culture war roundup
yofuckreddit
20hr ago
I had two playlists. One I've shared previously, which is roughly my "Best of: All Time" list truncated down to 100 tracks.
The other is a workout playlist that is not perfect but good for cycling:
Arist(s) Name Track Name
- Party Favor; Lil Gnar Spirits Pt. 2
- Taylor Swift; Snakehips Lavender Haze - Snakehips Remix
- Rêve Hypersexual
- Knox; John Harvie Leg Day
- Megan Thee Stallion; Latto Budget (feat. Latto)
- Rage Against The Machine Sleep Now In the Fire
- TOOL Undertow
- Our Last Night Anti-Hero
- Tom Morello; Bring Me The Horizon Let's Get The Party Started (feat. Bring Me The Horizon)
- SZA Low
- Kesha; Eagles Of Death Metal Let 'Em Talk (feat. Eagles of Death Metal)
- Mabel Don't Call Me Up
- Post Malone; Halsey; Future Die For Me (feat. Future & Halsey)
- flor Every Night
- Tyga; Offset Taste (feat. Offset)
- Jack Harlow; jetsonmade I WANNA SEE SOME ASS (feat. jetsonmade)
- TOOL The Pot
- Post Malone Wow.
- Drake; Future Diamonds Dancing
- Run The Jewels; El-P; Killer Mike Call Ticketron
- Clearside Cop Drama
- DJ Khaled; Drake POPSTAR (feat. Drake)
- Rise Against The Good Left Undone
- Nine Inch Nails Discipline
- Aries FOOL'S GOLD
- Aries DEADMAN WUNDERLAND
- Logic Fade Away
- The All-American Rejects "Swing Swing"
- Big Sean; Post Malone Wolves (feat. Post Malone)
- Jack Harlow Dua Lipa
- blackbear lil bit
- Joyner Lucas; Logic Isis (feat. Logic)
- Logic Keanu Reeves
- Run The Jewels; El-P; Killer Mike Oh My Darling Don't Cry
- Sleep Token Granite
- Halsey; ILLENIUM Without Me - ILLENIUM Remix
- Run The Jewels; El-P; Killer Mike; DJ Premier; Greg Nice ooh la la (feat. Greg Nice & DJ Premier)
- BOYS LIKE GIRLS BLOOD AND SUGAR
- Bishop Briggs; King Kavalier River - King Kavalier Remix
- Run The Jewels; El-P; Killer Mike Legend Has It
- Sleep Token Chokehold
- Run The Jewels; El-P; Killer Mike DDFH
- TOOL Cold And Ugly - Live
- NF PAID MY DUES
- Flume; Tove Lo Say It (feat. Tove Lo) [Illenium Remix]
- Petey USA The Freedom to Fuck Off
- Halsey Gasoline
- J. Cole MIDDLE CHILD
- TOOL Jerk-Off - Live
- Kendrick Lamar HUMBLE.
- Rise Against Prayer Of The Refugee
- ¥$; Kanye West; Ty Dolla $ign FUK SUMN
- DOVERSTREET Thank You
- GloRilla; Megan Thee Stallion; Cardi B Wanna Be (with Megan Thee Stallion & Cardi B) - Remix
- Pusha T; Ab-Liva Suicide
- City Girls; Cardi B Twerk (feat. Cardi B)
- 3OH!3; Katy Perry; Matt Squire STARSTRUKK (feat. Katy Perry)
- Amyl and The Sniffers Chewing Gum
- Zach Bryan Oak Island
- Logic; Eminem Homicide (feat. Eminem)
- Elley Duhé; Whethan MONEY ON THE DASH
- J. Cole G.O.M.D
- Pusha T Numbers On The Boards
- PHONK WALKER KING OF THE ROAD
- Logic Under Pressure
- JAY-Z; Linkin Park Dirt Off Your Shoulder / Lying From You
- Lil Wayne; Cory Gunz 6 Foot 7 Foot
- Rage Against The Machine Calm Like a Bomb
- Audioslave Cochise
- Mos Def Mathematics
- Pusha T; Tyler, The Creator Trouble on My Mind
- Kendrick Lamar DNA.
- TOOL Forty Six & 2
- Eminem The Ringer
- Vince Staples Norf Norf
- Geto Boys Still
- Pusha T; Chris Brown Sweet Serenade
- Pusha T Come Back Baby
- Drake Toosie Slide
- FJ Law; Laur Elle play dumb
- Kanye West Black Skinhead
- Tinie Tempah; Zara Larsson Girls Like (feat. Zara Larsson)
- Andy Mineo I Ain't Done
- Yellow Claw DJ Turn It Up
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
letting pedophiles run rampant
It feels to me like 1985 all over again.
Thanks to a legal system that often fails to draw (and often fails to even attempt to draw) a distinction between children who have been kidnapped by strangers, children who have voluntarily run away with strangers, and children who have simply been moved by a responsible adult but in violation of a custody order, it's nigh impossible to say for certain how many pedophiles are out there snatching kids... but "run rampant" does not appear supported by the evidence. I am... skeptical, let's say... that the people "working for free to rid their platforms of predators" should be allowed to do that, because I suspect there are many, many more vigilantes (and aspiring vigilantes) out there doing real and serious harm, than actual child-snatching pedos.
Of course we needn't get all the way to child-snatching; simply exposing children to various forms of degeneracy probably has long-term psychological impacts that are worth considering. But the research on this seems to be hopelessly muddied by culture war matters; moral panic over children's media exposure reaches all the way back to Plato (at least!). I expect we are all shaped by the media we consume, but not always in the most obvious or expected ways.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
Corvos
2d ago
Isn’t that what we’re doing here? To my mind, this explained better by @kky’s theory of traction.
The average person has no idea how to get from “I am upset about this” to “I am taking effective (paramilitary?) action against it”. If I remember correctly, both the CIA handbook for building an internal insurgency and the famous “Rules for Radicals” both hypothesise that showing supporters intermediate steps along this path is the primary purpose of an effective resistance movement.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
This forum also has seen some Aella-inspired discussion of this phenomenon.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
You know, I'm a person who has been described, in this very thread as:
I definitely don't have @self_made_human's endless energy for arguing here, but his takes tend to be quite grounded
Consider what that means when someone actually exhausts my patience. I think that says more about you than it does about me.
I'm a pretty pleasant guy. What have I said that is not pleasant
After all, even the most saintly are unlikely to like you very much if you say things along the lines of:
Now you're just throwing a hilarious Internet Shit Fit for having gotten called out on it. (About three comments! That's "for a while"! Mucho Internet Shit Fit...)
I'm sure you think you are very pleasant, and that you are a great conversationalist. I'm sure your mother thinks you're very handsome too.
Just a piece of advice, though; thinking that you're going to be able to avoid the problem by avoiding the person who points out the problem never works.
I think it works great. If I didn't have a firm commitment to not blocking anyone on this site, I would have blocked you a long time back. The next best thing is to ignore you, which is what I'm doing from now on. Being "unMottley" doesn't come at the cost of my sanity.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
I have a strong conviction that objective morality does not exist. The evidence against it is a vast, silent ocean; the evidence for it is a null set. I consider it as likely as finding a hidden integer between two and three that we've somehow missed.
It's rather ironic that your own choice of analogy willingly jumps into the thicket of the philosophy of mathematics. Perhaps you're just doing so unknowingly or just with a general lack of care, but that would indeed be apropos.
What sort of 'evidence' do you think one would gather to determine the status of mathematical objects? Is it empirical? Do you perform an experiment? Is that the means by which one 'finds' or, say, 'discovers' things like integers?
My own stance is that I am both a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist, and I deny these claims are contradictory.
I hate to do this, but last time we did this, you were unable to even explain what it is that those terms meant. Would you like to take another go at it?
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
3d ago
I apologize for not responding to the rest of the post, but I wanted to zero in on what seems to be a disagreement of fact rather than a disagreement of opinion.
Ergo, LLMs might be conscious. I also always add the caveat that if they are, they are almost certainly an incredibly alien form of consciousness and likely to have very different qualia.
This would seem to indicate that you already disagree with the illusionists. Illusionists believe that nothing is conscious, and nothing ever will be conscious, because consciousness does not exist. Therefore, you hold a philosophical view (that illusionism is false).
Earlier in the thread you said:
I have a strong conviction that objective morality does not exist.
This is itself a philosophical view. There are philosophers who do believe that objective morality exists. So, it appears that you believe that your own claim is true, and their claims are false.
You previously claimed that Searle's Chinese Room does know how to speak Chinese. So you think Searle's claim that the room doesn't know how to speak Chinese is false. And you think that your own view is true.
In this post you claimed that GPT-4 had a genuine understanding of truth, and that p-zombies are an incoherent concept, both philosophical claims.
So you have a long history of making many philosophical claims. You appear to assert these claims because you believe that they are correct, because they correspond to the facts of reality; so it naturally seems to follow that you think that anyone who denies these claims would be saying something incorrect, and opposed to the facts of reality. I don't see how the concept of a "category error" enters anywhere into it. So "The only way a philosophical conjecture can be incorrect is through logical error in its formulation, or outright self-contradiction" is false. They can be incorrect because they fail to correspond to the facts of reality.
Unless you want to claim "there isn't even such a thing as a philosophical problem, because all of my beliefs are so obviously correct that any reasonable person would have to share all my beliefs, and all the opposing claims are so radically wrong that they're category errors", which is... basically just a particularly aggressive phrasing of the old "all my beliefs are obviously right and all my opponents' beliefs are obviously wrong" thing, although it would still fundamentally be in line with my original point.
The point is that you can't escape from philosophy, you're engaging in it all the time whether you realize it or not (in fact the two of us engaged in a protracted philosophical argument in that final linked post).
Do the pro-gun comments in the thread meet your standard?
Like quoting 4-chan to say-but-not-say someone's argument is retarded? +30,-2 btw (charitably, just quoting it because it's the best explanation they could find, but like .. you could see how that would be massively downvoted if it were an anti-gun rant instead)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
What, you think people don't know when they are being sneered at?
I think the most likely explanation is that our readership is doing opinion war when it comes to an issue they really care about, and that's bad.
I think the most likely explanation is that you're upset that you can't convince anyone at the object level, so you're resorting to shaming over meta-level concerns.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
It would be one thing if I was arguing solely from credentials, but as I note, I lack any, and my arguments are largely on perceived merit. Even so, I think that calling it a logical fallacy is incorrect, because at the very least it's Bayesian evidence. If someone shows up and starts claiming that all the actual physicists are ignoring them, well, I know which side is likely correct.
I have certainly, in the past or present, shared detailed arguments.
https://www.themotte.org/post/2368/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/353975?context=8#context
Think of it as having the world's worst long-term memory. It's a total genius, but you have to re-introduce yourself and explain the whole situation from scratch every single time you talk to it
https://www.themotte.org/post/2272/is-your-ai-assistant-smarter-than/349731?context=8#context
I've already linked to an explainer of why it struggles above, the same link regarding the arithmetic woes. LLM vision sucks. They weren't designed for that task, and performance on a lot of previously difficult problems, like ARC-AGI, improves dramatically when the information is restructured to better suit their needs
https://www.themotte.org/post/2254/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/346098?context=8#context
I've been using LLMs to review my writing for a long time, and I've noticed a consistent problem: most are excessively flattering. You have to mentally adjust their feedback downward unless you're just looking for an ego boost. This sycophancy is particularly severe in GPT models and Gemini 2.5 Pro, while Claude is less effusive (and less verbose) and Kimi K2 seems least prone to this issue.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1754/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/309571?context=8#context
The good news:
It works.
The bad news:
It doesn't work very well.
Abysmal taste by default, compared to dedicated image models. Base Stable Diffusion 1.0 could do better in terms of aesthetics, Midjourney today has to be reined in from making people perfect.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1741/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/307961?context=8#context
It isn't perfect, but you're looking at a failure rate of 5-10% as opposed to >80% when using DALLE or Flux. It doesn't beat Midjourney on aesthetics, but we'll get there.
I give up. I have too many comments about LLMs for me to go through them all. But I have, in short, said:
-
LLMs are fallible. They hallucinate.
-
They are sycophantic.
-
They aren't great at poetry (they do fine now, but nothing amazing)
-
Their vision system sucks
-
Their spatial reasoning can be sketchy
-
You should always double check anything that is mission critical while using them.
they can reason, they can perform a variety of tasks well, that hallucinations are not really a problem, etc
These two statements are not inconsistent. Hallucinations exist, but can mitigated. They do perform a whole host of tasks well, otherwise I wouldn't be using them for said tasks. If they're not reasoning while winning the IMO, I have to wonder if the people claiming otherwise are reasoning themselves.
Note that I usually speak up in favor of LLMs when people make pig-headed claims about their capabilities or lack thereof. I do not see many people claiming that modern LLMs are ASIs or can cure cancer, and if they said such a thing, I'd argue with them too. The assymetry of misinformation is, as far as I can tell, not my fault.
Somewhat off-topic: the great irony to me of your recent "this place is full of terrible takes about LLMs" arguments (in this thread and others) is that I think almost everyone would agree with it. They just wouldn't agree who, exactly, has the terrible takes. I think that it thus qualifies as a scissor statement, but I'm not sure.
What of it? I do, as a matter of fact know more about LLMs than the average person I'm arguing with. I do not claim to be an expert, the more domain expertise they tend to have, the more they tend to align with my claims. More importantly, I always have receipts at hand.
celluloid_dream
3d ago
A lot of the heavily downvoted comments in that thread are not rhetorically spicy. Must I? Fine..
- comment expressing agreement and explaining +7,-7
- short opinion and explanation +5,-9
- comment raising a line of argument +5,-10
- detailed and thoughtful comment continuing a line of argument +5,-6
- perfectly valid opinion, well expressed +10,-7
I think the most likely explanation is that our readership is doing opinion war when it comes to an issue they really care about, and that's bad. I picture Motte-Jesus storming this temple, flipping tables screaming "Stop turning my Father's house into an echo chamber!"
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
Why is this comment +10,-16 for merely making an argument?
Perhaps the rhetorical flourish at the end?
Or this one? +10,-12
Perhaps the jeering paragraph objecting to "fun" being a reason for things to be legal, or the tiresome cars/guns comparison?
Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Does not even get small meaningless negative reinforcement via stupid internet points.
No, a downvote is not a bullet, and an argument against bullets is not an argument against "small meaningless negative reinforcement via stupid internet points".
celluloid_dream
3d ago
Fair point. That response was less than maximally pro-gun, but it is 1. is mostly on the topic of suicide, 2. still pretty lukewarm, and comes with a healthy amount of throat clearing: "I'm not arguing that this, in itself, is a persuasive argument in favour of banning guns, and can see the merits of both sides of the debate (particularly the "guns as a check against encroaching authoritarianism" argument advanced by many, including Handwaving Freakoutery, formerly of these parts)".
Why is this comment +10,-16 for merely making an argument? Or this one? +10,-12
Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Does not even get small meaningless negative reinforcement via stupid internet points.
It's a process for everyone. Demoralization is real. And everyone is trying to improve all the time, and there's just too much to know and master. There's a real balance between maintaining the standards of a community and maintaining the morale of individual members of a community - you do need enough high quality not to run off people who have actually mastered some things. And yet there really is very little to be gained by ripping bad work to shreds, in the usual case.
Above standards, there is politics, and there is tribalism. Take the Culture War Thread, for example. "This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here."
Is that how we act here? Look at the gun discussion from last week. Do the votes look like they track response quality (i.e. of argument), or do we simply have a large American gun-owning population that vehemently downvotes anything that might be the slightest bit critical of their god-given constitutional right? And of course, it's not just the voting. I regularly see people with minority views accused of being trolls, of being alts, etc. etc.
This is a rising trend on the broader internet. Even going into a reddit thread trying to post some polite, neutral information, not even taking a side draws downvotes because it pattern-matches a tribe. It didn't used to be like that. Again, this is politics and tribalism, not standards or correctness.
gattsuru
4d ago
Does your theory need to change if I can demonstrate LLMs solving questions that were not previously on Quora, or otherwise on the internet? I'll admit it solved that particular problem poorly, but it seems a pretty critical issue for any parrot-style claims.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
4d ago
These LLMs are not like an alien intelligence, an independent form of intelligence. They consist of amalgated quora answers. They’re very good parrots, they can do poetry and play chess, they have prodigious memory, but they’re still our pet cyborg-parrots. Not just created by, but derived from, our form of intelligence.
The number of terrible takes on AI on this forum often seem to outweigh even the good ones. Few things make me more inclined to simply decamp to other parts of the internet, but alas, I'm committed to fighting in the trenches here.
Unfortunately, it takes far more work to debunk this kind of sloppy nonsense than it does to generate it. Let no one claim that I haven't tried.
gattsuru
4d ago
Maybe I'm just too sheltered, but I'm not quite sure what you're insinuating here.
I mean it pretty literally: an employee sat down, explained what I was doing wrong, what the expectations for that specific space was, what likely failure modes I'd encounter if I continued as I was doing, and some alternative approaches.
I dunno what the guy's specific job was, but one of the older employees sat down and gave a ten or fifteen minute spiel, starting with the simple stuff like explaining what someone buying you a drink meant (only strictly speaking requires a conversation, but impolite to accept if you aren't looking for something more, with expectations of reciprocity, and how the tab worked under those circumstances) and how to handle it if the drink was unacceptable but the company wasn't (tell the bartender or waiter when you order your first drink that you're a teetotaler, even if you're not), that customers purchasing less than two beers worth were going to unspecified issues (hint hint), normal don't leave drinks unattended and know your limits for alcohol when you do drink. Eventually, what I'd missed about the name (a marijuana reference), what event nights were active for 'mostly' social stuff (poker or betting on watch football) and which were much more heavy on either hookups or otherwise might be a little too ribald for me (here's a flier; yes several include drag and/or guys in glorified speedos), and other spaces that might be easier to get friends to go to the bar with (admittedly, not very helpful given three of the recs were explicitly political orgs).
I have no idea how many of those conventions were even common back then and I'm sure many aren't common now.
But my read is that the "I'm a femboy and I fuck better than your girlfriend" is a strikingly common fantasy.
Uh... yeah. One of my first crushes was on a straight guy, and it wasn't the only such crush, add in a general shortage of tops, and there's a lot of reasons it works as a fantasy. And while I've never pursued it, you only really need one or two closeted guys for it to feel like it could work.
That said, the "I'll just go gay/date a femboy/date trans women" thing seems to have a little purchase, but only in the way that Trump wanting to buy Greenland is. It's a memetic negotiation tactic, a way of asserting "I have power over you no matter what you do!"
Maybe? I dunno how much of it's kidding on the square. A lot of soccons have looked at the number of younger generations self-identifying as bi and then not doing anything about it, but there's other explanations for that behavior that could end up changing pretty fast.
But that may just be me assuming many other people share my interests, and there definitely are starting to be people who try to take that approach and get surprised to find out exactly how poorly it works in practice.
But also straight men need to be real careful lest they start assuming that twinky femboys are drama-free sex machines.
Hah! Fair point. Even 'always up for sex' isn't anywhere near realistic, and that's assuming a lot of frot that straight or 'straight' guys aren't probably gonna be feeling. And it's very much just a different sort of drama, and not even that different, rather than as overt a difference in quantity as a lot of straight guys expect.
Hell, some of the times you don't even avoid the shoe-explosion.
What's particularly strange is this seems to be the overall campaign for HIV prevention, treatment, and testing, but the banners I recall specifically were advertising PrEP.
Interesting. I'll have to put some feelers out; this seems like the sorta thing where everyone involved was sure they were just presenting the most palatable experience, but by the end of the game of telephone it's somewhere between useless (like dental dams, PrEP for lesbians is probably not a high impact field: I think there's been literally one case of cisF/cisF HIV transmission through oral sex documented) and actively counterproductive (expecting partners to use a drug they can't get and wouldn't be helped by).
phailyoor
4d ago
This is not true. AI search is not programmed to be critical of sources, so it becomes a pure garbage in garbage out situation.
On heavily SEOed queries, AI search is in fact much much worse than just asking the AI directly. In August 2025 I will not touch "grounded" AI with a 10 foot pole it's dogshit.
This guy asked AI for a "grounded" query and the AI happily cited a fake scam website front and center.
Men commit the overwhelming majority of murders and violence crime.
Gonna go off on a tangent here that's unrelated to what you were trying to say, but I'm just going to point out that this is largely down to their risk taking and greater aggressiveness within the public sphere, which also means that they are responsible for the overwhelming majority of acts of heroism (men are 90% of those who have received the Carnegie Hero Medal, for example). Of course, the negative aspects of these traits always get discussed so much more than the positive ones, and by virtually every political group in existence. Wonder why. Then there's also the reality of violence-by-proxy by women, which is yet another thing that fuels male-perpetrated violence. I wrote a longer comment about all of that here.
And what is the real reward for sexual liberalization? I mean this genuinely as a question, not a rhetorical device.
I wasn't so much advocating sexual liberalisation or disparaging sexual traditionalism as much as I was simply pointing out that if we're accepting a sexual framework, we need to fully accept all of its consequences. Sexual traditionalism doesn't just mean "shotgun weddings for men" and "penalties for cads for having deflowered a woman": it also means stigmatising and penalising women who have premarital sex or tart themselves up inappropriately or use sex/intimacy to wheedle money out of men, granting the men around them the power to vet and police who they can go out with (since they will have to defend any breach of their honour), and placing responsibilities on both husband and wife in a marriage to put out and provide sex to their spouse. The responsibility for maintaining a pro-social scenario was not placed only on one party.
Note I don't consider this to be the Handmaid's Tale either. I very much agree with you that that's basically feminist oppression porn and an unhinged caricature of traditional sexual mores which borders on the fantastical. I think all of these traditional strictures are just a consequence of accepting that entire framework of looking at things, and I don't like how we've basically adopted a chimera of sexual liberalism and traditionalism, having accepted only the parts of both worldviews that benefit women while discarding all the bits that may inconvenience them. Within this current context, I won't accept any more sexual strictures being placed on men; the system is already engineered to give women maximal choice while displacing maximal accountability onto men. If we're advocating a traditional society, the obligations of women that made it make sense need to be enforced. We need to pick a lane and stick with it, instead of relying on women's tears to help us shape our approach to everything regardless of how conflicted and schizophrenic things get.
faceh
5d ago
Women are currently too valuable as a political force for the political class to remove their power to vote, let alone reduce them to chattel.
So that is DEFINITELY a 'coup-complete' sort of solution.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
5d ago
Would you then contest the assertion that women are fundamentally lesser than men? I think that @To_Mandalay is essentially correct in this thread about how women have always been considered lower on the Great Chain of Being than men, do you disagree?
I don't hate women at all, though I do empathize with women who seem to hate themselves like this poor soul. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for women to feel trapped by their biology, to despair that their ordained purpose is mere continuance of the species while the men drive forwards the transcendence of Man.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't working, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.
I’ve been inwardly giggling at you and @faceh’s recent comments matter-of-factly talking about castrating or even executing “Lothario” men.
Like the state of affairs is so bleak, the cultural inertia too powerful to reverse, that such a practice is more realistic and further within the Overton window than marginally but directly limiting or inconveniencing the FUN or freedom of young women in some way to increase the protections afforded them.
Indeed. The wars of the sexes, and the resulting fertility collapse, have gotten so bad that people are willing to resort to literally anything to fix them: killing womanizers, paying women to birth orphans, anything at all...
...except the one thing that we know works, and that kept civilization running for the past 5,000 years. De-emancipate women? Never! Better to go extinct.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
5d ago
if you succeed, you'll sound the way me or @faceh or those who did way more with way hotter girls than any of us.
That's not very appealing. As highlighted in comments such as this, even you yourself don't sound happy with it.
Well, I suppose you and I are more psychologically different than I thought.
I have to confess, though, that I’m not necessarily surprised — the only guy who ever mirrored my orientation in this way was that one guy from high school. Intriguingly I’ve had more “oh that’s how you see it too?” conversations with trans women than men, and actually more than cis women too — nobody crack an egg over my head. I have often found that people on the margins are those who most understand the precious nature of intimate connection.
Romance for a lot of both men and women seems immensely tied up in external status in a way it never was for me; while I absolutely recognize the norms of male performance in my own romantic success, when it’s come, I am also lucky that the performances that were appealing were abundantly personal to me, showing me at my best, being myself. And that the feeling I can, at times, inspire includes both attraction and companionship.
I believe all the things I do about love as transformation not because of things I read in novels, but because of what I have experienced in love. Every time someone has loved me it has changed me for the better. Not in the sense that “I was trained” or whatever people believe about women in relationships. But in the sense that I became more tender, more empathetic, more open to other people, and in fact more spiritual. I actually believe in God in part because of my experiences with romantic love. C.S. Lewis once called Eros “the thing in the world that most begs for idolatry,” (paraphrase) and I believe it.
But our discussion here and the serendipitous chat with my girlfriend prompted a really good chat with her last night — thanks for that. She made the point that what women dream about “in traditional romances, not the werewolf thing,” she added, is a man who cares about them, talks to them when they’re down, is emotionally available, good dad material. I made the point to her that a lot of men dream about the same thing — a woman who cares about them, accepts their vulnerability, believes in their potential, sweet and loving — good mom material. The great male fear is that a woman will love him only for what he can do, and will resent him and hate him if he ever stops giving interest on their principal. This shows up in complaints about nagging, the alpha/beta dichotomy, sexless marriages, if you find a male complaint about women this is what it resolves to. I don’t want a woman who loves me because I slayed the dragon, I want a woman who gives me the strength to slay him. “Behind every great man…”
If “cishet girl lore” can dream about a man who sees a woman for who she is, for her actual personality and soul and love her for this and not for the size of her tits, well, Cishet male lore also dreams about a woman who sees a man’s capabilities even when he’s down and yet believes in him. Loves him. For who he is, for who he can become. What both sexes truly want beneath the recriminations is very similar: love, affection, and commitment based on who we are in our innermost selves, not what we present to the world. This is the meaning of “intimacy.”
It is only because this is preciously rare that anyone settles for less. And men and women both feel its lack with great yearning. And sometimes, contempt.
More options
Context Copy link