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?
13hr ago
Christians historically would have said this is a direct parallel to Eve choosing to eat the forbidden fruit. The Genesis narrative describes her being lied to by the serpent, but notably it also describes her making her own appraisal of the situation and making a decision: "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it."
The original sin is a free choice, and likewise the decision that leads to salvation has to be a free choice.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
Mandalorian and Grogu is currently doing worse than Solo, and is being beaten by a horror film. I agree with you. The sequels divided people, which was enough to cause people to lose interest in it, but now most of the voices who were defending them are quiet. Nobody cares enough to press the issue any more.
I recently saw an article in one of the geek publications where the author was like, “yeah, the sequels were inconsistent and undermined each other, but the people who say this was because of feminism are still misogynists.” I’ve never met someone who defends the movies. They suck. But cancelling them wouldn’t do much. The energy’s already gone.
There are two definitions of “manchild.” One is a man who doesn’t uphold adult responsibilities, sarker’s definition. The other is a man whose hobbies are considered childish or underdeveloped. I guess this is more the counterpart of Quirk Chungus or 5434a’s Disney adult.
The two are frequently conflated, sometimes by women as a justification for their ick at male hobbies like gaming or science fiction or LEGO, and sometimes by men as a dominance play against other men they consider beneath them because they indulge in said icky hobbies. Sometimes women will just use “manchild” to refer to a man who is emotionally underdeveloped, in whatever way she thinks he is, like in the Sabrina Carpenter song.
All words with emotional valence eventually just become synonyms of “good” or “bad.” Manchild is one of them. We have plenty of female equivalents — “basic bitch” is one women like for the hobby sense, “foid” is closer to the Sabrina Carpenter usage as deployed by men. For the other equivalents used by men, read the motte.
I have mixed feelings about AI; I have concerns about it being used to automate military decisions that should require human moral judgment (the traditional Terminator-style concern over computer command and control), and also the potential for deepfaking and manufacturing false content to mislead or manipulate. The latter has already been used in new and more sophisticated scams, and I worry about what a nation-state-level actor could do with that kind of power. Economic disruption is there as a genuine possibility, and that's difficult, but I'd prefer if people expressed that possibility directly as a livelihood threat rather than trying to launder the (genuinely sympathetic) concern into environmentalism or moral grandstanding about human creativity or interpretations of IP law in which AI training is assumed-illegal.
I've rarely actually heard someone say, "I don't like AI because doing my job without it gives me satisfaction and a good-paying job, and the introduction of AI into the workplace makes me feel like I'm losing the livelihood I prefer." Instead, I typically hear things like "AI was developed by stealing the intellectual property of hardworking people in order to enrich the billionaires and ELON MUSK and DONALD TRUMP," part of the large egregore of "all my enemies are evil rich fascists."
People would rather be angry than admit vulnerability. Our discussions over issues of social importance would be strikingly improved if people were willing to admit when their principles are self-serving -- which there's nothing wrong with, everyone deserves to advocate for themselves -- instead of trying to convert everything into an argument in which justice, law, the hand of God, and the long arc of history all militate against whoever you think is opposing your interests.
I don't agree with the environmental or land-use concerns for the most part, and it strikes me as degrowth corporate-hate and NIMBYism rather than principled objections. Energy use is not automatically immoral. I'm disappointed in the ways in which AI's demand for silicon is draining the consumer market of computer components and I worry about the impact on individual people's ability to control the means of technological production, but at least so far, this is offset to me by the increase in the ability to interface with computers using natural language.
The kind of generalized AI hate I see out there, online, occasionally in person, is hard for me to wrap my head around. I'm in the 10% of Americans who are more excited than concerned about AI. Generative AI has been great for me, in ways similar to what it's been for you. I enjoy using it. I get value out of it. I think AI slop memes are funny sometimes. I don't like when it's used to write personal messages or fill out marketing boilerplate copy, but I don't hate AI text as a general principle, especially if it's used to bolster and not replace human effort and creativity. And I dislike the invective and contempt that valid uses of AI generate in critics far, far more than I dislike the silliness or laziness of uses of AI that are in poor taste. That's the self-interested vulnerability of my own: I don't want a tool that has expanded my capability to become socially radioactive.
I don't know enough about AI to comment with any level of expertise on the research frontier. But I do have a skeptical prior towards the idea that this generation of AI will produce genuinely generalized AI that can meaningfully, affordably, and trustworthily replace human oversight. But we've gone farther with agentic AI use than I would have expected, so I might be wrong about that.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
“Tits out for harambe” has a kind of ring to it.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
I never really encountered this. It certainly wasn’t a sudden transition. My experiences didn’t change drastically when I hit puberty; women in authority liked me before, and liked me after. The girls didn’t pay me much attention before, but paid me a bit more attention after. My mom’s attitude didn’t get worse in any way. If anything, I felt my connections with women improved after puberty, but I also had a tough childhood.
I didn’t feel the kind of pressure you’re hitting at until I was around 24 or 25. Even then it was pretty light pressure. It’s fair that people have higher expectations for productivity, emotional control, and accomplishment for grown adults than for children.
So, I don’t know. I believe you and the tweeter are talking about a real phenomenon, and I’m aware of deeply misandrist women, even mothers, who treat their boys as dangerous rather than beloved once they reach puberty.
It’s true that there have been various times in my life where my negative emotion was seen concernedly in a way it might not have if a woman experienced the same thing, but this has always been defused by actually talking about it and demonstrating reflectiveness and control. I feel like every relationship I’ve had with women has rewarded my ability to communicate emotionally, and I do wonder where the gap is between my experiences and other male experiences sometimes.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
I recommend it, especially if you're interested in highly story-based games and enjoyed The Witcher 3. It's not the "be literally anything you want to be!" game that it was pitched as, but it's very, very good for fans of story-based games. The gameplay is also excellent, and I say this as someone who usually doesn't enjoy first-person shooters. You feel like your cyberware actually enhances your character, makes you more powerful. At a certain point in progression you feel invincible.
I didn't play until a few years after it came out, so most of the major bugs were ironed out. There are still lots of bugs, but they're manageable.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
Which is funny, because the CS/AI kit's big ML feature is just computer vision, a lot of it stuff that's been around for a decade in OpenCV. But that's why they've got the massive marketing team and I don't.
Everything is AI now. Searching a database? AI. Computer vision? Obviously AI. If-then statement? That sounds like a computer following a chain of logic, it’s AI. Everything and nothing is AI.
I guess when investment pushes into a particular area, the financial incentives push for dressing anything up as the area in question. Generative AI is genuinely a huge deal, but it’s expensive to actually invest in it, and substandard substitutes are eager to parade as the real deal.
I never got into the mindstorms stuff, and robotics isn’t really my thing. But I had followed it for a long time, and it’s genuinely strange to me that Lego moved to the “Spike Prime” thing and then cancelled it, too.
I’ve also read that there’s a big push for “AI literacy” in schools, and Lego may be trying to appeal to this curriculum demand with the new kit. I guess it just goes to show that everything has to have AI in it nowadays.
They’re making money hand over fist in botanical sets and pricey display models, maybe they think the robotics game doesn’t have high enough growth potential for their current business model.
But I’m still stewing over the death of Bionicle, and I think about Lego Universe every now again, so the LEGO Group’s ability to cancel iconic things without remorse doesn’t surprise me.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
There’s also the “tortured soul” energy of your examples — a werewolf, a vampire, and the beast are all cursed with an affliction that tortures them and separates them from the human. The women in the stories serve as a stabilizing force — in BatB, literally the lifting of the curse itself — that humanizes him.
They’re dangerous, but deep down, beyond the curse, deeply good. A man who gets passionate and heated, but can be calmed by a touch of his woman, is a pretty real scenario couples experience all the time. Everyone knows that guy who will start yelling about something, and his wife squeezes his hand, and he chills out.
For professional or semi-professional writing, that appears sloppy and unprofessional.
For personal writing, it makes no difference. Normies can't tell the difference between ASCII 0x2D (-) and Unicode U+2014 (—). Even when writing dashes with "--", I've been accused of being AI. The assumption among sophisticated audiences is that you AI-generated the text and then edited the characters you used to disguise it. And most people aren't so sophisticated that they're looking at detailed character codes, they see any writing with dash-separated clauses and they presume it's AI.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
Yeah, the em dash has been destroyed. It's infuriating, because there are so many sentences that are punchier with a dash thrown in.
I'm glad in many ways that I finished my bachelor's in a writing-heavy field before the advent of generative AI.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
If you manage to get a good mortgage in your 30s, you've found the pathway to being a boomer, sooner.
Thanks for the substantive engagement. I had to reflect on it.
Do these things strike you as wrong because of their motives, because of the degree of possessiveness, or because the actions don't fit your sexual register? Most women I've met into this sort of marking aren't especially possessive (for women, damning with faint praise as that might be by gay standards). Male impregnation kink (uh, straight or gay) can focus around the exact same 'we're together forever' now thing, as can just the 'fingernails down back' kink, or even people who get really worked up over giving hickies. Are couple's tattoos or piercings bad because they're Szasz-adjacent, or just because they're trash?
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 and forced 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'd like to think differently, but I don't know how I could.
Getting off on a merely weird coping mechanism feels more... nonoptimal? Inefficient? Getting into relationships where 'value my appearance' or even 'don't call me ugly' is a sexual ritual rather than just room temperature is a limiting factor because a lot of guys will genuinely find that goofy, but it doesn't mean you can't also have it as the room temperature outside of the bedroom (or the scene), either. But the asshole ex-husband caused the damage; this is just the repair work.
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.
I can empathize with the division: even as someone that likes subbing, it doesn't take much that doesn't fit the scene to break the mood, and I've experienced it. Dunno if it's as rough for me as for you, but it's definitely a difficult situation, and actually pushing back can be uncomfortable.
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.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
15d 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?
15d 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?
15d 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?
15d 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?
17d 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?
22d 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?
22d 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.
I looked up the second panel shown in your link. Is this supposed to be some kind of a cuckold thing? She's got an arm around her but Man Child is sitting on the couch watching.
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