FtttG
User ID: 1175
Isn't it a stereotype that the hotter a woman is, the less effort she feels that she needs to put into sex?
I've encountered this claim on many occasions. There's no way to express the following opinion without sounding like I'm humblebragging, so consider this an inb4.
I've had an unusually high number of female sexual partners, so my sample size is unusually large. Some of those I would consider quite attractive; some were "mid"; some were not even that; some I only had sex with out of sheer desperation at the tail end of a lengthy dry spell. If this claim has any truth to it, then in my fairly extensive sexual history I honestly cannot claim to have observed it. I've been with hot girls who starfished and passable girls who starfished; I've been with hot girls who were rearing to go and passable girls who were rearing to go. I think the best predictors of how enthusiastic a woman will be in bed are a) her basal sex drive (controlling for how long it's been her last sexual encounter); b) her sexual experience (everyone's a little shy and awkward their first few times; the trope of the pure virgin who's a demon in the sack during her deflowering only exists in porn) and c) how attracted she is to her sexual partner. In the latter case I'm thinking in particular of a girl with whom I had sex ~7 years ago, who did have sex with me but seemed of two minds about it. I imagine it would have been a very different experience if I'd been someone with whom she had more chemistry.
Frankly, I think this "hot girls are all crap in bed, while mid girls give it socks" thing is one of the purest examples of sour grapes in human history.
FtttG
2hr ago
I know you think you're being really clever by bringing up the Sequences, and that the answer to the question "is Bob a woman?" depends on the reason you're asking the question and what information you're looking to get out of your interlocutor.
But like, I've read the Sequence, I understand the argument Eliezer was making, and I still find gender ideology incoherent. Regardless of the question being asked, I cannot imagine a situation in which "Bob is a woman" would provide more information than "Bob is a male person".
And for someone so eager to tout the virtues of the Sequences as a tool for navigating the universe, it strikes me that there were two Sequences you conspicuously failed to internalise: "Categorizing has Consequences" and "Making Your Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)". We expect women to behave one way, and men another. A particular group of men (alternative phrasing: a particular group who would have historically been categorised as men) demand to be included in the category "women" instead. We observe that, along on a range of important axes, this subset of women behaves identically to the modal man. Does that not rather strongly suggest that this new category has been artificially gerrymandered, and does not in fact cleave reality at the joints? If you believe that all men who demand to be called women are women, but nevertheless expect them to behave exactly as men would, can you really claim that your belief (that these men are really women) is paying rent in anticipated experiences (therefore, these men will behave much the same as I would expect a modal woman to behave)?
The ones that, if you don't know her very well, and aren't being hired for purposes involving her body, are any of your business.
What? I literally don't understand what this means.
"Bob is a woman for most purposes."
"Well, here is a list of the most pertinent ways in which women differ from men, or in which society treats female people differently from male, none of which are applicable to Bob. How, then, is Bob a woman?"
"None of your business."
Legitimately – what the fuck does that even mean? You're saying I have to treat Bob like a woman because he demands it, but if I express the slightest curiosity about how, exactly, Bob is a woman, you accuse me of invading Bob's privacy? I'm just supposed to take it on faith that Bob is a woman "for most purposes" (none of which he cares to enumerate) and should be treated accordingly? Wow, I can't imagine how this policy could be (has been) exploited by bad actors.
An individual is responsible for what they, personally have done; they are not responsible for what they are capable of doing but haven't done, or what people who share characteristics with them have done.
With respect: bullshit. Not only does this not describe how anybody lives their life, not only does it not describe how anyone should live their life – it doesn't even describe how you, personally, live your life. You literally aren't following the moral principle you demand everyone else follow.
When you are walking down the street late at night, and you pass a drunk person acting aggressively, I'm going to hazard a guess that the size of the berth you give them depends heavily on whether they're male or female. You do this not on the basis of what they, personally, have done (you don't know if they have a criminal record, they're a complete stranger to you). You do this on the basis of: if they're a male person who gets in your face and tries to hit you, if they succeed, they will do a lot more damage than if they're a female person.
Another example. If you're not the parent of a small child, imagine that you are. You need to leave your child alone for an evening, your child is too young to be left alone, and none of your friends or family are available to look after the child. You put up an ad saying you're looking for a babysitter, and receive two applications: a fifteen-year-old female, and a fifteen-year-old male. (If you like, the fifteen-year-old male can claim to "identify as" a girl, but still has fully intact and function male genitalia.) You aren't allowed to learn anything else about the applicants other than their age and sex. Who do you hire?
Am I wrong about any of the above? If not, I'm dying to hear your explanation for how you aren't a complete and utter hypocrite.
this is dependent on the axiom that the well-being of individuals is the measurement of ethics
My worldview is also dependent on that axiom, and a related axiom that not all harms are created equal. In order to prevent harm coming to their children, it makes sense for parents to hire babysitters who are not members of the demographic responsible for the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults of children (not to mention penetrative rapes, given that this demographic is the only demographic capable of penetratively raping others with anatomy alone). I do not dispute the fact that it's upsetting for the sexually well-behaved members of this demographic to be denied employment opportunities on the basis of traits they have no control over (although most of them are mature and empathetic enough* that they can eventually learn to understand why parents are more willing to leave their child alone with a female stranger than a male, without throwing a tantrum about being the victims of sexist discrimination): I just think that the amount of mental distress caused is infinitesimal compared to the amount of mental distress caused by a child being sexually assaulted or penetratively raped by an adult male. It's a trade-off I am perfectly willing to make (along with virtually every other reasonable adult), basic utilitarianism. I think it's frankly disgusting that you're invoking the historical example of marital rape when the policy you're advocating is a rapist's credo. If parents legally could not take "candidate's sex" into account when hiring a babysitter, can you envision any scenario in which this wouldn't result in tens of thousands of additional child rape victims every year? If so, how?
But you don't dispute that: you just think a man's right not to feel sad supersedes a child's right not to be physically violated by his or her guardian.
You still, still, still have not answered my question on whether "gender identity" is innate or not. Gosh, I wonder why.
*A category which includes me but, apparently, not you.
No, if she identifies as a woman, she is a woman for most purposes.
What "purposes" are these? Not physical strength and speed; not aggression; not propensity to commit assault (including sexual assault); not absence of the male reproductive organs (as previously established, only 5% of trans women undergo bottom surgery); not the corresponding ability to rape and impregnate female people; not the corresponding ability to infect others with STIs; not likelihood of being a victim of sexual assault; not ability to bear children; not menstruation; not likelihood of suffering from assorted medical conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, uterine cancer and so on; not likelihood of holding typically female interests (indeed, the overwhelming majority of "trans women" I know hold stereotypically male interests like math rock, D&D and video games); not likelihood of being sexually and romantically attracted to male people only (it seems to be a toss-up as to whether "trans women" are heterosexual or homosexual males, and female lesbians have been complaining for decades about how many lesbian spaces have been effectively colonised by "transbians" i.e heterosexual males, many of whom don't even make the most token effort to pass).
Once you subtract all of those, I'm genuinely curious which "purposes" are left by which a "trans woman" can be considered a woman. This really seems like a "what have the Romans ever done for us?" situation. When trying to predict how a trans woman will behave or what life experiences they will have, for what purpose does their maleness provide worse predictive power than their "identifying as" a woman? I've interacted with far more than my fair share of trans women in my life, some of whom had gone to significant lengths (up to and including medical interventions) to modify their appearances to more closely resemble a typically female one. At no point did I ever experience a subjective sensation that I was talking to a female person: 100% of the time, I felt like I was talking to a nerdy man who expressed himself exactly as I would expect a nerdy man to, and who had all of the interests and habits of mind expected of a nerdy man, coupled with an incidental fondness for cross-dressing (and sometimes not even that). A subset of these trans women barely even pretended to hide how pornsick they were (outside of pornography, female women do not typically walk around wearing t-shirts with "CUM SLUT" emblazoned across them) or their unabashed hatred for female people, but that's beside the point.
You also haven't answered my earlier question as to whether "gender identity" is a trait just as innate as "sex".
Here's why it didn't get much press coverage:
- Based on their names, at least 24% of the perpetrators were of obviously Arab descent (hence likely Muslim), despite Arabs representing 7% of the French population. In this regard the case is a bit like France's small-scale answer to the grooming gangs scandal.
- Contrary to your claim that the perpetrators came from "all walks of life" and represented a cross-section of French society, they were in fact overwhelmingly from working-class backgrounds (if professions like canteen worker, car mechanic, farmhand, mason's helper, supermarket receptionist, construction worker, factory worker, video rental shop owner, soldier, restaurant manager, construction worker, truck driver, firefighter, forklift driver, delivery driver, carpenter, electrician and food processing worker are any indication).
"Woman gang-raped by scions of the wealthy elite" is a man-bites-dog story that woke journalists can't get enough of (see Epstein's island, "A Rape on Campus", the Duke lacrosse scandal, Brock Turner – I posit it's not an accident that two of those turned out to be completely made up). "Woman gang-raped by working-class men, many of them first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants from Arab countries" is a dog-bites-man story, in addition to being profoundly dissonant with the woke worldview.
It also explains why feminists don't want to talk about it, as most modern feminists have been so compromised by intersectionality theory that they can only conditionally agree with a statement like "rape is bad" after they know the ethnicities of victim and perpetrator. Following the October 7th attacks, a popular slogan highlighting this hypocrisy was "#MeToo, unless you're a Jew". To be more exacting, I think the modal Western feminist is functionally operating on the principle "#MeToo, unless your rapist was a man of colour" – less pithy, admittedly, but more precise. Liberal feminists simply do not want to acknowledge or pay attention to sex crimes committed by Arabs, Pakistanis, immigrants etc. for fear of "giving ammunition to the far-right". They especially don't want to discuss the possibility that men from such demographics commit a disproportionate amount of sex crimes, and that there might be cultural reasons for this (as certainly seems to have been the case with the aforementioned grooming gangs scandal: I've read some articles claiming that, within Pakistani culture, a married Pakistani man raping a white British teenager who "dresses like a whore" is not even seen as adulterous).
The US is not unique in this regard, even among developed Western nations. There are parts of Dublin where public bus drivers simply won't stop because the risk of being assaulted by the (overwhelmingly white and native) underclass is too high.
FtttG
23hr ago
Oh I'm aware. I was just under the impression that The Stand was widely considered King's masterpiece, as opposed to IT.
FtttG
1d ago
I wonder to what extent he consciously wrote his magnum opus in imitation of LOTR.
Do you consider IT his magnum opus? In On Writing, he bemoaned the fact that The Stand is widely considered his best work i.e. he did his best writing 22 years earlier.
FtttG
1d ago
So you think a male person can flip back and forth between being a woman and being a man, purely depending on what clothes he's wearing at any particular moment?
I'll say the same thing every gender-critical feminist I know has said at one point or another: femininity is not just a costume to be put on and taken off at will. A male person does not become a woman just because he's wearing a dress and makeup.
FtttG
2d ago
Do you think it's bad that female people look at male people and correctly infer that they are male?
FtttG
2d ago
Every time I see a section of a brick-and-mortar bookshop called "booktok" I cringe.
I've heard of video games that include a little notice at the start inviting the player to stream the game on Twitch, which strikes me as tacky in the same way.
FtttG
2d ago
And it has an obvious limitation for the small subset of "active shooters" who are ideologically motivated (Brenton Tarrant, Omar Mateen, Anders Behring Breivik). As loathsome as these men were, at least they had an ethos.
I agree, all of the terms used in this debate have far too many degrees of freedom. You'll see a headline like "there have been 100 mass shootings in the US this year!" and then you dig into their data and you find that they're including gang violence, or four morons messing around with guns and accidentally shooting each other non-fatally. Or a headline like "50 school shootings this year" will include a drive-by shooting in which no students or school employees were shot, but which incidentally happened to take place within a 250-yard radius of a school and so technically qualifies as a shooting "in or near a school".
The people writing these headlines know full well that, when they say "mass shooting", everyone thinks of Pulse nightclub or Stephen Paddock; they know that when they say "school shooting", everyone thinks of Columbine or Virginia Tech. We need a specific term of art for these kinds of events (in which a lone-wolf nutter seeking personal infamy shoots up a location more or less indiscriminately), which excludes gang violence and accidental discharges. For awhile it seemed that "active shooter" was going to become the preferred term, although this one strikes me as even more vague than "mass shooting": anyone who is currently firing their gun could be accurately described as an "active shooter", regardless of whether they're Eric Harris or a gangbanger.
FtttG
2d ago
If I were to claim that I was entitled to know any other aspect of your medical chart, on the grounds that it is statistically correlated with propensity to commit assault, most everyone would agree that I was out of line.
Hard disagree. Adults applying for roles in which they are responsible for safeguarding children will often undergo vetting regarding aspects of their medical history which might make them improper candidates, such as submitting to drug tests. I don't think the claim that a person who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia or psychosis is an improper choice of guardian would strike "most everyone" as unfair.
However, this does not mean that one is entitled to know whether their deductions are correct, nor that they ought to be brought up in polite company.
Just so we're clear: the overwhelming majority of humans on this planet have zero problem, none, with people correctly pointing out that they are an individual of [sex], and that this trait of theirs has predictive power in an array of different domains. Maybe you'll say that these people are brainwashed by false consciousness and that in the post-gender utopia they'd realise how strange and inconsistent this was, but it's simply a statement of fact that most people really do not have any problem with this. Demanding that we change our entire society from the ground up, the inferences we are permitted to draw about each other, how we communicate with one another, how we refer to third parties in their absence – all to appease a tiny minority of extremely strange, emotionally stunted people, who are driven to tears and death threats by banal statements of fact like "as a male person, you are stronger than most female people". I'll reiterate: this set of policy demands would be totalitarian if it wasn't so farcical.
The statistical correlations between biological sex and violent crime are claimed by many with whom you are probably familiar to have parallels with race.
A specious analogy, as I've argued before. The difference between black people and white people is quantitative only: black people commit assault and murder more often than white people, but white people still commit assault and murder. The difference between male people and female people is both quantitative and qualitative: the proportion of female people who can forcibly penetrate people with their reproductive organs is 0. The proportion of female people who can forcibly impregnate people is 0:
if the average Untouchable could physically overpower and forcibly impregnate 99% of Brahmins against their will, while no Untouchable ever had to fear becoming impregnated and no Brahmin can impregnate someone else, I think segregating Untouchables and Brahmins in certain contexts would be perfectly reasonable.)
Moving on:
If people act on their knowledge of those statistics, innocent people of certain races are subjected to lifelong humiliation and ill-use
Is your claim that male people are currently being subjected to "lifelong humiliation" because female strangers correctly deduce that they are male (the demographic responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of rapes and sexual assaults), and treat them with the appropriate level of wariness? I still just can't fucking get over this: you find it so humiliating when a woman crosses the road to put some distance between you and herself, that female people collectively should voluntarily put themselves in harm's way, exposing themselves to greater risk of rape and sexual assault than they already do, specifically to spare you that minor indignity?
This is a positively sociopathic level of disregard for women's safety and well-being. I'm not exaggerating or being the least bit facetious: this is such a selfish, self-absorbed worldview that it sounds like something a serial killer would write. You legitimately think that "innocent men being subjected to lifelong humiliation" is a more pressing societal issue than women being raped. It reads like a parody of sophomoric MRA bullshit.
I am only asking that, when it comes to interactions with actual people, you not treat their genitals as relevant by default, and not bring up the matter any more than you would any other medical condition.
Well, your request is ridiculous, and I'm not going to. The only people capable of forcibly penetrating other people are male people. Male people have vastly higher sex drives than female people. Male people are vastly stronger than female people. Male people are vastly more prone to aggression and sexual violence than female people. All of these facts are true, and they do not stop being true just because the male person in question purports to "identify as" a woman. A person's sex (not their "genitals", as you insist on referring to them: never miss an opportunity to imply that your interlocutor is a deranged pervert) is one of the most useful traits one can know about a person and to make predictions about their behaviour, beliefs and worldview, and to say otherwise essentially amounts to mind-body dualism. I don't care if that makes some creepy men in dresses sad: it's true.
FtttG
2d ago
I will concede that, in that case, they are justified in dividing by currently possessed genitals, i. e. the ones with which they are presented, and for this purpose, a trans-woman remains a man unless or until she has that part of her anatomy altered.
FtttG
2d ago
Dude, this is pathetic. It's not oppression that women look at you and know that you have a penis.
Is there no historical act of oppression that trans activists won't attempt to appropriate as their own? Have you no shame?
But in any case, this doesn’t mesh with the GC worldview. Either the average person is very trans friendly, or trans people can pass and be perceived as the opposite sex.
I've never disputed the existence of androgynous people, and nor has any gender-critical person I've met. Even people who aren't trans sometimes get mistaken for being members of the opposite sex (i.e. butch lesbians). I'm just saying that such people are the exception rather than the rule, and that most people are very obviously of one sex or the other. I would imagine that if I spent a lot of time in trans spaces, I would far more frequently see people complain about being "misgendered" or "clocked" or failing to pass than I would see the opposite (people celebrating how successfully they pass).
FtttG
2d ago
My experience is that the average person is absolutely not a sommelier when it comes to differentiating cis from even moderately passing trans people. If you look enough like a woman, you’ll get called ma’am by service workers
I appreciate your perspective, but I will point out (probably not for the first time to you personally) that there is a difference between a service worker mistaking you for a female person, and making an educated guess based on your appearance that you are attempting to present as female, and going along with it so as to avoid causing you offence.
FtttG
2d ago
FtttG
2d ago
And when the pro-trans faction were like, 'But this isn't right!', and sought to change it, the anti-trans faction objected
Yes. We didn't agree that "it isn't right" for people to know the sexes of people in their vicinity.
I'd never heard of Epstein prior to his arrest. "Celebrity" is a bit of a reach.
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