domain:nfinf.substack.com
anon_
just now
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
14m 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
19m 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
29m ago
Presumably also women don't become autistic when they go through menopause?
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
33m 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
41m 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
59m 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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 article 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.
kky
1hr ago
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, 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. 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
1hr 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.
kky
1hr ago
The preferences are, I think, the big part. And the main of that is understanding what the desired end-goal relationship is, how that can be founded, how it can be maintained... and so on. Then the natural partner becomes more clear, and the virtues that a woman can cultivate beyond sexual attractiveness. But if you don't know what you want in the end, how can you tell the difference between a good partner and a bad partner, rather than simply an attractive or unattractive partner? And that in turn requires a vision or model for a stable romance, and considerations of old age, and so on and so forth. But it sounds like the women in question are, at best, thinking of the early phases of a romance. I'm not sure they're even looking ahead to something as minimal as moving in together, much less marriage or children. And if that's the case... yeah, I guess it tracks that when the author talks about how much effort her girlies are putting in, it's about getting the right outfit and putting makeup on, not figuring out ways to show off a loving and nurturing spirit (e.g. cookies, not that hard to make but very pleasing).
But on the other hand, I don't think it would matter to the guys they're currently dating how nice or not they are. Sounds like they'd tolerate a mean or dull woman just so long as she puts out, which is a pretty sad place to be. If those women are losers, then just imagine the guy who spends all his time trying to sleep with losers...
Shrike
1hr ago
One of the interesting things that the right wing in the USA is doing is working to destroy many of the institutions that can be deployed to be The Man (the Department of Education being perhaps the prime example).
I don't think this eliminates the chance that the right-wing counterculture suffers from victory (as seems to typically be the case!) but I do think, if successful, it makes it more difficult for the right to seize and hold the low ground of "mandatory and cringe" that typically alienates people. Banking on "diversity of thought" to skew right-wing is a bold choice that may not pay off, but if it does it is actually likely to help keep the right more diverse (and more tolerant) by ensuring that the right's "client base" (for lack of a better term) is diversified.
2D3D
1hr ago
Honestly I'm surprised the left hasn't tried to figure out Asmongold 's popularity with young men
"Doesn't look like anything to me."
The left is approaching the problem statement from the wrong direction: men aren't right wing because they listen to a magically popular midwit trash goblin, the roach king is popular precisely because he shits on leftist shibboleths. Its a literal blind spot for the left to see any positive value in the anti-woke and generally anti-identitarian rhetoric of Asmongold, which is one of many blind spots but the most pertinent one. The only time such data can be noticed is when it is a cudgel to attack enemies "the evil men like Asmon only because they are anti-woke" or "Asmon is anti-woke because he needs to appeal to chuds!"
Viewership stats seem opaque but my gut tells me the right wing anti social-justice creators have way more traction than social justice. I did a quick peek to see how Breadtubers are doing and I didn't realize how inconsequential they are, much less against Asmongold. This just reinforces the point that the left wing just doesn't have the sauce to keep audiences engaged, but the reason for that isn't the packaging its the message itself.
Leftists are hoping that they can infiltrate mens spaces to share the message, convinced that the gatekeeping is what keeps the message from being received. Its like they never learnt the problem is the message itself. Infiltrating mens spaces to spread the gospel of The Future Is Female doesn't create converts, it hollows the space. Shoving ugly they/thems in Concord didn't tap into Modern Audiences and for all the technicolor progressives populating Overwatch R34 still clearly shows skinny hot chicks dominate.
HighResolutionSleep
1hr ago
I mean, sure, you could overindex in on the worst example on offer. But the average between the men she's describing seems to offer little more than a shrug when it comes to commitment.
I'm assured that this is enough to completely befuddle the average woman, as though she were being promised lifelong marriage. I'm not sure what to make of this.
TIRM
1hr ago
an unregulated free market privileges large corporations over workers. I assume that most of the commentariat here is already familiar with this analysis.
Familiar sure. And also understanding it is false.
kky
1hr ago
That's a pretty naive take. What is "it feels like we're falling in love" followed by "I did say that. But that’s also how all my good first dates feel. Like we could fall in love!" if not clear and obvious duplicity? That's straight from the top-level link. Haven't you heard of lying with implications before? You don't have to spout literal falsehoods to deceive someone as to your intentions. And intentions are what romance is about.
TIRM
1hr ago
an onlyfans star writing about this on her substack might have motives other than sincerely seeking a solution to a problem
So that's now two onlyfans performers who determined that a substack is a good way to advertise to some potential clients. Aella and this one.
SerialStateLineXer
2hr ago
And the dissent was all conservatives. The Democrats were happy to throw chronic pain patients under the bus in order to preserve an obviously wrong interpretation of the Commerce Clause because it's the source of the Federal Government's power to regulate purely intrastate affairs.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
Also look up the "triple tradition." Confucianism, much like modern humanist atheism, succeeded because it was deeply embedded in the Buddhist and Taoist religious frameworks.
aldomilyar
2hr ago
I'd say they'd suck less for the average woman, if they were capable of setting up boundaries.
Prettymuch. The average woman is likely capable of getting into a stable relationship with a pretty good guy from a dating app if they just jiggle their preferences a bit. The average guy has to go on a massive path of self improvement to get attractive enough to then actually start meaningfully 'dating' then can maybe look at dealing with it.
HighResolutionSleep
2hr ago
I was responding to what this poster said, what was discussed in the article, and what you yourself said above:
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'
Is there something between the lines here that I'm missing? Do you consider a man promising nothing and promising marriage to be basically the same thing? Where does women's personhood enter in to this equation?
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 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.
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