizenship, sponsorship, and professional licenses are supposed to exclude sex offenders, and doing so by looking at criminal convictions and sentence length should be a reliable standard. Instead, the judge decided he didn't like what they would do with accurate reports, so he gave a different answer instead.
If I was in charge of the professional licensing body or citizenship and immigration, that would piss me off to no end. I want to know if the accused's conduct was 90-days-of-prison bad, or not that bad. Given that information, I would choose to kick them out (or not). Instead, the judge is taking that out of my hands by reporting whether it's 90-days-of-prison-and-loss-of-licence-and-deportation-and-etc. bad or not. If the judge doesn't share my opinion on the value of a sex-offender-free workplace (and there's no indication that he does), then I can't trust that he summed it up properly.
Also: The Onion hits different 14 years later: Being tried as a black man would be great given how pervasive sentencing adjustments are.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
2d ago
Your houses seem much more generous than the IPMC. I think it matters a lot more how the space will be used: 8 adult occupants in a sharehome will probably want their own bedrooms, whereas 8 occupants in a family home will probably end up bunking together (married couples) or on bunkbeds (kids). A family will probably be having dinner all at the same time, and so will require a larger dining area than a group of flatmates, but the flatmates might prefer to have more showers.
Speaking of bathrooms, is there a reason you have a bathroom per bedroom? Growing up we had one for three bedrooms, but I guess I wouldn't be surprised if luxury dormitories had one per room.
Corvos
2d ago
I'm skeptical that there is some breakout male author who could bring in male readers the way these authors bring in female readers (the last truly cross-gender mass phenomenon was probably Harry Potter and even that was a majority female fanbase). I'm very skeptical that publishing would refuse to print it if they actually smelled that kind of money.
The thing is, famous authors start off as un-famous authors. Their reputation is grown by getting good publicity and bookshelf deals from the publisher while they're still nobodies, and they don't want to do this for men as much as for women and minorities. That's why by-men-for-men fiction only thrives in places like Japan and genres like litrpg where it's customary to pluck authors from the highly-ranked webnovel lists, which make it possible to gauge their potential without investing in them.
anti_dan
2d ago
Discord, Roblox, and Telegram are currently the big 3 IMO when it comes to enabling Child Porn and Child Predators. Other big sites have much better policing, particularly of the images, and the more "specialized" sites usually are more for just the Child Porn, which is of course bad, but there wasn't many child users of Kik, for example, despite of, or perhaps because it was, a hive of scum and villainy.
Corvos
2d ago
How old are you? I would say things generally start going wrong at about 30 - I got a gastric problem from a not-great diet that had been fine up until then plus some heart stuff, my friend did something permanent to his ankle skiing, somebody else started getting serious insomnia, etc.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
A redneck shoots one and displays it to the media.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Because few Americans lead healthy lifestyles.
chooky
2d ago
What are all you guys going to nutritionists and chiropractors and so forth for? Doesnt all that stuff just happen automatically if you eat right and exercise?
I can see a reason to go get cancer, heart, etc, screenings starting at a certain age, but I actually am quite confused why a healthy lifestyle 20-50 year old needs doctors at all beyond screenings and acute things.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
we ought to advise people against it
Sure. What you said was:
No responsible adult would violate a custody order.
This was false. You now seem to admit that it was strictly false, and that what you really meant was something much more reasonable, like "it's an extremely bad idea to violate a custody order." I don't know why you made such an obviously false statement to begin with, unless maybe you were trying to pick a fight. The comment improved substantially when you fleshed it out, but did so by retreating from your original claim.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
I used to love bookstores and libraries. But now there's like 90% chance that when you enter the establishment the first thing you would see a huge trans flag and a bunch of BLM slogans, if not pro-Hamas agitation. And whatever books are emphasized are selected accordingly. Which kinda spoils the mood quite a bit. So I still go to libraries - and local libraries where I live, while usually hosting a lot of lefty types, are not as aggressive in pushing politics - but I no longer think any bookstore or library is the place I'd feel welcome and comfortable.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3d ago
I haven't stepped into a Barnes & Noble in years, but I understand that it's mostly walls of romantasy and Brandon Sanderson nowadays. But you know, it's a chicken-and-egg problem that has more to do with the ruthless pursuit of quarterly earnings than it does with some malicious cabal of white female NYC publishers refusing to greenlight anything a man will read. What genre has always outsold every other genre? Romance. Who buys the most books nowadays? Young women. Hence Twilight, 50 Shades, Sarah Maas, and so on.
I'm skeptical that there is some breakout male author who could bring in male readers the way these authors bring in female readers (the last truly cross-gender mass phenomenon was probably Harry Potter and even that was a majority female fanbase). I'm very skeptical that publishing would refuse to print it if they actually smelled that kind of money.
The fact is that the publishing industry has changed dramatically in a lot of ways since the golden age of SF. Not just in tilting more strongly towards female preferences, but tilting strongly towards "Only books that are bestsellers and will bump our QEs are worth supporting." (See this phenomenon also with movies, which have turned into a different kind of formulaic slop, but not exclusively targeted at women.) The death of the midlist is I assume common knowledge by now. It used to be that agents and publishers would cultivate a relationship with an author whom they expected to produce books over the course of a career, and if every book wasn't a best-seller, as long as each one paid out, it was good enough, because the cumulative earnings were enough to sustain the author (and his agent, and his publisher). Nowadays, not so much. Publishers don't want a long tail from middling sellers, they want bestsellers and are only willing to invest in a book that has a chance of becoming that, and they are only willing to invest so much in an author who doesn't break out.
Hence Brandon Sanderson (whose fanbase is large male) doing fine, and Stephen King and Haruki Murakami and a few others, but only if they are huge sellers with already established names. Meanwhile, while even the John Scalzis and Larry Correias are making a decent living, you will not usually find them occupying premium real estate in a bookstore.
I am not denying there is also a "publishing sneers at white males" problem, but it's not happening because publishing is unwilling to pick up money that's lying on the table.
Your links, are, unsurprisingly, also rather distorted views of reality.
The Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies affair was a reaction against leftism and SJWs in science fiction. Female-coded, to be sure, but their complaint at the time was not "Nobody is writing books men want to read" but "Nobody is writing books we want to read." Seriously half of it was Vox Day's abiding hatred for John Scalzi.
That /r/romance_for_men cartoon: well, I am not really a romance reader, but I've read a few (so I could at least say I had some understanding of the genre) and while I realize meme-cartoons aren't meant to accurately reflect reality with high fidelity, the Alpha Male Wolf Pack Mafia Boss Billionaire is basically a gross exaggeration of the most formulaic and traditional romance story ever, the one that has been the stock romance story for as long as there have been romance stories: women want to read about an impressive and desirable man falling in love with a woman who is plain and generic enough that any (female) reader can imagine herself in her place. It's no more complicated than that. No, that doesn't leave much for the male reader, but I will say that if you want cute love stories with actual functional couples, there seem to be quite a few that do not feature Chad Thundercock or BDSM.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that there isn't much real "romance for men" outside of indie publishing, but again, that's because men don't buy romance.
As for your beloved idol Dread Jim, I almost literally laughed out loud that he thinks John fucking Ringo is not right-wing enough. Apparently if you don't have women literally in chains... oh wait.
Well, there's always Tom Kratman.
As for this:
In “Lucifer’s Hammer”, written in 1978 by Niven and Pournelle, civilization collapses, there is famine, and people start eating people The cannibals are not especially black, even though realistically, it is likely that the cannibals would be disproportionately black. The only guy who suggest that there might be a correlation between cannibalism and blackness is the horribly prejudiced ignorant hick.
In Lucifer’s hammer the authors are careful to make the proportion of blacks among the cannibal army exactly and precisely the same proportion as blacks are a percentage of the US population, nonetheless today the book is deemed utterly outrageous and horribly reactionary for having any black cannibals whatsoever. Observe that in today’s collapse of civilization books, all cannibals are white.
It's been a while since I read Lucifer's Hammer, but he's really glossing over how much the theme of that book was "When civilization collapses, white people become farmers and engineers and rebuild, and black people turn into rampaging cannibals." Yeah, the cannibal army wasn't exclusively black (and ironically enough, it was led by a messianic white man...) but I am pretty sure it wasn't 13%. Basically the majority of blacks in southern California joined the cannibal army, and any white people who didn't want to get et joined them. I don't think Niven and Pournelle were intentionally being "racist" (they threw a few black characters in with the good guys as well) but like, I am Niven fan but yeah, he knew what he was writing. (Including the motorcycle gang who takes a girl scout troop as sex slaves, but fortunately a boy scout troop rescues them and now every boy scout has his very own girl scout clinging to his feet, Frazetta-style.) You're taking at face value rants from a guy who thinks a book is too leftist if there is even a hint of female agency.
So yeah, where we are now is indie publishing for anything outside the mainstream or a very few Sanderson- and King-level big names. And that's because publishing (at least the industry as it is today) is dying a slow death.
Speaking briefly on ultimata.
The primary purpose of an ultimatum is to force the listener to accept the form of the argument: A or B. The argument then splits out along lines of A-support, B-support, A-opposition, B-opposition... etc. It begs the question on whether A and B are in fact linked.
Take your PATRIOT example. The post-9/11 question is: how can we protect ourselves from future attacks? Supporters of the PATRIOT Act alleged that the only effective method was curtailing the rights of Americans. But this is not obviously the only way to protect ourselves from these kinds of attacks. Suicide terror attacks are, and were, overwhelmingly favored by a certain type of extreme Muslim on the world stage. Governments and mafia (i.e. small governments) don't really like them, as they expend valuable trained human resources on frankly trivial strategic goals. (Unless they can convince a third-party stooge to do it, like Iran.) The only time people favor suicide terror attacks is when they kinda want to die (or have their people killed) as a side effect. Consider Japan's suicide bombers. They were very clearly a statement more than a strategy. So, taking this all into account, you could theoretically solve the problem by tightening the visas you give to foreign Arabs substantially, or some other form of discrimination against the highest-risk group. In practice, I think this is what we did. There were lots of racism complaints during the Bush admin. But as far as the PATRIOT debate went, it was about the ability to spy. It's not obvious that this had any bearing on the real problem, and was instead about the ability to spy itself. Call me cynical, but I think that if there were more guys in the White House with strong prejudices against Islam, we'd have been having a different Constitutional debate, one about outlawing a certain religion.
OK. Taking a look at the feminism/fertility debate, or the environmentalism/survival debate, and so on, I believe the not-so-subtle move is that the two are necessarily linked and we must "choose." I call bullshit. Around the world, patriarchal societies still have cratering birthrates. This is easy to find information. Similarly, a ruined environment has explicit costs to human survival, as we undermine our own productive capacity through poisoning ourselves, wrecking good farmland, denuding the seas, etc etc. The existence of those binaries can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to link these unrelated topics for the purpose of controlling the debate, steering it towards one's desired outcomes.
For feminism/fertility, I think the real move is getting attention off of fertility itself. Lots and lots of women want to have kids, and yet they don't, or put it off until the numbers just go down. Why? The feminist (or anti-feminist) answer is to hide it behind the "right to choose," but it's pretty obvious in context that it's only a (colloquially) feminist choice in one direction. (Not all feminists believe this, but it's what dominates the conversation.) I suspect the real reason is a confluence of factors, mostly cultural (lower respect or understanding for the importance of reproduction) and partially material (increased life expectancy screwing with wealth movement and life stages relative to fertile windows). But as long as it's about feminism, which everyone has already made up their minds on as a matter of principle, we don't have to think about maybe changing our individual values and cultural practices to reflect this new reality. Almost the same description can be applied to environmentalism with some mad-libs substitutions.
That's why I'm so skeptical of simply accepting the frame on these things. OP, for his part, didn't actually frame any of this as an ultimatum. He was actually just negating the antecedent, showing that (for him) the presented argument was insufficient. Sure, I happen to disagree with his stance quite fervently, but reading him closely - he doesn't say that he values certain things above the survival of the species, he says he does not value the survival of the species at all, one way or another. There's no ultimatum there, Therefore, one had to be provided for him.
(As far as the OP is concerned, all I can make is a value statement: that it is ugly and sad to have nothing to recommend one's time on Earth to posterity, be one's contributions ever so humble. We are all destined to die, and pleasures are fleeting, and the march of old age makes the immediate world increasingly bitter, it behooves one to seek value in something a little more distant and external. Say, the future in which one is invested. People who do this seem in my experience to die more comfortably.)
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