urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
I have a friend who is something of a player -- had casual sex in high school, was resented by a lot of women as a ladykiller, accused of infidelity repeatedly in ways that may or may not have been true. Even as an adult, when I really got to know him, he had a new girlfriend every 2-6 months. He had an engagement that broke off not too long after I got to know him.
He apparently had created an OkCupid or Match or one of the other traditional online dating websites after the engagement broke off, didn't use it much, didn't find much going on there, and his story is that when he went to log in after months of not using the site, he had one match, who was like a 95% match or whatever that platform used to gauge compatibility and had messaged him, he messaged her back. Apparently she was an English evangelical (there are such a thing, apparently) in the United States as part of a religious choir.
About a year ago they got married in a Church of England parish. I heard the wedding party's trip to the UK was great, although we're really more distant from each other in the past few years as our lives have drifted so I wasn't part of that.
My joke is that the best people you can meet on online dating are people who have just arrived (and are freshly looking and hopeful) or people who are just leaving (because they've realized the specific platform or OLD as a whole aren't getting them what they want). Online dating just seems to suck for people who use it to try to find partnership, and anyone who 'goes native' on them is probably not a dateable person.
Likewise "girlfriend experience" is not named because it accurately portrays girlfriends IRL, but bevause it portrays how men would like girlfriends would act. Such conduct is not required to be prevalent among real GFs for the name to stay around.
Every serious girlfriend I've had has been like this -- I haven't had many of them, 3 or 4 I suppose if we're generous, but the experience isn't at all foreign to me and when I've been in relationships, the women I've dated have given every appearance that they've valued being this way around me, and we've enjoyed each other's presence because we cared for one another, made each other laugh, felt like the best versions of ourselves around each other. If that experience is as rare as you're suggesting, then swipe right on my profile and call me gigachad.
It's true that things like being able to be a provider, being a psychologically stabilizing in the presence of crises, and caring about her physical and mental needs to an intense and specific degree, are things that women care about in their partners in a way that men don't necessarily do about theirs. Even as stable and formidible a writer as 2rafa, when she talked about being engaged, described how wonderful it was that her fiancé remained calm and helpful even in moments of crisis. Women aren't quiet about this stuff, and it's not stupid or malicious that they value these things. Husbands and fathers exist because women, especially pregnant women, are vulnerable in moments of crisis, and men's adaptive function to hominid evolution was to protect them and provide for them.
But there's more symmetry, at least at a greater level of abstraction, there than you seem to be implying. Both men and women ultimately want a partner that cares for them as an individual person specifically, who pays attention to their needs, and supports them and roots for them when times get tough. Maybe that's not possible in the long term, I'll grant the manosphere the possibility of reasonable doubt, but my experience seeing my mother with my father, my grandmother with my grandfather, my friend's mother with my friend's dad, and my own experiences with women, indicate to me that it is possible.
It may be true that this is much harder to find in modern times, and I don't actually doubt this at all. But blowing it up into an overall model of human behavior given the WEIRD and unique and socially atomized nature of modern times is a pretty serious empirical error.
Gender asymmetry is built into every point of this debate.
It's true there's gender asymmetry, but gender asymmetry isn't malice in the same way that the fact that women menstruate and men don't isn't malice; it's just part of what the world is like for a sexually dimorphic mammalian species.
If you've ever been in online dating where you receive male attention, and I have, having explored in a bisexual phase, you realize pretty quick that a lot of male attention is low-quality not just in the sense that the men are basically normal, friendly guys who just aren't hot, or whatever, but that the men are simply just not great prospects under anyone's definition.
You'll get attention from 50 year olds, you'll get people who don't read your bio, you'll find a lot of guys whose profiles are basically "the worst possible selfie a human being has ever taken, obviously taken because the app asked, plus a bio that describes nothing about them." Oftentimes these guys will be aggressive, not even in a threatening way but in a really dumb way, like messaging you and then two hours later, after you don't reply, messaging "well it sounds like you don't actually want what you say you want, you jerk," like externalizing their frustration at one person who doesn't reply will somehow change their fortunes.
And that's not even an environment where the gender asymmetry you're talking about exists -- that's gay men, the most sex-forward group of human beings ever to walk the earth, and many of the same principles that women complain about encountering from men are present there in men looking for men spaces, too. This isn't really because men are horrid people or anything; it's just that the floor for men's attractiveness and basic social competence is pretty damn low, and because of the realities of the species men have to put some effort into being attractive, even to other men who are looking for men.
Complaining about that is of the same genre to me as women complaining about men not having to get pap smears -- your complaint is with God or Darwin or the universe as it exists, it's just what biology is, symmetry and equality was not evolutionarily adaptive. Feminists complain endlessly about the world not being equal for women, and the most confusing thing about the manosphere to me is that they copy them: yes, men and women are not biologically equivalent, them's the breaks.
But also, the main reason that many women don't like dating apps is their perception, which is not without evidence, that a huge number of men are looking ultimately to play the field and not commit to a particular woman. This is a gender asymmetry that resolves in terms of men not looking so great on the LTR-orientation front, and it too has its deep connections to evolutionary biology.
If you tell me the idea of a harem of beautiful women has never occurred to you as compelling because you're just so LTR-oriented and the picky dating app women just can't see that, well, I don't believe you. The thought's in my heart as much as yours, and if we want to be brutally honest about gender asymmetry we have to acknowledge the male desire for polygyny, and the fact that a massive number of men -- both hot and frumpy, rich and poor -- would take the option given the means and opportunity. If we're allowed to question seriously women's 'wonderfulness', then questioning men's 'wonderfulness' is also fair game.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
I'm sorry to hear that you're struggling. Dating is genuinely hard these days, and I'm not denying that -- I just think that the imputation of active malice to women is factually incorrect. Women, particularly the ones you'd most want to date, aren't really implementing a strategy, just flailing around, being lonely or platonically satisfied by friendships, inconsistently trying to date in a world that provides them little guidance for how to do it right, and not succeeding in their own ways. The manosphere, for all it says about women, persistently overestimates female competence at dating-as-a-strategy in ways that are, mildly speaking, kind of funny.
This is particularly true when we're talking about women in their mid-twenties and above -- most women who are serious about dating, driven towards marriage, and don't have baggage pair up sometime in college, and so it gets harder and harder to find people who are both serious and driven the older you get.
And that's why its so odd, if women don't want to be on dating apps like you say, that they also don't like to behave in the ways that would actually lock down a partner, but instead make the process painful for both themselves and the men they encounter, for no apparent gain.
Well, the thing is the women I'm talking about actually just flat out aren't on dating apps, for the most part -- they're single, often don't know why, often are addicted to their phones or to TikTok, often feel like they're missing love in their lives but may never have experienced real love that is transformative in the way love is transformative. They're not implementing a strategy because, to a lot of women, implementing a dating strategy is itself a form of humiliation -- not because they hate men, but because thinking about love strategically is exhausting, and adversarial, and women by and large actually don't want dating to be exhausting or adversarial. What they want is often a deep and individualized kind of passion where they feel like they're finally seen and acknowledged as a person worth knowing deeply and intimately, and dating is as much a minefield of navigating people who claim to offer this but have a knife behind their backs for women as it is for men.
They don't want to end up in a place where they feel adversarial about dating in the way you feel adversarial about dating, and they have plenty of examples of how women can go that direction and they don't like it. They'd rather hold on to their feelings that love is real and beautiful and transformative while not having it, than face the brutal world of dating as an adult and have those hopes dashed or violated or taken advantage of. This doesn't work out for them, and it works out even less for men, but it's what they're doing and because the world is more socially atomized than ever, it's easier than ever to end up alone, only dragged out of your house occasionally by a group of friends, and without any tools or frameworks to understand what adult intimacy is and how you pursue it.
Sometimes women will create a dating app profile for a couple weeks, the process feels painful and the sorting through many options -- rather than feeling validating or empowering, as men often imagine -- puts a woman who really doesn't want to instrumentalize and reject en masse human beings, in a position where she has to do that. She is not having a good time. She is having a specifically bad time. And the women who experience this as a good time -- and such women do indeed exist -- are the very women you don't want to touch with a barge pole.
Moreover, because the men are hungry, she feels like one cute face among many, not like a person who is ever actually seen or acknowledged as an individual person in her own right, which is the basis for women's intimacy with men. They would rather remain alone, hoping for the unmediated connection of twue wove, than become the kind of person who pursues love strategically and thereby (in their understanding of the world) makes themselves unable to receive it authentically.
So, you're right. A lot of single women act very strangely, without a strategy, often in ways that make life harder for her and for the men she sees. But there really isn't much of a voice for giving women real and useful dating advice in our culture. "Just be yourself," is bad advice often given to men, but women often receive their own kind of bad advice, like "Know your worth," or "don't settle," which equally mean nothing. Being specific and useful to either men or to women requires a kind of honesty about dating and romance that is painful for both sexes, and nobody really wants to go down that road unless they have to.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
What's interesting is I think women know (or ought to know) that this is a male desire/fantasy, you can find certain genres of softcore porn that emphasize the woman being pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a guy with sexual desire as an undertone. The blackpill is that you can easily get a woman to act this way if you pay for it directly in hour-long increments. Which tells you both that many women don't want to act this way for a man, naturally, and perhaps worse many are able to convincingly fake it anyway.
You’ve just described a long-term relationship. The relevant porn term is “girlfriend experience,” because this is what a loving girlfriend is like.
Women certainly don’t want to act this way for any man, just for a man they’re in love with. It’s true that women who are ‘playing the field’ and aren’t ready to settle into an LTR are noncommittal and ready to swap out — but so are men who are trying to play the field.
The saving grace for men is that most women aren’t actually looking to play the field. It looks like it, especially when you look at the population of women on dating apps, and particularly hookup-oriented dating apps. Those women, of course, are looking for hot men who are good at sex and make the on-ramp to a sexual encounter thrilling and socially permissible.
But the same statistics that show that also show that their absolute number is low, especially compared to the men looking for the same thing. Most women don’t want to be on dating apps, and most would consider joining one to be an admission of failure, an unacceptable stranger danger risk, or at the very least massively overwhelming with low-quality attention in a way that’s uncomfortable and hopelessness-inducing, not validating. These are the actual feelings the average woman feels about dating apps, not something they’ve made up to mess with guys.
I guess sometimes I read discussions from guys on what women are like in dating and I wonder if anyone’s actually been in a reasonably-healthy LTR. Most women want to be what you’re describing, but only with a man who she feels gives the same to her.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
I think that’s exactly right. The canon wasn’t a huge deal, people had arguments over it, various books were read liturgically and some weren’t, Jerome had opinions but translated most books to latin when he was asked. Ultimately figuring out a solid canon wasn’t a priority in antiquity, they were far more concerned with Christological debates. They were interested in what the Word of God was, not what the Word of God was.
The last point of appeal for doctrine was a church council, local or ecumenical, and so having a definitive selection of canonical texts in an exact, harmonized critical version was more of a hobby of Jerome than a church-wide project. He was influential, of course, and it would be fair to say that the entire history of Western theology of the canon is a debate over how to read Jerome in much the same way the entire history of Western soteriology is a debate over how to read Augustine.
But putting an exact number on the canonical texts didn’t become a major issue until the Latin church and Orthodoxy drifted apart and tried to hammer out differences, finding that the Vulgate and the Septuagint had different OT texts. But this was in the background, massively, compared to the question of the authority question, particularly about the Papacy. The Orthodox counter position to the Papacy was “we have the Sacred Tradition” not “we have the Holy Bible.”
When Protestantism came about and placed the highest of premiums on Scripture as the place of final appeal, it became urgent to have a solid OT canon — the authority question moved in one sense from “which councils are ecumenical and which bishops are ecumenical” to “which texts are authoritative and which readings are divinely inspired.” The only texts accepted absolutely universally and available in original languages were the Hebrew edition books, and of course the fact that Judaism had a harmonized edition in the Masoretic text made it widely available. So this became Protestantism’s alternative to the Papacy as a source of authority.
There are some things in the books of the Maccabees that could look like the intercession of saints if you squint, and there’s some level of arguments about that.
But also, the main difference in the OT canon is that Protestantism ended up holding as canonical only the books that were known to the 16th century in Hebrew. At that time, Tobit, Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom, etc were known from ancient sources only from the Septuagint, which is of course the Greek Hebrew Bible known and used by Hellenistic Jews in the first century, including many Christians. It's important to note that the Septuagint (the 70, for its 70 translators) was the book referenced by New Testament authors, and the quotations from the OT in the NT demonstrate its textual differences from the Masoretic texts.
It’s also relevant to note that these books known in Hebrew were the precise ones that made up the Masoretic Text of Judaism, as rabbinical Judaism had gone through its own winnowing of the Biblical text and these books were available in Hebrew principally because Judaism had preserved them. Many Protestant Biblical translations are based on the same Hebrew texts used by Jews. They're numbered differently, but the texts are often the same.
Because Protestantism included a strong belief in going back to the sources, the availability of these books in Hebrew from Jewish sources made them the natural starting point, and thus the Protestant Bible ended up with only the 39 books that could be sourced in Hebrew.
This was not a unique concept of Protestantism, and Jerome's Latin translation, the Vulgate, regularly referenced the Hebrew texts in addition to the Septuagint, a principle for which he was sharply criticized by contemporary Christians who held the Septuagint to be, itself, strictly canonical. That said, there is a long custom of seeing the books totally unavailable to the ancient world in Hebrew as part of a different category than the Hebrew-available books. Protestantism didn't invent this. Jerome himself had complicated views on the Old Testament canon, and in particular thought that including the non-Hebrew books in the text was harmful to Christian dialogue with Jews, and that founding doctrine on these books was questionable. He was incredibly controversial in his day for his views on the canon, but in many ways his views do approximate the views of more "apocrypha-friendly" Protestant churches, though he quoted the extra books with great frequency and respect, as did Luther, occasionally. It should be noted, of course, that when Jerome was questioned by other Christians for his views on the canon, he stated firmly that if a Church authority contradicted him, he would accept the judgment of the Church.
Because some of the readings of the Septuagint lend themselves to a Christological interpretation of the messianic prophesies more than some of the Hebrew readings (Isaiah 49 is an infamous example), it was a not-infrequent accusation among early Christians that the Hebrew texts used by post-second-temple Judaism had been altered from the originals as a manner of deflecting from the application of these texts to Jesus of Nazareth. Archaeological study has shown that there was a considerable diversity of Hebrew texts in ancient times and it's likely that both the Septuagint and the texts that would ultimately become the Masoretic Text were pulling from Hebrew sources of equal vintage and ancient authority. No modern Christian source informed on the matter would make an accusation of deliberate post-Christian defacement against the Jewish Tanakh.
I should also note that many of the books in what Protestants would call the apocrypha were not necessarily considered bad by magisterial Protestantism; it's just that they weren't considered authoritative for the establishment of doctrine.
A good example of the approach of magisterial authorities to them is found in the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles, which lists the Protestant canon of the Old Testament, and then states:
And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine
and then lists the extra books from the Catholic canon. I presume the justification for this choice was basically "all the good Protestants are doing it," based largely on the Hebrew Masoretic tradition custom.
That's not a massively satisfying answer to you, but as far as I know it just kind of... happened this way, and justifications were back-filled in to justify what was essentially a ressourcement movement that used the Masoretic Text as a basis because it was available in Hebrew. The Protestant take on this wasn't radical and wasn't new, but what was new was how firm Protestantism as a whole would ultimately take the rejection of the deuterocanonical books. It's one of the many areas where 16th century Protestantism and 21st century Protestantism are very distinct.
The truth is that, with the Old Testament, there really isn't a canon, other than the 39, and this is a reality that goes back to ancient times. Just about the only thing that can be conclusively said by the Christian tradition is there are between 39 and infinity texts written at some point by Hebrews under divine inspiration.
What were the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches using instead of the Hebrew texts? Generally the Vulgate or the Greek Septuagint/Greek New Testament.
The Vulgate has a strong authority in historical Catholicism, and many of the canonical and doctrinal principles of Catholicism are based on its unique readings (for instance, 2 Corinthians 2:10 being translated roughly, "What I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the person of Christ", which relates to the doctrine of the confessor as being in persona Christi). It's also notable that the Catholic Bible does not contain the entire Septuagint, and Trent's formal holding of the Catholic canon did not include some books like the books of Esdras and 3 Maccabees.
The Septuagint and original-language New Testament have a privileged position in Orthodoxy, as the Orthodox churches (Eastern and Oriental) trace their theological lineage to the Hellenistic world, where ancient Greek was a sacred language. I have joked, considering the long history of the Septuagint's authority in Christianity and especially eastern Christianity, that in the same way many American Bible Churches are King-James-Version-Only churches, the Eastern Orthodox Church could be described as a Septuagint-Only Church -- don't be quoting the Vulgate or the Hebrew to them.
There is no good English translation that follows this mode of the EOC's Biblical canon, and "Orthodox Study Bibles" generally just launder a Protestant translation. I've heard, however, rumblings that there is a push inside the growing English-speaking Orthodox community to make a genuine Orthodox critical text of the Old Testament.
Various Orthodox Churches have various numbers of Greek books they add to the 'standard' canon, with the Ethiopian Orthodox famous for having a lot. This plays a very minor role in inter-Orthodox dialogue because the Biblical canon is not a first-order issue against the reception of tradition. It's also my understanding that many of the Septuagint's additional books have been found in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic as part of archaeological finds, but those are not considered authoritative in the churches that include them.
You asked about the New Testament, and I've been neglecting it thus far.
There are no canonical differences in the New Testament among mainstream Christian churches, which is nice.
Luther, particularly initially, pushed for some, and personally demoted the so-called "catholic epistles", which have nothing to do with the RCC and are called that because they aren't written to a particular group or individual like Paul's letters and were addressed to all Christians ("the Church Catholic"). Luther had a particular misgiving about the book of James, which he once described as "an epistle of straw", because of the way James 2 discusses justification. Ultimately he pushed James and some other books to an appendix, but his views cooled, and Lutheranism and Protestantism as a whole accepted them as fully canonical.
I'm unfamiliar with Luther having an issue with the book of Revelation/Apocalypse of John, and in fact Luther could be called the most creative interpreter of this text in history. Because the subject, to secular and serious Christian scholars, of the book of Revelation is the Roman Empire, the book makes frequent references to things that are intended in code to reference Rome, like the whore of Babylon being seated upon the "seven hills" which John wink wink nod nods to us in order to communicate this means the seven famous hills of Rome. Since Luther's project was to sharply criticize the Bishop of Rome, who of course resided in and ruled a meaningful portion of Italy from the very city of these seven hills, it was incredibly rhetorically useful to him to describe the Pope as the very "whore of Babylon" and the "Beast," and yes, the antichrist. Similarly, it was rhetorically useful of Luther to speak of Catholicism as "the Babylonian Captivity" of Christianity, in reference to the Old Testament event.
You can actually trace the history of 'modern' debates over the book of Revelation to these fierce disputes between Luther and the other reformers and Catholicism.
Ancient Christians were actually fairly slow to accept the Apocalypse as canonical, and it was in many respects the 'last' book of the New Testament to be fully accepted. This has a lot to do with its intense scenes, obviously coded nature, and cryptic predictions, which of course are the subject of considerable theological debate. It was, in fact, so slow to be accepted that the ancient calendars of Biblical readings still used by some churches like the Orthodox Church do not include it -- not because they reject it, but because they had a good rhythm going before it was universally regarded.
Ancient Christian sources reference it, and sometimes give their own interpretations that often rhyme with the later syntheses, but Revelation was not the subject of great theological debate in ancient Christianity and interpreting prophesy wasn't a matter of great import.
The claim of anti-Papal reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer that the Pope was the antichrist dropped a thermonuclear bomb in the middle of apocalyptic interpretation, and the Catholic Counter-reformation sprung into action, with many of the approaches to the book theologians recognize today -- futurism, amillenialism, preterism, etc -- being developed in response by Catholic theologians and especially Jesuits, to provide a coherent reply based on a fresh interpretation of Biblical prophesy.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
Is it really that disgusting for a straight man to think about having sex with a man?
Generally, yes.
At first yes, but you’ll quickly notice a massive drop in libido from the lack of testosterone. Then over the course of many months, maybe years, your sexual desires will likely start changing, you won’t be attracted to women the same way, you might even start to find men attractive. Going from 100% straight man to 100% straight woman is pretty rare but at least a point or two on the Kinsey scale is expected. And of course you’ll find the way you experience emotions is going to be quite different.
This is really fascinating. I've heard similar commentary online, but it's hard for me to imagine "finding the way you experience emotions to be quite different."
I also got the same kind of result on one of mine, selfmade must have some kind of prompting special sauce.
Apparently Claude decided the only thing it could say was, "mid-tier heterodox Substacker," and I don't know whether I should feel complimented or offended.
When I pushed it more, Claude says, Freddie deBoer or "Scott Alexander in a very different register than usual" which is kind of funny.
EDIT: I am not even recognizable enough to make the list apparently:
The prolific, recognizable-pseudonym Motte posters who write in roughly this register and length: FCfromSSC, Hlynka (deceased, RIP), 2rafa, KulakRevolt, TracingWoodgrains, Walterodim, Iconochasm, Ilforte/Dase, naraburns, DaseindustriesLtd.
The voice here doesn't read like Hlynka (more folksy, more religiously inflected), or Tracing (more journalistic and structured), or Kulak (more bombastic and right-coded), or 2rafa (more cosmopolitan/elite-signaling).
The combination of (a) male first-person sexual self-disclosure, (b) sympathetic-but-critical analysis of both feminist and redpill framings, (c) the schema/CBT vocabulary, (d) the willingness to call out predatory behavior in kink communities, and (e) the slightly weary "I've seen women who..." anecdotal register suggests someone who posts a lot about relationships, sex, and gender on the Motte.
My best guess: FCfromSSC or Iconochasm. If I have to pick one — FCfromSSC. The discursive paragraph structure, the heterodox-conservative-adjacent-but-not-quite framing, the willingness to take seriously both feminist and anti-feminist claims while critiquing both, the married-man perspective, all fit my impression of his posting.
Second guess would be naraburns.
Sorry you two. Also Opus apparently believes that Hlynka is dead. Pushing again, I made the shortlist, but it didn't catch me. I don't think Opus has a strong sense of my writing style.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
I had gotten it to either stop saying "goblin" or explicitly note that it was about to say it and avoid it, but now it's fully back to goblin mode.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
however, my previously reliable work computer has proven unable to handle even as few as 150 tabs without crashing ever since the company forced everyone to upgrade to Windows 11.
Wow, I thought I was a tab user. 150 tabs! My man!
And based on the other replies to my comment, sounds like 11 really did mess with a lot of people's performance. I had to buy a new PC for 11 so I experienced it as an 'upgrade', but Microsoft's ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is unmatched.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
I'm skeptical that it's massive, growing, or that common. I can understand why it feels that way, given the tendency for media involving this genre to end up shoved into random unrelated spaces, to be extremely off-putting, and to be hard to avoid without getting exposed to the off-putting parts.
But we don't see cuckolding or male humiliation overtaking a lot of more mainstream kinks, or even weirder kinks that act as sublimation of prohibited desire for sex, on sites specifically focused around fantasy.
I actually would say that the signs of the growth of this genre don't come from fantasy-focused sites -- they come from traditionally-vanilla sites where these kinks are gaining significant ground. As more and more men are addicted to pornography, which inherently includes the experience of watching a different man have sex with a woman, there's a strong current of shame and self-contempt that I see growing in the water supply. Coupled with the increasing sex gap and loneliness crisis, what's happening is that increasingly men feel that the possibility of sex is above them, that women in particular are 'above' them, beautiful but untouchable, and this psychosexual viewpoint, combined with porn, is corrosive.
When I say "influencers" I mean something more like "onlyfans creators" and "pornstars"; a growing genre of pornography, even softcore, is "woman berates you on camera for your inability to have sex with women," which as a sign of the times is something along the lines of the rivers turning to blood. Onlyfans creators are starting to turn to this, because the demand is there, and guys who pay onlyfans creators for the 'privilege' of indistinguishable nudes seem to me to have a sense of profound sexual inferiority, which belittling and humiliating femdom can and does exploit. The problem is that shame is being eroticized and sold back to the ashamed for profit.
I don't doubt that these kinks make up only a small percentage of the active, long-lived, and well-practiced fantasy scripts in kink communities, but my concern is about the metastasis into vanilla or mainly-vanilla spaces, where I believe these kinks do real psychological damage and contribute to significant shame.
There's a lot of psychosexually weird stuff that favors femdom. A bound sub is 'unthreatening', and there's a lot of reasons women find that a lot easier to get or stay in the mood. Bruises and cuts and piercings are a way of making a male sub 'yours, irrecoverably', and women don't have to be so possesive as to be mentally ill to want that. Chastity can be a way of making sure everything he does, he does for you, and then after-orgasm overstimulation can get a guy to do the funnest and most attractive motions imaginable. Pretty much every pegging top I've run into frames it as a trust and vulnerability thing. A guy in an uncomfortable pose that needs you to make control the situation... needs you, that's not rocket science. A leash is a fulcrum, a blindfold is a way to drive focus.
I'm not so vanilla as to be totally prudish, but I admit that reading this part made my skin crawl.
I guess reading about pure femdom gives me the same kind of heebie jeebies as when vanilla women read about maledom dynamics -- the whole thing just rhymes with "someone's being abused here, something bad is happening, get away from this as fast as you possibly can" in a way that strikes me pre-cognitively. I also don't know that I'd describe "I've cut you so you're mine, irrecoverably" as a not mentally ill cognition, but I guess at that point we're entering Szasz territory of debating what a mental illness is, and at the very least I simply believe that kind of thinking reveals a level of possessive that I can't pre-cognitively differentiate from predation. Your examples so alarmed my unconscious threat-detection system that I went into fight or flight.
Kink mismatches don't have to turn into something broken. The median form of #2 probably doesn't look like a big heart-to-heart conversation filled with therapy speak, but the boring 'hey, could we try X', 'doesn't tickle my pickle, but seeing what it does to you is kinda fun' is actually pretty enjoyable from the latter perspective, and while it doesn't necessarily turn into liking the kink on its own, for some people it can. The median form of #3 might not be 'real' domination in the same sense as someone that someone who had Feelings from the first time they saw a cartoon character tied to a railroad, but there's a lot of male subs for whom 'I order you to go down on me' is a not-that-briar-patch moment and it's a perfectly reasonable exchange for them.
I can understand this, and my point in the post was to assert that this is essentially what I think is the not-broken version of femdom. I suppose it's just a prior, or a psychological heuristic, for me that a woman who autonomously, on her own, developed the kink for domination is not the sort of person I would feel safe around. I also think #3 is much sadder than you're giving it credit -- it's not about "wanting oral sex and demanding it," but genuinely sad stuff, like a woman whose reddit post I once saw talked about how her husband calls her ugly and she was looking for "male submissives whose task it would be to praise me highly", which is all kinds of fucked up no matter where someone lands on kink.
In general, I find desires for domination to be deeply uncomfortable, and again I just can't differentiate them from predation. I can understand the masochism-pleasure-pain thing, and I can understand the "obedience as permission" thing, but what I find incredibly hard to understand is sadism. I hope I never understand it.
I do resent to an extent the fact that women I've dated have pushed me to accept those kinds of kinks, and it's a consistent thing for me that romantic, slow, intimate sex is what I enjoy and is memorable to me. Rough sex just doesn't even feel like sex to me, in a way that's hard to describe.
And I guess, to put it bluntly, "I enjoy the part of sex where I'm blindfolded and flogged," makes about as much sense to me as "I enjoy the part of the football game where the pitcher throws the ball at the batter" -- just seems like a category error.
What I’m looking for is a machine that can ideally simultaneously handle several open Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, image files, and PDFs, one or two PowerPoint presentations, an ungodly number of open tabs spread throughout multiple windows and likely across several browsers (including several active windows that are absolute memory hogs), a CAD program, SoundCloud, and a couple of other minor programs on a rotation basis.
These are completely understandable requirements, but I will note that I chuckled at your list -- Office documents and PDFs, along with even many browser tabs, are definitely a solid set of real-world work computer requirements, but they're also not that demanding. You could get away with a comparatively modest system for this, with some wiggle room for memory requirements. Then you had to throw a CAD program in there, and boy does that add considerable expense to what you need. But if that's what you need, that's what you need.
Right now is possibly the worst time of all times to need a computer upgrade, so I feel for you. Memory and solid state storage are at ludicrous levels, close to plaid. Unfortunately that means these are going to make up a much larger chunk of your costs than they ought to. My feeling is that 32-64 GB of RAM would be the target; I had a system with 16GB, and even without the CAD requirement it desperately needed a memory upgrade. My advice would be to go for a set of two 16GB sticks for now, which would put you at the recommended level for a lot of CAD software and gives you room to grow based on your needs.
The lower GPU requirements that gattsuru talked about are actually a blessing here -- that's another huge cost center, and you can shave some of the cash that gamers have to spend on graphics and allocate it to memory. Generally people doing CAD work would have a pre-built, possibly workstation-grade computer from a major manufacturer bought by their workplace as part of a large contract deal. Those are expensive because they're calibrated for businesses to expense them. I would not, in general, recommend a gaming-oriented pre-built for your needs, and I think your willingness to try your hand at building is the right call. You'll have to keep us updated!
I'll also join gattsuru in saying that unfortunately even in today's world a computer won't last 15 years, even if you spec it out. That's particularly true if you're doing CAD work or trying to keep up with the web.
And Microsoft might not even give you the option: my 9-year-old system works great, especially as I've continued to upgrade the memory and SSDs to higher-end components over the years, but Windows 11 cut off support for it. There are ways around that, but they're hacky and unofficial, and if you're using a computer for work you want it to work and be properly supported. Linux keeps it going though.
You shouldn't feel bad about your level of knowledge -- you have a great awareness of your needs, you can explain them well and in a way that makes it easy to understand and give advice, and you have opinions on the software you use for the work you do. That's solid.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
Well, the point of 'wordcel' is that it is pejorative, because the point is that being really good with words isn't really intelligence, particularly not in the sense that modern industrial-technical society requires. A person with brilliant mathematical intelligence but no interest or skill in writing, prose, word connotations, etc can make a pretty profound impact on society, and those skills can be quite remunerative. Someone with the opposite set of capacities joins the long line of people trying and failing to apply humanities-brained concepts to modern problems.
Typically, of course, verbal and mathematical/spatial intelligence correlate quite closely, and that results in brilliant mathematicians and physicists like Oppenheimer or Feynman or Einstein who could alter perception of the entire world based on pure mathematics, and then write beautifully about it. But that's not always the case.
I identify with the word in this sense: when I was administered a WISC test for gifted education when I was in school, there was a 25-point gap between my performance IQ and verbal IQ, in favor of verbal, such that you can calculate an IQ for me, but it would be extremely misleading. In almost all ways I am significantly worse off than if things were reversed. Society needs mathematical and spatial intelligence more than it needs verbal or linguistic intelligence. Especially now that language is the first skill to be obliterated by AI.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
I'm a little interested that you two still talk, but I guess you transitioned into friends towards the end.
Unicorn hunting/open relationships as a guy just insane juice-to-squeeze ratio unless you're really good at scoring casual sex.
Normally unicorn hunting describes a couple looking to date together/trying to put together an MFF threesome. If you were essentially in an open relationship and dating/hooking up separately... yeah, that's a relationship that was about to end.
Glad to know you embraced monogamy and cisheteronormativity. It exists for a reason.
Beans and cornbread are a common staple among the rural working class, as is chili.
Peanuts are also a common snack food, typically salted, although cashews and almonds are more popular outside of baseball games. Rasins have more of an age disparity, older people love rasins and dates, younger people don't. It's also a fact that American rasins and dates contain a lot of sugar, and the idea that eating rasins would prevent obesity is a bit silly.
Avocados have an association with urban liberals because they like to use it as a butter substitute to add fat to a sandwich or toast; outside of this usage, most Americans have had and enjoyed guacamole.
It's true that vegetables and even fruits are less common than they ought to be, but the cause of obesity has far more to do with sugary drinks, high fructose corn syrup in everything from ketchup to Wonder bread, and cheap, sugary snack foods than it does with the servings of fruit and veg Americans eat. It's an engineered problem of the palate.
Nail quality is also seriously affected by dermatitis and other skin conditions, and cases of atopic dermatitis and psoriasis are on the rise along with allergies. When my hand eczema was untreated and severe, one of the key indicators of the severity of the condition to my dermatologist was the pitting of my nails. There are lots of things that affect nail health; not all of them are class signifiers.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
13d ago
Oof. Unicorn hunting is its own bit of insanity, and it sounds like she's the one who pushed for it.
Do you feel regret when you see what she's up to, or is this an "I'm glad I dodged a bullet there" kind of a thing?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
I had an ex-girlfriend who ultimately had tastes way more hardcore than my own, but we dabbled a bit with the Feelds of the world whilst we were together and I've kept up socially with her since and she's been pretty open about what she's getting up to.
Were you unicorn hunting, or was this a "we're just looking around" kind of a thing?
This kinda thing is generally the best shot of 'single unaccompanied hetero guy getting to dom women he doesn't know'
I will say that the idea of a "BDSM hookup" is pretty ridiculous to me, much moreso even than normal hookups. I'd want to know a person pretty seriously before engaging in anything on this side of the asteroid belt of risky sexual behavior, let alone power exchange.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
Full service submissive exist, but they’re up there with findom subs and consensual cuckolds for rarity, having pretty esoteric hard nos, and for being overwhelmingly (cis) male.
I believe light maledom/femsub dynamics are on a continuum with normal heterosexuality, but extreme BDSM in general, and particularly femdom/malesub dynamics are disruptions that speak to fundamental psychological problems and not kink-as-play.
My crackpot theory is that straight male subs are driven by their actual schemas and beliefs about the world, not by raw sexual desire. Their submission fantasies are actually a means of separating themselves from their sexual desires, which they believe they aren't worthy to fulfill. Submission becomes a sublimation of the sexual into the enjoyment of denial. "I may not be worthy of having sex with a woman, but I can serve her non-sexual needs." "I may not be able to please a woman, but I can watch and faciliate as she is pleased by another man."
The 'upside' is that you're at least acknowledged by a woman, even if you're humiliated by it. But if your schema of the world tells you that you're unlovable and unfuckable, sexually worthless, then being humiliated by a woman is at least something, some kind of involvement with her, and that's better than nothing.
IMO, this is far, far more common as a fantasy or desire than the actual number of people practicing it, almost entirely due to the complete lack of female dominants.
Female dominants have their own problems -- one thing is there's like 5 of them for every 1 trillion men who want to find one. But also I believe that women who sexually dominate men are almost exclusively 1) mentally ill, and dangerous, predatory or 2) doing it because their male partner got them into it, and his enjoyment of it positively reinforced it or 3) into it because they actually want something else and they've sublimated that desire into dominance.
On #1, IMO, this is not the sort of thing you say at a dinner party, but I believe the majority of self-initiated female dominants are psychopaths, extreme narcissists, or in general people with serious mental disorders who see sexual domination as a power trip. They're often surprised at how low male subs are willing to go, and being able to push against boundaries and find nothing pushing back is the sort of thing that predatory people have always done. An uncomfortable number of female dominants are little more than Warren Jeffs in a dress.
Because of the dearth of female dominants, male subs are often desperate and willing to put up with almost anything, and this is a really, really bad posture to have when entering into a power exchange relationship. "Exploring this side of my sexuality is too dangerous given the environment" needs to be the fallback. But if people were able to do that with their sexuality broadly we'd live in a better world.
On #3, I've seen women who really just wanted to be in a mutualistic and affectionate relationship describe it as a "female led relationship", and their conception of this is literally "having a honey-do list" and "being the one who buys the groceries." I've seen women who simply wanted a man who admired them describe it as "femdom" because their husband called them ugly and they wanted a man she could order to call her beautiful. I've seen women who genuinely wanted a relationship in which she could expect an orgasm now and again describe this as "femdom," because her big idea was that she could order a guy to go down on her.
"Maybe if I get leverage over men and form a relationship in which I'm In Charge, then I can get what I want" is the logic there. In that sense I'm not sure that I can say definitively whether or not it's simply the same phenomenon as the redpill discourse, but from another angle. It's power relations as the resigned second-choice after affection and intimacy didn't work out.
And of course, the biggest portion of #3 is dominatrixes/'findom' 🙄 where "the thing they want" is simply money, and because there's far more demand for female domination than supply, money is a... workable selection mechanism and it's one that many men are willing to pay. Often for crumbs -- again, male subs are desperate, and the amounts of money men are willing to pay to be indifferently humiliated by a woman flabbergasts me. I read a story on the internet once about a mildly sexually traditional woman who got into doing paid femdom chats on the internet, was utterly disgusted by it, but kept going because she made wildly good money. The oldest profession in the world is quite remunerative.
Some bondage or dominance subs, the ‘narrative’ is just ‘oh no don’t make me do this thing I want but don’t want make myself admit’.
‘I’ve been a bad girl/boy/whatever’ is a cliche, but it’s a cliche that exists for a reason, and that’s to separate the blame from the responsibility. It literally only feels good if you ‘deserve’ it, or you want the release of anxiety from having fucked up and being ‘free’ of that, or it shreds something core to your identity and self-idealation.
I personally believe a big part of the large numbers of female submissives has to do with women genuinely desiring hot sex, but feeling ashamed of this, for traditional ('sex is sinful'), status ('don't be a slut'), and feminist ('male sexuality objectifies women') reasons.
It's hard to overstate how much of the past 20 years has been a sustained attempt at putting in the water supply a level of cynicism about women's sexuality re: men that competes with the Victorians in terms of how bad it makes people feel about sex. As a teenage boy, I actually believed women got exactly zero pleasure from vaginal intercourse -- not just that they typically couldn't have an orgasm from it, but that they genuinely felt nothing, it had no level of satisfaction either physical or psychological for them and they did it entirely because men made them do it, and then when I actually started having sex and she enjoyed it and said she wanted to do more of it I was utterly shocked. She was too!
It's also not hard to find women whose three extreme kink interests are exactly the same: "free use", breeding, and CNC. In other words, sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and rape. What are women desperately afraid of? What are the complaints we hear from women about their fears of men? They're afraid of being sexually instrumentalized ("objectification"), being stuck with a pregnancy ("deadbeat dad"/"men want to control women's bodies"), and rape, which of course needs no reference because its badness is clear.
IMO, I think this is another form of painful (and not always true) schemas about the world being sublimated into a kind of resigned acceptance, and therefore made in some way pleasurable or sought-out. These young women believe that the state of the world is such that all women can expect is sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and assault, and seeking out explicit BDSM relationships becomes a way of finding a man who will at least admit that's what he's doing, and provide a safe word escape route from the experience of being treated like a warm body by a man's sexual desire that wants nothing else from her.
It's "all sex is rape" being taken to its ultimate conclusion, formalized and made explicit, even to the point where a submissive woman's desire for sex is sublimated into it. If this is the dark and unforgiving world a woman lives in, and every man is in fact a rapist-in-waiting, then the only option available, unconsciously and psychologically, is to find one who will at least be nice about it.
I guess you can say I have ethical and psychological critiques of the kink community. I don't believe they're in general bad people (although predators love to wear the language of kink like sheep's clothing), but I do think there are unexamined psychological problems, pain, and mental illnesses that seriously affect the community and those deserve to be interrogated.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
I have no idea how it comes about, but I can say that as a boy I had conceived of very weird kinks despite not even having reached puberty and never having been involved in sexual activity. Puberty was less of a sexual awakening for me and much more of an "oh shit, I can ejaculate now, what is this crap?" moment.
Wherever kink comes from, my personal experience suggests to me that it has to be deep, deep down.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
17d ago
If we taboo the word “market value” and just call it “desirability in matchmaking”, would that satisfy you? The second sounds rather like something Jane Austen would propound upon.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
18d ago
The blue coastal elite men they desire are at the coasts.
Why can't I just find someone with an honest blue collar job that's not MAGA?"
“Coastal elite”
“Honest blue collar”
one of these things is not like the other
Everyone enters dating with various desiderata, and generally those work like Boolean filters at the acquaintance-to-dating stage: the ass man doesn't date any flat-butt girls, the lady who prefers brunets declines the blonds. That way, by the time you start bonding with somebody, you've presumably clarified that you do find them hot and you can focus on also enjoying their personality and connecting with them as unique (and hot!) individuals.
If you'd started out with this, I would not have posted my other reply, and if this is what you've been trying to assert all along, I retract my fangs. This sounds like we're in substantial agreement on the facts on the ground here.
The issue I still have, though, is twofold:
First, it seems to me that what you're objecting to is the word "market", and I worry you're importing connotations into this word that aren't there. Dating obviously isn't a commodities market, it's not about frozen concentrated orange juice, but there are other types of markets. The best version of economic modeling of relationships talks about them in terms of matching markets which line up perfectly with your model of desiderata and selection:
(1) People in the dating market are very different from each other. They have vastly different interests, locations, preferences, histories, cultures, physical attributes, professions, families, etc.
(2) What people look for in a romantic partner can differ dramatically. They might want shared or different interests, cultures, religions, etc. They might prioritize financial security or emotional vulnerability, etc. They might want to live in the suburbs or stay in the city, etc.
(3) People are (generally) looking for a single partner, rather than multiple (at least at a given point in time).
This is clearly a matching market, where the choices of an individual are heavily dependent on the choices of others.
So the idea that stating "dating is a market" means the person making the statement believes that relationships are a competitive optimization game simply doesn't hold water for me.
But in terms of Sexual Market Value -- well, even products that aren't raw commodities like FCOJ often reflect idiosyncratic and unique preferences, yet a price for them can still be set. The 'value' of something under orthodox economic models has to do with the amount people are willing to pay, which reflects, at its heart, how low the supply is, and how high the demand is.
I don't think Sexual Market Value, to steelman it in its best and most useful formulation, is about one person's assignment of a "raw fuckability score." It's not even, necessarily, about the 1-10 ranking system, or whatever. It's about how many people in the population, in the matching market that is dating, would find that an individual meets all their 'various desiderata' such that they pass the initial Boolean filter. The value of someone on the "sexual marketplace" -- or if you don't like that phrasing, let's taboo it and go with "matchmaking environment" -- is determined by how many people would consider that person a greater catch. Lower supply and higher demand -- understood here as being considered uniquely, highly attractive by a greater and greater share of the population -- equals higher value. It's a property of the matching environment, not a metaphysical ranking of human ontological worth.
What's the benefit of this "higher value?" More choice. More attractive partners. Better suitors. Obviously there can be downsides, particularly for women who can be faced with lots of attention they don't really want, but even in your own framing -- "people may have a vague sense that partners should "match" in their attractiveness level" -- being more attractive means you end up with a more attractive partner. The value of this goes beyond the purely puerile: any feature that makes a person of the opposite sex highly desirable to a large number of people, like being really sweet, or very caring, or having a great job or a home owned outright or a kind smile, increases demand, and increased demand means the competition for that person's hand is harder. This isn't even a particularly male thing to comment on -- read Jane Austen.
I'll also note that male attraction, even at this level of abstraction, simply works differently than female attraction -- it's not so much a boolean as it is a gradual scale upwards in terms of excitement and interest, with a floor set somewhere, there is a Boolean at the most basic level. I actually believe there's more to this in many women's psychology than you're letting on here; obviously Orlando Bloom is a more exciting catch for any woman than Frumple McFrumpelstein.
My other point is this: the reason you see men talk about Sexual Market Value much more than women, especially in environments like this, has to do with the fact that, for many men, clearing that first boolean hurdle is really, really hard. There are a lot of men, and I've talked with them on here, as have you I believe, who will state honestly that they want nothing more than to focus on the pair bonding and the faithfully loving and the enjoying of personality elements of dating, but they seriously struggle to get to that point because they can't find a woman who meets their boolean floor and whose boolean floor is met by him. Again -- matching market.
When men talk about "increasing their sexual market value," they mean doing things that will make them cross that boolean threshold for a greater and greater number of women, not because they want to personally have sex with all those women (of course, some do), but because they as individuals have desiderata and more attention means they have more of an ability to pick someone who actually satisfies those desires. This also means they will thereby have more of an ability to select a partner who doesn't present with red flags and can find someone that is a good match in terms of their personality and values. You need optionality to select well.
The default state for men is no attention, or very low attention, where you have only a small ability to actually select a person who's consonant with your personality, values, and yeah, sexual desires. That makes it hard, and the ability even to try and choose a good partner from a set of suitors is a luxury a lot of men are locked out of. Many of those men end up in loving relationships with women they care for a great deal, but some also end up in terrible relationships with women who have problems or don't treat them well, and without the ability to meaningfully choose you end up either taking who makes herself available or you die alone. I get the sense that for a lot of women, dying alone is preferable to shacking up with a bad guy, and I can certainly see why, considering the possibility of "a bad guy" being pretty damn bad, but men actually do love women and they don't want to die alone, which obviously isn't the ideal for anyone.
So of course there's status panic -- dying alone is pretty low-status and sucky, and ending up with someone you don't care for and aren't attracted to, which is the other alternative, is also pretty low-status and sucky. The 'third way out,' is, of course, becoming more attractive to a greater number of women, to wit, increasing your sexual market value.
You're criticizing guys for saying things that aren't consonant with 'stage two', but many are just trying to succeed at 'stage one,' where their raw sexual attractiveness and that of the people they're trying to attract -- in terms of how valuable they are as a potential partner to them -- are highly relevant features of your experience. Some on the motte would of course charge you with despising these men for their pathetic unattractiveness and laundering this disgust through rationalization, but I've seen you extend charity to guys who admit their struggles enough times that I extend you the charity of simply believing you don't realize the gap.
Yes, it's icky to think about relationships this way. Yes, this should very much not be the end-all-and-be-all of someone's approach to dating and intimacy. Certainly no one should be considering marriage based on SMV, but I fail to see who exactly in this conversation said you should!
But the analytical and practical utility of at least sociologically modeling relationships as a matching market outweighs that it feels bad. And I don't advise that people talk about it in mixed company, or make decisions on the important things in their life based on it. Pair bonding is more important.
Stated properly, the model does real work, and it impoverishes our understanding of what's going on in society to taboo the concept.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
I kind of get what you’re saying, but your wording is a bit freeform so I’m having trouble following you.
I think what you’re saying is, “women don’t engage with this framing because it has a bad reputation and will pollute you with it, even if you engage with it, it couldn’t affect your behavior much because you’re already doing what you can to be attractive and your standards aren’t a matter of choice so it doesn’t give you any new information, and the view talks about people’s relative status and that’s painful to talk about.”
Yeah, if that’s what you mean, that’s a solid explanation. I think the truth is that people generally understand the things about SMV on an intuitive level, and discussing it explicitly just feels too painful or too impersonal or too abstract in a way people don’t really ever apply to the things that worry or concern themselves the most.
In private, with trusted friends, of course people discuss harsh things about attractiveness and dating sometimes. But discussing gender issues in mixed-sex company is like discussing feces at the dinner table.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
That’s fair, and pretty obvious. What someone chooses to say on a first date reveals what they think is high-status and interesting about themselves. If that for you is discussion of the dating market in analytical terms, that’s pretty sad and does say something about where your head is at. As I recall, I don’t know that any first date of mine has had much analysis of anything — I’m introspective but that’s not really first date material. I guess I would sometimes be philosophical, but in an upbeat way, about how I like to think about the world and consider the way the world could be improved and how people could treat each other better. That’s the right level of abstraction on my interests for early dating. But the best relationship I’ve ever had started with me in full public speaking about ideas mode, I chalk this up to a rare alignment of the stars. (Astrology on a first date is also a red flag.)
But I don’t think OP was trying to discuss it on dates, as he said, but with friends. But it’s not really light friendship material either. You have to really know someone and they have to either be a high decoupler as someone else said, or you have to have a really good reason to bring it up. Same-gender friendships are more constructive for it than opposite-gender ones.
Thanks for the substantive engagement. I had to reflect on it.
I'm not the biggest fan of tattoos in the world, but I'll admit, a tasteful, discrete couples tattoo is up there with "Baptizatus sum" in terms of tattoos I could respect. I think it's a silly idea, because that's a dangerous thing to mark your body with given the possibility of divorce and it tempts fate, but you know, I don't totally hate it.
And on reflection, I actually don't think it's the possessiveness of it that makes this concerning to me. It's the bodily harm element. I suppose I have what the kinksters would call a 'hard limit' for bodily harm, weaponry, cutting. I also understand there's a big thing in the kink world where people get bruised up and it's a point of pride, and I find that hard to think about. I guess I understand a little redness on the butt if you're into spanking, but when hematomas get involved I'm extremely squicked. I have a slight impulse to use the "I think X is good, actually" meme here, and I guess I'll just say it: "I think people leaving the bedroom uninjured is good, actually."
I actually find possessiveness, when it's mutual, hot and one of the more fun aspects of a monogamous LTR. So the fact that that women into cutting men with knives aren't actually that posessive is actually a disappointment, in one sense, to me. And if they're not particularly possessive by the standards of women, that in a way contributes to my point: that to act this way towards a man creates distance between her and him, in a way that may make actual long-term committed love psychologically improbable.
I guess I'm very skeptical of most means of social control, and I have a bit of that libertarian "ThIs Is My LaNd!" energy in me, where I imagine myself in the place of someone being sexually dominated in the way you're describing, and the visceral reaction is "get the hell away from me." I control me.
So it's not possessiveness as much as it is control that I find uncomfortable; possessiveness in the mutual self-gift sense -- "I'm yours forever, you're mine forever" -- is the most romantic thing in the world. But when it gets to, "I have placed a locked device around your member so you do things for me" it just activates primal bodily defenses. Partly because it's just weird, and partly because it's not mutual.
What strikes me, I suppose, is that "we're together forever" is a good impulse for a couple to have, and it would be great if we had a major social institution that could ratify this formally so people don't have to rely on tattoos and piercings to accomplish it. We could keep the jewelry aspect. Maybe men in robes could officiate.
I guess what I'm saying is that, as a good socialcon, I have suspicions that maybe some elements of kink are post-sexual-revolution attempts to re-impose the compelling aspects of the tradition, and I worry it does so, but in a degraded form.
I'll cop to having had some fairly submissive fantasies from time to time, and if you
bound and gagged me andforced me to take the BDSMtest honestly at gunpoint, I think you'd see me ending up on that edge of the spectrum pretty decisively. If this is what you've been suspecting all along, congratulations, I'll give you one Stanley Nickel.But I think what alarms me in reading your comment is how... alien, and potentially dangerous the 'dominant side' of these kinks are. As I said before, I flat out don't understand sadism as psychology, and I have a serious ethical worry that building out the neurological pathways associated with it, even as part of sex and role play, is a change in the person that leads to vice, not virtue. I just have no desire to 'control' people in the way you've described, and I guess I would find it fantastically hard to trust someone who expressed that sadism or that kind of intense control formed a part of their psychological makeup.
Moreover, I just have significant doubts that femdom/maledom dynamics can coexist with heterosexual love as I understand it. I just have a strong prior that small elements of disrespect in a relationship, which are behaviorally indistinguishable from some elements of femdom, will eventually bubble into large-scale conflicts and profound disrespect that will destroy the relationship. The kinkster claim is that the underlying psychology is different, even as the behavior looks the same, but that's what any apologist says about something that looks bad, and the internal psychological state of dominant women is invisible to me and it would take a very large mountain of evidence to prove it to my satisfaction.
It should be noted that our conversation here is taking place as part of a thread based on a comment that argues some elements of maledom BDSM are compelling to women because of a widespread female desire to submit to men in broad contexts. This is obviously the subject of intense and impassioned debate, but what is hard for me to deny is that maledom dynamics, at the very least, follow the gradient of standard heterosexuality in a way femdom doesn't.
A corrolary of this is that, to follow femdom dynamics where they lead, you must work against this gradient, and I have serious concerns that doing this would also work against the normal psychological gradients that keep men and women together.
I do my best to resist the blackpill, but there are elements of the blackpill I find at least somewhat plausible, and the risk of the blackpill being true indicates to me that the risk of these dynamics to heterosexuality is potentially ruinous. To use the language of the blackpill: saying that these dynamics don't utterly ruin and destroy heterosexuality is to say that women stick with betas, and in particular stick with them while holding them to be the primary object of their sexual interest. I'm just not convinced that it's possible for a woman to 'look down on' or 'control' a man sexually, while still loving him.
To belabor the metaphor, it's a hard pill to swallow, intellectually speaking. It's a nice thought, but I hold whatever fantasies I may have internally, because I just don't see a good argument for how they'd ever be treated with respect or understanding or desire.
I guess it's, again, my socialcon self showing up here, but I'm not sure my first description of it would be "a merely weird nonoptimal coping mechanism." I think what's being asked for is simply love, in its true form, and it's my opinion that making this a 'sexual ritual' -- or more particularly to what's going on, a ritual of control -- is a healthy response. But I also have a configuration of morals such that I hold even people in pain to an incredibly high standard of conduct.
And, as a hopeless romantic, I do have to admit I find it hard not to see a romance-shaped hole in every human heart, and configurations of intimacy that lack this, or seem to approximate it without fully reaching it, strike me as strictly worse than nothing at all. But this requires a pretty demanding set of metaphysics and morals to uphold, and I don't necessarily expect that people will find this persuasive even if I do.
Ah -- I think something got lost in translation here. What I mean is that I actually have felt pushed into being a 'dominant' partner with women before, and haven't liked it. Even if she enjoyed it a lot and demanded I do it more, I really didn't enjoy the part where her nipples ended up bruised or the nasty degrading names she wanted me to call her. It just doesn't feel right to me. Again, I like the version of sex where everybody walks away uninjured. I realize that puts me in a minority.
I admit that female sexuality includes a lot of these features, and I don't love it, really, but I've accepted that to get the companionship and intimacy that I want I have to pretend I enjoy domming from time to time.
No woman has ever offered to dominate me in any sense, and I don't know what I'd do if the offer were made.
I've experienced being on the receiving end of someone's dominant fantasy, in fantasy solely, but it wasn't a woman who did that, and I was alarmed enough by what they were saying that I got the hell away from them as quickly as possible. It hot for a bit, but I knew very quickly this person Meant Trouble.
I suppose the overall texture of my feelings about the kink community is that I just don't experience sex as an avenue of 'play' and identity shifting in the way they do -- as far as I'm concerned, sex is the most identity-relevant and immediate experience you can have, and it's been my experience that trying to shift it away from that identity and immediacy cheapens it, makes it less compelling.
I also find it very hard to participate in role-play and identity shfting in non-sexual contexts, and things like acting, ass-kissing, dishonesty, going along to get along, play pretend are all very difficult for me. I experience the world very immediately and very, perhaps the word is authentically? and I find it hard to put on airs. I just kind of am what I am. So perhaps I just have the wrong psychological configuration to find any of this comprehensible, except insofar as I've stated.
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