Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
In complete seriousness, when guys complain that it would be so nice to have a body with intrinsic value in others' eyes, why do they not explore the many places where this is already true?
It's a good question!
So, this is something that happens from time to time, straight men going into various types of gay spaces for attention and validation. And I have occasionally heard a few straight men say they wish they were gay, because it seems like it would be easier. But obviously for the majority of straight men, these are hard limits, they would never even think about going there.
My whole post was basically about how the whole "intrinsic value" thing has both good aspects and bad aspects. It's not a panacea (but it's not a uniquely awful tragedy either). So a man who thought that getting lots of free sexual attention would somehow solve his problems would be making the same mistake as the overly-bitter feminist who imagines that men have access to a special level of existential authenticity that she is forbidden.
What breaks the symmetry in your example is the fact that straight women do, actually, find at least some men attractive some of the time. Some of the attention she gets throughout her life will be from creepy undesirables. But some of it will be from men who are genuinely attractive, and who she may be attracted to in turn, and who she may judge to be good romantic partners. Drawbacks, but also benefits; thinking about the whole dynamic over the course of a lifetime, rather than just one night at the club. A straight man getting attention from gay men has a zero percent chance of ever finding any of the potential suitors desirable, which obviously puts a different spin on the experience. It's the difference between "lots of people want something of value from me, and some of them may be able to pay a fair price" and "lots of people want something of value from me, and none of them will be able to pay a fair price".
Yes, but that was the whole point of the comment you were replying to. “You think being able to get sexual attention from men (many of whom will in fact be gross and old) is so great? Well, how would YOU like some male sexual attention?”
Well, y’know, it actually does! Every social practice that humans have ever engaged in throughout history has confirmed this fact.
So a man has to find something with which to supplement his value. This is no Herculean task, the barrier is very much intended to be surmountable. There are many types of goods and labors that men exchange for access to women’s bodies. But the point is that he has to find something; he’s not born with it.
Well, the actual, true, final TERF position is that women should live in lesbian communes and men should go fuck off in a ditch somewhere.
Men appear to enjoy sex more than women.
Yes, and why do you think that is? It’s not just a random coincidence. It’s rooted in the fact that a man’s reproductive resources are very cheap and a woman’s are very scarce.
You know that it’s men who pay for access to women’s bodies, rather than the other way around, right?
Revealed preferences, look at what people do not what they say, etc.
Treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex is going to... require treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex!
The standard TERF position for decades has been that sex is a biological reality, but gender should be abolished. The unique vulnerability of female bodies as compared to male bodies necessitates certain accommodations like female-only spaces, but most aspects of “gender roles” can and should be done away with. You could argue that this is a fine line to walk, but I at least think it’s internally consistent.
Hm, does Compact have any links to the German magazine of the same name?
I don’t think so, no. Although funny enough, the name “Compact” comes from the idea of a “new compact” between left and right. Social conservatism and economic socialism. One might say that it’s rather… third positionist. (Although in practice most of their takes are very basic bitch and milquetoast.)
Musk-level value was OP’s analogy
I said it was a "heavily attenuated" version of that. It was just an analogy, not meant to be taken literally.
I simply think it has an appeal to men who don't feel they've got a shot at the real thing.
And does it have appeal to you?
Without actual, real life women being willing to settle down
But that's not true. There are lots of women who are settling down with lots of men as we speak.
And 5 years down the road the married guy got divorced, maybe has a kid, and suddenly finds himself alone
You're trying to rationalize how the AI could be "just as good" or "not as dangerous" as the real thing, because you know that the AI is obviously worse.
Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?
You'll always feel inferior to men who were able to build a relationship with a real woman. It'll gnaw at you.
AI girlfriends (and boyfriends) have already one-shotted some of the more mentally vulnerable of the population.
Talking to an AI feels like trying to tickle yourself. I don’t get it at all.
When I was a kid I used to be somewhat surprised that there were older people who had never played a video game, had no interest in ever trying a video game, they were perfectly fine with never playing one, etc. And I was like, how can that be? How can you not even be curious? I suppose video games just got popular at a point in their lives when their brains were no longer plastic enough or something. And I suppose I’ve hit that point with new technology now as well.
I can’t enjoy talking to an AI when I know that I’m in control and it’s trying to “please” me. Even if I told it, “oh by the way, try and add some variance, maybe get moody sometimes and don’t do what I ask”, the knowledge that at the end of the day I’m still the one in control ruins it. I suppose if we imagine a scenario where the AI is so realistic that I never get suspicious, and you’re able to trick me into thinking I’m talking to a real human, then sure, ex hypothesi there’s nothing to distinguish it from a human at that point and I would enjoy it. But short of that? Not for me.
There was a Sirling-era episode of the Twilight Zone where a bank robber died and went to Heaven. Angel tells him that he’s made it, he can have anything he wants for all eternity. So the dude lives out all sorts of wish fulfillment scenarios, winning big at gambling, beautiful women, some bank heists, etc. But he gets bored fast, says something is missing. There’s no danger to any of it, no bite, he wins every time. Angel says “well you can set whatever parameters you want. We can make it so there’s a 50% chance of your next robbery failing”. Guy says “no no, it’s still not the same. Look, I don’t think I’m cut out for Heaven. I’m a scumbag. I want to go to the other place”. Angel says, “I think you’ve been confused. This IS the other place.”
That’s what AI “relationships” feel like to me.
New in Compact Magazine: Neither Side Wants to Emancipate Women
Twice this year, I found myself at conferences where a familiar question surfaced: Why do women not vote conservative? The tone was not hostile, only puzzled. Conservative women asked it themselves, with a kind of weary civility. But none of the answers seemed to satisfy. Some cited the state’s failure to support both motherhood and career; others blamed the lingering shadow of a conservatism that once sought to tether women to secondary roles.
No one could explain why so many women still turn away from even the most progressive forms of the right. Why do they keep voting for a left that consistently throws them under the bus, prioritizing for instance ideologies that deny biological sex and insist on men’s feelings and desires? The answer is simple, although no one wants to see it: Conservatives offer women performative reverence. Progressives offer equally performative protection. But no one offers women the thing they were once promised: freedom.
What freedom? How are you not free?
Of course, we already know that there's something rhetorical about this question, at least in the sense that we can reasonably ask whether anyone is in fact free. It's not an easy thing to nail down, you know? Lenin was asked if the revolution would bring freedom; he responded, "freedom to do what?". You have to specify, it's not self-evident. It's easy to be envious of the apparent freedom of others while also failing to appreciate their own unique forms of unfreedom. The master is relatively more free than the slave, no one can deny this; rare is the master who would switch places. But is the master free, simpliciter? Now it's not so clear. Marxists would say that no one is free, not even the capitalists, not as long as the task of capitalism remains unfulfilled. Capitalism is freedom, to be sure, but it is an unfree freedom, a freedom that poses a riddle that remains unsolved. But, let's stick to the issue at hand.
In the United States, women have leaned left for decades, not out of fervent ideological commitment, but through the steady pull of education, work, and shifting social norms. In 2020, Edison exit polls showed that 57 percent of women voted for Joe Biden, compared to 45 percent of men. Across Europe, too, women often favor center-left parties offering tangible supports: childcare, healthcare, material security.
But the dilemma runs far deeper than electoral politics. It touches upon the very essence of what it means to be free. I remain loyal to the feminist promise, however battered or dimmed, of genuine emancipation for women. This vision is not content to merely manage or glorify womanhood, but to transcend its limitations altogether, to be more than a body assigned a function, to move beyond the scripts of sex and tradition, and to claim the dignity of self-authorship. I never wanted merely to be accepted as a woman; I wanted to be free.
[...]Women do not lean left because it offers a credible path to emancipation. They do so because the right never even tried, and because the left, despite everything, still carries a faint echo of that promise.
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about?
(I'm going to tell you what I think she's talking about, just hang tight.)
Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between. There are plenty of female role models to follow in all these categories. To the extent that there still exist "systemic privileges", actual explicit institutional privileges, they're mostly in favor of women now: in university admissions, in hiring, in divorce and family courts, and so on. Women are doing pretty good for themselves! Maybe they weren't 150 years ago, maybe they aren't if we're talking about Saudi Arabia or Iran, but in the 2025 Western first world? What freedoms are they missing?
And yet the author of the linked article perceives that something is missing. She perceives that women, as a class, do not have freedom, do not have the dignity of self-authorship. What do these terms mean? She doesn't say. But nonetheless, we should take her concerns quite seriously. Plainly, there are millions of women who share in her feelings, and millions of men who think she's onto something, and this continues to be the animating impulse of a great deal of cultural and political activity that goes under the heading of "feminism". Millions of people don't make things up. They're always responding to something, although their own interpretation of what they're responding to and what their response means can be mistaken. Plus, the author alleges that whatever phenomenon she's getting at, it plays a role in electoral politics, so you should care about it in that sense as well.
We should again note the author's hesitation to concretely specify her demands. If the issue were "the freedom to have an abortion" or "the dignity of being taken seriously in STEM", then presumably, she would have simply said that. But she makes it clear that the issue is freedom as such, and dignity as such; it's a gnawing, pervasive concern that you can't quite put your finger on. It's an abstract concern. So, we may be inclined to try a more abstract mode of explanation to explain why she feels the way she does.
Human interaction is predicated upon the exchange of value. There'd be no reason to stick around with someone if you weren't getting something out of it, even if all you're getting is some company and a good time. (There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions.)
We want to provide things of value to other people. But value is both a blessing and a curse. You want to have it, but it also weighs you down, it gets you entangled in obligations that you can't quite extricate yourself from. When you have something of great value, it tends to become the only thing that people ever want from you. We can consider Elon Musk as a figure of intense material and symbolic value. He's one of the wealthiest men alive, he runs X, he runs SpaceX, he had a spectacularly public falling out with Trump, and these factors undoubtedly dominate in virtually all of his interpersonal interactions. It's probably a bit hard for him to just be a "normal guy" with "normal friends", innit? Imagine him saying to someone, "when we're hanging out, I don't want to be Elon Musk, I just want to be Elon, y'know? Don't think of me as Elon the business tycoon and political figure. Think of me as, Elon the model train builder, or Elon the DotA player. Yeah, think of me like that instead. That's the identity I want you to symbolically affirm for me". His relations might make an attempt to humor him, although I don't think they'd be particularly successful in their attempts. His extreme wealth alone will always warp his interactions in ways both conscious and unconscious.
It is my contention that (healthy, reasonably attractive) women experience a heavily attenuated version of this phenomenon essentially from birth, which helps explain the pervasive irritation that some women feel at the simple fact of, well, being women. The constant nagging feeling that something is still not quite right, no matter how much progress is made on formal and even cultural equality (or even cultural domination, as may be the case in certain contexts).
If you were born with a female body, then you were gifted ownership of one of the most valuable possessions on planet earth. This is, again, both a blessing and a curse. This confers to you certain privileges and opportunities, but on the flip side, there is no way to ever turn this value off (aside from ageing -- but, even then...), to take respite from this fountain of value. You're in for the whole bargain, all of it, all the time. The value of the female body is a matter of pure economics; it is not based on the internal subjective psychological states of any individual or class of individuals. A man can impregnate many women in a single week. A woman, once impregnated, is tied up for 9 months. Her time cannot be apportioned as freely. Scarcity is the precondition of value; this is the law of everything that is, was, and shall be.
As a natural consequence of the extreme value of her body, the body comes to dominate her relations with others, both materially and symbolically. She correctly perceives that when people (well, men, at least) think about men, the properties they notice in order of salience are "web developer, white, middle class, male, father...", something like that. But when people think about her, the ordering is "woman, web developer, white, middle class...". Her body is what people want, it's what they're seeking; or at least, this is always necessarily a lurking suspicion. This, I believe, is the root of the aforementioned "abstract" concern with "the dignity of self-authorship"; it's not just the ability to become say, a prominent mathematician or artist in material reality, but to have that reciprocally affirmed as your primary symbolic identity by others. That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us. I don't doubt that there have been times when a woman was being congratulated by male colleagues on the attainment of her PhD, or her promotion to the C-suite, and still there was a nagging doubt in the back of her mind that went, "........but you still see me as a woman before anything else, don't you?" Or, perhaps on the verge of frustration when talking with a male friend, she wanted to say, "look, I know every time you look at me I have this glowing halo effect around me, like you're wearing fucking AR goggles and they're telling you I'm an NPC that will give you a quest item or some shit, but can you please just take the goggles off for one day and just look at me as, well, me for a change?" And, I'm sorry to say, but here comes the really depressing part of the story: the goggles can't be removed. That glowing halo effect is glued to your tooshie, and it's not going anywhere. "Sexists" are at least appreciated for their forthrightness on this point; the reviled "male feminist" is correctly perceived to be simply dishonest about it. I suppose that's a bit of a downer. But, we all got our own shit to deal with. Take solace in the fact that you're just like everyone else in that regard.
Elon could at least conceivably give up all his wealth, his titles, his positions of symbolic authority, and start from zero. Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate". But when your body itself is the source of this overbearing value? That's a bit harder to rid yourself of.
This, at any rate, is a psychological theory to explain the origin of the discourse in the linked article, a discourse that would otherwise seem to fly in the face of all available evidence. But I'm open to alternative theories.
Light is pretty unambiguously the villain and, spoilers,
Watch Death Note. I've never found a human who didn't like Death Note.
I thought Elfen Lied was great… when I was in high school. Now, it’d probably go in the “guilty pleasure” box at best.
I can’t imagine recommending it to someone who’s just getting into anime, unless I already knew they were into that sort of thing.
we don't see the appeal in a dangerous partner
It's actually not a fantasy structure that's exclusive to women! It's just more common in women because, obviously, men are the more violent and aggressive ones.
Do you know how many audio files there are for guys with titles like "serial killer yandere ties you up in her basement because she wants to be with you forever ASMR"? A lot more than you might expect!
What do these ratings mean, what is the scale?
You and most other posters on this thread seem to think that women are only interested in dangerous men being dangerous to other people and are obviously in denial about the possibility that dangerous men are dangerous to them.
Oh no, I don't think that at all! In fact I thought about including a line about that in my post - "she could simply have a masochistic streak, she could enjoy the palpable sense of danger" - but I decided not to, because I find that comments are generally more persuasive and attention-grabbing when you only include one bizarre claim instead of multiple.
I do think the "I'm a highly distinguished person to him" aspect of it is probably stronger in the majority of cases than the "I like being in danger myself" aspect, simply because even the most masochistic and self-destructive people still show an aversion to acute physical danger. Although, funny enough I just linked someone downthread to Freud's essay on the death instinct, where he explores how a primordial instinct for self-destruction could coexist alongside an apparently overriding concern for self-preservation. That could certainly be relevant in cases like this.
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Because up until that point, they think it's hot that he could attack other people with a samurai sword, but he could never do that to them because he just loves them that much / they alone have the power to tame him / he's so emotionally dependent on them that his world would collapse without them / insert-their-preferred-framing-here.
So the hotness can win out over prudence and risk aversion.
The long answer would involve starting here.
The short answer is that I didn't say that, under self_made's described social system, the man would enjoy his wife's transgression per se, but rather that the feeling of power he derives from exercising his authority over those who have transgressed offers something to enjoy.
Do you think there's no alien life anywhere, or do you just believe that it's implausible that it's a) intelligent and b) has the means and desire to get here?
[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
The mood in the UFO community has been rather dour lately due to a string of disappointments and setbacks, but Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri dropped some promising indications this week that Congress has not forgotten about the topic and full disclosure may very well still be in the works:
"We're pursuing a hearing date. We've got a list of people that we're looking at. We're actually looking at potentially doing two. One with some people that are direct whistleblowers, who have had direct, and when I say direct, they had eyes directly on or have personally encountered UAP. In their formal operations."
"Not somebody out and about like Joe Blow out there that saw something. There's thousands and thousands of people like that. We're talking about people that worked for the Pentagon, worked in a government program, where they worked in and around this technology. Whether it was through crash retrieval, or through reverse engineering, that's what we're pursuing right now."
"The next hearing after that, once we're able to get information, we're looking at doing some interrogatories, which is where you take some of the things that have been said in these briefings, in these open hearings under oath. And then we send a formal letter as a committee, asking for answers from, whether it's Tulsi Gabbard, or whomever it is that we need to be asking these questions of. And then which would send up the potential second hearing, which would hopefully be able to clear people like Tulsi Gabbard to come forward."
"And I've been told she's very... friendly when it comes to this topic. That she wants disclosure. She wants to help bring about disclosure on this topic."
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