domain:badcyber.com
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
I feel like "emotional labor" is among the most toxic memes to come out of feminism, in the actual near-Lovecraftian sense that it insinuates itself into your world model and begs you to cleave reality at that particular joint to your permanent detriment as a human being. I'm not even in the target group, but every time I get even a little frustrated dealing with someone else's mental state (like, say, listening to a friend complain about how they were avoiding their advisor even though they and I had gone through the "I'm having [unfounded anxiety] and rationally I just need to psyche myself up to send that email already" conversation path many times already) the idea floats up and wants me to start keeping score.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
3d ago
Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever.
Can you give some examples? What I can recall is trans men talking about becoming incredibly and uncontrollably horny after starting T, and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but that seems reasonably accurate to the experience of any man who’s ever gone through puberty.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
3d ago
So when some socially adept and quite rapacious men figure out that there's an ample supply of idiots out there who just need a meager offering of romance-lit aesthetics and who can't initiate or sustain a real romance from their own abilities, they have no idea of how to approach romance from... well, not exactly an adversarial stance, but at least an active one, where you accept the base fact that life between man and woman (possibly man and man or woman and woman, not much personal insight there) is always a negotiation and you need to stake out your own ground to get what you want.
This is a really long sentence — can you clarify who doesn’t know how to approach a relationship from an adversarial stance?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
(And I say this as someone who likes playing around with tarot imagery but don't treat it as serious.)
In the hope of trying to find something more positive to talk about -
I wonder if there are any other Motters with a passing interest in tarot? I used to be fascinated by it as well. I give no credence whatsoever to divination, but I think the imagery of the tarot is extraordinarily rich and multi-faceted. Its supposed divinatory powers, I hazard, have more to do with the way that that imagery is both endlessly open to interpretation and psychologically provocative. If you find yourself mentally 'stuck', a randomised pile of images from the tarot may well give you the jolt you need to consider new perspectives.
I don't use it for advice myself, but I can still appreciate the symbolic language it provides. If there are any other Motters familiar with it, maybe it's worth a chat in the Fun Thread one day?
Clearly I'm coming at this from the angle of someone who naturally had these hormones all my life, so I can't speak as to what it would be like to experience the effects for the first time.
This has always fascinated me when I read accounts by trans men. Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever. There are a number of possible explanations for that, one of which is, indeed, that I've had this level of testosterone all my life, and my body is accustomed to it. It's just part of the way I think, and any downsides or difficulties that come with it are things that I have had decades of practice compensating for. Someone who suddenly shifted from a much lower level of testosterone to the level of a natal male like me, however, probably would experience it as an overwhelming flood, and that might explain, for instance, them having problems with impulse control that I have never had.
If so I can only guess that it's plausible that a natal male suddenly taking a much higher dose of estrogen would experience a similar shock, but in the other direction, and that it would be something that natal women cannot relate to either.
Of course, as the top-level poster mentioned, it also seems likely that there's some element of placebo as well. If you're telling yourself that you're taking a chemical that's going to make your more feminine or girly, well, you can probably just think yourself into that absent any chemical effects at all. All the more so if you're also making intentional behavioural or social changes. So plenty of grains of salt seem warranted here.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Matter of fact, it has been my fetish ever since that one time I dated a math grad student with impostor syndrome.
anti_dan
3d ago
So it begs the question: what, exactly, is she advocating for? Quite frankly, I’m not sure. If I had to guess, I think she wants a secular, sexually conservative sororiarchy, where women watch out for their gender’s collective interests and stop each other from undercutting their bids. Either way, an interesting point of view.
This, I don't think is confusing at all. Shes advocating for feminism with only the benefits. It is a common occurrence. Its not outside the realm of fantasy. Imagine a world where men could just point at a woman and say "I want" and she has to have sex with him 7 days a week and bear him 15 children. That is the reality that many think used to exist. It never did, of course, which is why the counter to it is so deranged, but here we are.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
The term has been floating around in the self-help literature sphere, and even made it onto Wiktionary (which claims that it's chiefly used in "philosophy"). I would assume that it was introduced by people who didn't want their poetic self-help goals tarnished by association with the more prosaic readings of "meaningful" (like not of insignificant scale or impact, not nonsensical, etc.): if you say you are striving for meaningfulness, some are bound to read it as a win-friends-and-influence-people sort of thing.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
Supermarkets are on thin margins and yet you have manyfold increase in the price from farm to table.
They have thin margins but they make it up by turning over inventory quickly. This doesn't mean supermarkets aren't profitable, just that taking radical steps to lower prices won't really work because they don't have much room to cut.
People are mad that prices went up 40%
Cutting the supermarket's 4% margin to 3.7% (or whatever) isn't going to matter.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Maybe! Go craft a message that will be listened to, perhaps even get your Elite Human Capital buddies to help you spread it, and show us how it's done.
Gaashk
3d ago
Even more than in her previous essay, she doesn't seem to actually like any of her "friends." The men are all cads, the women all fools, and she feels like talking to her female friends about their lives is "emotional labor." Is she also suffering from "dark triad" behavior, and honest, emotionally stable people keep their distance?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
While the word 'religion' isn't indigenous to this context, there is definitely a Chinese sense that the Confucian school, so to speak, is the same sort of thing as Daoism or Buddhism. This is depicted allegorically, and indeed forms the 'three traditions', as you term them.
Speaking of language, the Chinese term for Confucianism is 儒教 (rújiào) - the former character means 'scholar', and the latter means 'teaching', 'school', or sometimes 'religion'. Confucianism is the teaching of the scholars. I bring this up because it's similar to the names of schools that are uncontestedly considered 'religions' in the West. Daoism is 道教 (dàojiào, 'teaching of the way'), Buddhism is 佛教 (fójiào, 'teaching of the Buddha'), Christianity is 基督教 (jīdūjiào, 'teaching of Jesus', this term tends to have a more Protestant connotation), Catholicism is 天主教 (tiānzhujiào, 'teaching of the lord of heaven'), Protestantism specifically is 新教 (xīnjiào, 'new teaching'), Islam is 伊斯蘭教 (yīsīlánjiào, 'teaching of Islam', they just transliterated the name directly; 回, huí, is also common for Chinese Muslims as an ethnicity), and so on.
The point is that linguistically these all seem to be treated like different species of the one family - they are all types of jiào. Not all ideologies or systems of belief are jiào. For instance, communism, liberalism, and fascism, in Chinese, are all called 主義 (zhuyì, which means 'position' or 'doctrine'). The word jiào suggests something roughly similar to our word 'religion'.
The historical context, as hydroacetylene alludes to, is that Matteo Ricci and some of the early Jesuits in China really didn't want Confucianism to be a religion, because they liked Confucianism. If Confucianism is not a religion then Chinese people don't have to give it up in order to become Christians, which is obviously very helpful if you want to convert a bunch of elite Confucians, as Ricci did. (This is also why the name for Catholicism is so bizarre - Ricci tried to equate God with ancient Chinese belief in Heaven or some kind of Lord of Heaven, in order to make the case to the Chinese that embracing Christianity would be consistent with the ways of their ancestors. Interestingly, some modern Chinese Christians try to make a similar move - people like Yuan Zhiming preach pseudohistorical theories whereby ancient Chinese were prophetically proto-Christian. For instance, Zhiming argues that the Chinese character for 'greed', 婪 (lán), depicts a woman standing beneath two trees, suggesting some ancient lost knowledge of the Eden narrative.)
If you ask me, I'm not totally without sympathy for Ricci's approach - a Chinese convert to Christianity is not obligated to abandon everything taught by Confucius, but only those things incompatible with the gospel. Everything else may be retained, and that may well end up being an awful lot. But "Confucianism is a different religion, therefore it must all be thrown out" and "Confucianism is not a religion, therefore it's all fine" are both lazy shortcuts. They're attempts to shortcut past real discernment of the content of a teaching with the cheap label 'religion'.
Even so, if we have to use the label for convenience, I'd say Confucianism is more like a religion than it is not.
anon_
3d ago
I'm not sure what constitutes "an answer" here -- there isn't some magical answer that ends the human drama over sex. And if there was one, it might not even be a good thing.
But the middle is a rather anodyne thing: acknowledge that excessive sex-positively drives behavior that makes neither men nor women satisfied, while at the same time acknowledging that total abstinence outside of marriage is neither desirable nor achievable.
kky
3d ago
In all of this, is there any standard of duty, even to herself, that a woman could fail? Or is she always the one failed?
Of course - it's the duty to understand these dynamics and rise above them. Pretty similar to the duty on incels in that regard. Nobody can ever really help you but yourself. And in both cases, the fact remains that the typical support structures that defend adolescents as they try to work this out have been undermined.
There's one particularly salient fact for women, though, which is that they suffer increasingly severe setbacks as they fail to work this particular issue out. Your average man who can't work out appropriate sexual practice has a long runway. There's no real consequence, long-term, of virginity qua virginity. I was a late bloomer myself. It wasn't really a problem - I wound up coming into my own in my mid-twenties with no harm done. Women, on the other hand, are running down the clock of their fertility and the visceral attraction of youth, alongside the concrete health risks of sex and the severe consequence of an unintended pregnancy. A woman in her mid-twenties who only just starts to figure romance out is on a very tight clock, and has to get up to speed on the actual elements of romance, find a good partner, marry said partner, and then start having kids. This has to be a very matter-of-fact business for her to be able to start before 30. Any further errors, like getting stuck with a sweet but unambitious boyfriend and not knowing when/how to pull the plug, will potentially set her further years back. And if she's stuck with a kid, good luck; if she's had an abortion, then it may be easier to date, but it's a concretely bad thing that will stick with her.
And women get cast into this sphere much more aggressively than men, just by virtue of biology. A woman is sexually grown, to a great extent, somewhere in the realm of 18-22. At that point she receives full sexual attention and has to "debut," as it were, whether she's willing or not. Men aren't grown in the same way for several years past that point, when they start to get their careers in order. But wisdom comes at a year-over-year rate regardless of physical growth, and so women are thrown out into the open with some four or five less years of material experience compared to their developmental male peers. Compare how pretty much every woman has some sort of story of going through puberty in her early teens and immediately starting to receive open sexual attention from men, which they are nowhere near ready to handle at that phase. It's the same sort of problem, just at a different stage of life.
So I think it makes sense to say that, given the plain and simple disadvantage women have here, that society can stand to adjust itself a little to buffer women against the worst harms here. I recognize the typical term for this is patriarchy, or possibly paternalism, but it seems to me quite fair to say that people ought to go out of their way to stop men from obviously preying on women in the vulnerable range. The women from the story above are NOT in that vulnerable range - hence losers - but many women are, and do not benefit from getting tossed into the shark tank. For what it's worth, I'd say that men need a parallel kind of deference in childhood, mostly focused on their much delayed organizational skills. A boy who struggles with the rote elements of schoolwork is not necessarily delayed or misbehaving, and comparing him to a girl his age on those merits is quite cruel - and probably why college is getting so lopsided these days (which, in turn, feeds back into the ladies' problem from the start). Or for romance, boys tend to need a lot more mentoring and structure - the few outliers who "get it" tend to really overperform, or you get older men who swoop down to eat the boys' lunch, which is both problems rolled into one.
Maybe my view of the world is more strongly sexed than yours. But I hope I've laid it out fairly clearly, and shown that it isn't all a one-sided affair. On the individual scale, everyone always has nobody but themselves to blame. But on the larger scale, it makes sense to talk about the larger pressures, because those are what determine where the line between success and failure falls.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Have you actually encountered these women who approach relationships by being boss bitches with unchecked neuroticism yourself, or are you reciting a culture war catechism or something you have seen others claim on the internet? I have been through and seen plenty of failure modes of relationships, but nothing like "the woman refuses to be nice, warm, loving or create a positive atmosphere for the sake of political LARPing" has been among them.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
Presumably also women don't become autistic when they go through menopause?
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
3d ago
to avoid calling it a paraphilia.
Yeah, but that's both because nobody knows what a paraphilia is[1], and because it sounds like that other '-philia' that means you're into kids.
(Actually, the same's true of using the expanded form of 'AGP', for the same reason, and those who use it know that.)
[1] I mean, I like that caliber and being prepared and all, but I've yet to develop a sexual attraction to bullets and MREs.
veqq
3d ago
Basically the National Union of Mine Workers was butting heads with the planners in the socialist part of the British economy and seeking rents based on their ability to crash the economy by coming out on strike.
The plot of Heinlein's 1940 The Roads must Roll
HighResolutionSleep
3d ago
But I won't say the men are acting in any way reasonable or just in this case.
Sure, at the ELO we're listening in on, it's trash treating trash like trash and vice versa. I fail to see why I should be feeling bad for the women specifically. In fact, I see no reason to believe that the women who stick around to replay this arrangement aren't themselves fucking around. We know the men in this league aren't being completely forthcoming, why believe the women?
In all of this, is there any standard of duty, even to herself, that a woman could fail? Or is she always the one failed? Is there any point it makes sense to ridicule her for being book-porn-brained, or outright write her off as a player in the game herself? Only when she starts an OnlyFans and not a moment sooner?
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3d ago
Yet like Cassandra, they're cursed to have the rest of the world not believe them.
Maybe that has something to do with their messaging or decisions about which issues to prioritize?
GBRK
3d ago
A high number of FTMs I've known have at least stated they're autistic
Yeah, that's part of the reason why I'm only assigning a 1-5% probability of this being true. I could come up with an argument along the lines of, "autistic women do better with men than schizoid women" but that has its own problems.
GBRK
3d ago
Part of this satisfaction could also be gaining a new social group.
Yep, that's what I'm addressing with the
and joining a dedicated community
bit. The autism compensation culture is my explanation for why they join the "trans" group specifically. Sure, they can join a wargaming group and have fun with fellow autists, but reinforcing autistic behavior makes the social deficits in the rest of their life worse. trans groups, meanwhile, teach them to be pro-social at least when dealing with LGB people and white liberals.
This kind of shit is prime fodder for someone like hoe_math to respond to. Men who make up the bulk of an actual representative sample, to her, are Not People.
Oh, the women are idiots, rest assured. They've presumably been raised on low-quality romance literature and misinterpret the least effort towards a pleasant date from an attractive man to be a sign of deep and abiding love. So when some socially adept and quite rapacious men figure out that there's an ample supply of idiots out there who just need a meager offering of romance-lit aesthetics and who can't initiate or sustain a real romance from their own abilities, said idiots have no idea of how to approach romance from... well, not exactly an adversarial stance, but at least an active one, where you accept the base fact that life between man and woman (possibly man and man or woman and woman, not much personal insight there) is always a negotiation and you need to stake out your own ground to get what you want. And a relationship without disagreements or fights is either a temporary anomaly or an active con. But I won't say the men are acting in any way reasonable or just in this case. I can get a young idiot screwing up and breaking the heart of a woman, but doing it repeatedly shows that he doesn't care about them at all.
I don't think these are representatives of the average woman, either. At least, I really hope not. Although the simple fact that I haven't run into women like this is not any evidence of anything in particular.
FarmReadyElephants
3d ago
Pretty common is an overstatement, but it's a behavior I've seen around AGP/sissy spaces. I used to be AGP. Not all trans people are AGP, but it seems that a greater portion of AGP people are going trans nowadays than back when I was into it.
In the broad sense, getting turned on by behavior the person associates with feminity is the most common and defining AGP behavior, and that is not rare at all. The trans redditors call it "gender euphoria" nowadays, to avoid calling it a paraphilia.
I'll agree that total abstinence outside of marriage isn't achievable at the population level; humans will inevitably human. In what way is it not desirable or achievable at the individual level? If a guy and a girl abstain from sex outside of marriage, get married, and so cease to abstain from sex inside marriage, what has this cost them?
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