ForgettableOne
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User ID: 1971
I'm not convinced learned city-dwellers' (or soldiers') writings are representative of the rest of the population. I think if you don't live in a city and you have the resources to spare to get yourself a woman to fuck who you don't want to have kids with, you buy (or otherwise obtain) yourself a slave, and have her spinning cloth or do chores around the farm or be otherwise productive the rest of the time. At least she won't necessarily by definition be completely negatively productive for you, the way going to a prostitute is. Prostitutes are for people who are either rich enough that paying one doesn't affect them, or so broken-down that they don't care about tomorrow.
ForgettableOne
1yr ago
Tractors and synthetic fertilizers makes it pretty easy now, but without those growing potatoes is pretty difficult. You don't average 8 kids per woman and zero population growth at the same time if agriculture is easy. Just take away the oil and Malthus can finally stop spinning in his grave.
I do not think that is the whole point.
A lot of social games are played around the concept of the line, where e.g., you might demonstrate your social competence by walking right up to the line and just barely not crossing it. Maybe that's what we call a really good edgy joke? Or, if you don't know where the line is, you might deliberately cross it order to identify exactly where it is. I suppose that'd be a bad edgy joke. Although, a skillfully made line-crossing can plausibly be walked back to where the line is, after you've identified its location. And of course you might cross it just to make people mad. You might not even mean what you say, you just wanna piss them off and you know that crossing this line is the way to do it.
There's lots of others, like how ambiguous statements can be used to gauge mutual trust and friendship, e.g., you insult your friend and he chooses to interpret it as insincere as a display of trust. Which of course is dangerous, since the insult could be sincere, and he could end up looking or being played for a fool and suffer the negative social consequences of that. Or how groups can use offensive jokes or statements in order to forge similar bonds between themselves. And not just in the sense of saying offensive things insincerely and then being interpreted insincerely by fellow group-members, but also to say such things in order to deliberately make yourself less tolerable to others, and the more strongly you advertise social signals that make you intolerable to others, the more strongly you simultaneously signal your dedication to the group. "I am so dedicated that I am willing to forgo all other social relations, and I demonstrate this by making everyone else hate me to the point where this group is my only option." Although, that probably is not a positive aspect.
Anyway. This wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list (nor am I qualified to provide one), just to remark that there's a lot more to edgy jokes and general line-crossing than merely cleverer variations of saying that something is bad. There's lots of playing around with identifying what is bad, and with dancing around a shared understanding of something as bad in order to achieve different effects.
I feel like a lot of these points are intuitively very obvious (just look at people interacting socially, they engage in these strategies constantly and effortlessly with high levels of competence) but are rarely verbally articulated for some reason. Probably, I'm guessing, because they are so obvious and intuitive. But, then, this also makes them sometimes invisible in the verbal space. Makes me think of, although it's not quite the same, of how historians seem to be still very unsure about how e.g., roman legionaries actually fought when their line met the enemy, because nobody bothered to write that part down. They wrote lots of other important stuff down, just not that part. It was so obvious to them that there was no need to. So it's invisible to us, who are just seeing their writings. Maybe there's a danger in spending too much time in verbal spaces, like the internet, or highly formal places, like the workplace, where these social games are a lot more dangerous, and so they're played a lot less, and so people end up inexperienced with them. But I digress.
Most people do not distinguish between "man" and "male" because doing that is wrong. If it is not a "male" then it CANNOT be a "man". That's like saying that a triangle has four corners. I mean, you can say it. You'd just be wrong.
Memes like "Caitlyn Jenner is a woman" is just that - wrong. It's a falsehood forced upon people against their will by force. You have to say that the triangle has four corners to not do something as gauche as to be rude, so you do. But it's fucking wrong, and you know it's fucking wrong, and you know the fucking people making you fucking say it are fucking evil.
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