Terracotta
4mo ago
I've never watched Bridgerton, dislike the premise and the genre overall, and now, after Googling the actress, have a serious beef with her for breaking out that dumb old canard, "people in The Past had no hygiene," in a public interview.
But if I'm reading your comment right, you're saying that you watched an episode of a comedy TV show that:
- featured a female protagonist played by an actress whom you found facially and physically unattractive
- implied that in its fantasy historical setting, with many other social factors at play, several high-status men were interested in marrying this character
- showed this person having sex
- also had many very short scenes, in an episode specifically stylized and labelled as a riff on TikTok videos
and that on those grounds, you were filled with rage and "hated it more than anything [you'd] watched in your life"?
Physical performance of aggression works exactly the same for men as tears do for women, though. A man of 30+ years raises his voice in that sudden deep "dad intensity" mode, makes a sudden threatening physical move in an argument, then walks off, and people will conclude he's really passionate about this topic and he, on the whole, wins the day. A woman raises her voice and clenches her fists, people will titter to themselves about that shrill bitch who is literally crazy, and she's presumed to have lost.
I guess it's possible the male mode doesn't work as well on the internet, given its reliance on nonverbal intimidation rather than words, but it's absolutely a thing and I've seen it work for men on many occasions.
Where do women get this idea?
Woman here, and I started out not believing that "men need to feel intellectually superior to women" but absolutely agree with it now. The experiences that tilted me that way:
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As a woman, I have had many conversations with men where I curiously asked them many questions about their intellectual areas of expertise. I'm a pretty knowledgeable person and in many of those cases also had credentialed expertise to bring to the table, comparable to what the man was bringing. Following their own monologues about intellectual topics, not one of those men, literally nobody, ever asked me a curious question that indicated their parallel interest in eliciting information from me. Indeed, no non-related man has ever asked me a curious information-eliciting question about anything in my whole life.
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In those intellectual conversations where I did chime in with information or ideas of my own unasked, male conversation partners would consistently nod dismissively, then redirect the conversation back to some topic where they could educate me.
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As somebody who loves to learn about stuff in conversations, I try really hard to make sure I'm facilitating a real exchange of high-quality information where I know my stuff and the other party is genuinely interested. I have encountered so many men bloviating on and on, with obvious pleasure, about topics where they actually knew very little, to visibly indifferent conversation partners, that it's hard not to conclude that this is actually a dominance behavior intended to make them feel high-status by capturing someone's polite attention, rather than a genuine enjoyment of intellectual contact. Men seem to do this substantially more with female conversation partners.
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I have had several disturbing conversations where the principle "most men dislike argumentative women" played out as the man getting visibly angry and breaking off the conversation as soon as I indicated my interest in offering (polite, calm, well-evidenced) counterarguments to whatever they were contending. I have known maybe 3 men who could handle a sustained good-natured debate with me, a very polite lady, without getting angry and insecure and needing to stop, and I loved those dudes so much and desperately miss the ones no longer in my life. Overall, if in an intellectual debate space like this one somebody can unapologetically assert that he dislikes women when they argue with him, I'd say that's pretty suggestive that many men are uncomfortable facing the possibility of being intellectually bested by a girl.
Terracotta
4mo ago
In all fairness, if I look around at elderly heterosexual couples I know personally, it genuinely does seem like a much worse bargain for the women:
-Everyone loses some ability to process social cues as well as they get older, but in 95% of those cis/het older couples the women seem to hold onto social function for much longer than the men, resulting in a classic dynamic where the woman manages and humors the guy 24/7 like an autistic child while he narcissistically monologues, complains, rants and repeats himself and never asks a single question about her. My assumption is that women are so strongly socially (and possibly biologically) conditioned to pay attention to how everyone's doing in the conversation that everyday social skills hold out for longer.
-Many women enjoy the greater physical strength of a male partner, and on both a practical and a visceral monkey level this can be a constant low-key benefit of cis/het relationships for women. Older men are often frail and can't really offer that anymore.
-Related, because traditional household roles apportion mostly the strength-based tasks to men, the older women I know seem to do a lot more work around the house, and a ton more active work in general. Virtually every male retiree I know takes long afternoon naps and falls asleep in front of the TV in the early evening. I have literally never met a female retiree who does this.
-Some cursed dynamic with testosterone, poor emotional self-awareness and dementia-linked anxiety seems to result in many old men getting unpleasantly rage-y as they age. "Grumpy old men"/"old man shakes fist at cloud" are both memes for a reason, and that doesn't look fun to live around. Old women complain too, but I have met a vanishingly small number who fly off the handle and shout loudly on the regular, the way their husbands do.
These are women who've chosen to be in heterosexual relationships, so clearly they find this preferable to being all alone. I expect I will too, at that age. But I wouldn't say it looks like a perfectly fair exchange of value.
Terracotta
5mo ago
Female here, with one point that's missing from the previous thread: you don't mention how old your wife is, but if she's anywhere in the mid 30s- mid 40s range, then normal perimenopausal hormone shifts will absolutely cause a natural change in body composition and fat distribution, particularly increasing visceral fat in a way that gives that "pregnant" look, without any changes in diet or exercise. Stress and sleeplessness make this fat-deposition pattern worse (so if you see things that could reduce her stress levels, that might be a good approach), but I'm not aware of anything that can fully reverse it. Just go to the mall and glance around and see how many 50-year-old women you can find who still have a 25-year-old's waist shape, regardless of overall fitness or weight: it's a vanishingly small proportion.
Terracotta
5mo ago
I think your mistake here is conflating straight women's goal of "trying to attract men" with "trying to maximally arouse men."
While I have various issues with that Aella Good At Sex/what-women-want blog series, one useful concept she established was the idea of "werewolfing" as a state of goal-driven, uncontrolled male arousal that many women find a little scary and unpleasant. A woman would have to live under a rock not to realize that men want big tits in the sense that they'll werewolf and pant and slaver over them; this is a literal cartoon meme. But most women are not sure how to channel that kind of raw animal attention to produce the social and romantic benefits they themselves might actually want, like having the guy attend to their needs, listen to their ideas, praise and admire them, stay intimate even after orgasm, etc. In some cases arousal actually seems to work against romance, in that men seem disproportionately likely to demean the intellectual capacity of extremely voluptuous women, something I'd love to see properly explained from the male end.
I suspect that when young women try to appear sexy in ways that seem puzzlingly suboptimal to straight dudes, a big part of this may be trying to refine or control the type and level of sexual attention they receive, trying to keep men interested enough to be solicitous and respectful, but not fully pushing them over into werewolf mode. If what you did was helpfully point out that they could evoke a bigger boner if they just [X], my guess is it was interpreted as "Since respectful and moderate male attention isn't a thing and women are only good for werewolfing over, here's what my inner werewolf would want." Frankly, I'd respond with a hate-filled glare too.
Terracotta
5mo ago
So to go with OP's scenario, a woman in her 20s has the option of rendering value through: (a) having babies and raising them, or (b) focusing on her career and developing her ability to offer economic value, maybe while trying to fit in a baby or two for personal gratification along the way.
In option (a), she's maybe got 15-20 years of being valuable to others (since people value mothering mostly through the end of the cute phase); that value is mostly rendered privately, since community members don't much care who breeds or not; and the past value she's rendered is extremely perishable, expiring pretty immediately when her fertility ends and the kids leave elementary school.
In option (b), she can continue to produce value for others, and thus be regarded as valuable in turn, through age 60-65+; her value is rendered publicly and comes with the benefits of stronger community relationships and public respect; and even if something happens so that she gets fired at 55, her compensation thus far has been in investment-friendly cash plus professional connections, which will hold their value well in tough times.
I think this is why old-fashioned gender roles did very much emphasize women's economic productivity, focusing on diligent spinning, weaving, prudent financial management, etc. (Also, creation of children used to be another form of economic productivity/retirement savings, but is definitely less so now that they don't contribute to the household and feel no obligation to look after aged parents.) For better or worse, our grinding middle-management girlbosses are more truly aligned with old-fashioned notions of women's value than the modern sentimental tradwife who stays hot for hubby, bakes cute cupcakes and cuddles the babies all day.
Terracotta
6mo ago
I was responding to the earlier poster's comment:
The truth is that men do value women greatly for certain things that are unique to their womanhood and less for other things that are not unique to women.
made specifically in defense of the proposition that women should abandon professional careers to pursue instead early stay-at-home motherhood. So the question of whether the average dude would beat up some other guy for insulting his mother isn't really germane to the question.
Do these mother-loving men love motherhood enough to listen to older women's perspectives, defend their rights, respect their ideas, hire them in preference to hot young recent grads, offer them salaries commensurate with the years they spent in this ostensibly ultra-high-value experience? Do they go out of their way to live near their own moms and spend time with them?
Do they deeply admire a CEO's wife who raised his four kids, just as much as they do the CEO for whatever email/boardroom/golf wankery he did during that same timeframe? Would they go to hear her TEDX talk and buy her vanity book afterwards? Because men find motherhood so high-value and so darn important?
Terracotta
6mo ago
Oh, I agree that it's a curse of middle-aged womanhood in general. Underneath that, likely just the bitter animal truth that humans only seek the favor of other humans when they (a) have something to gain from them or (b) have something to fear from them. Men are more physically intimidating into midlife, thus retain the power to command respect and amity for longer.
However, given the choice to be a widely-reviled middle-aged woman with a fat bank account, a nice apartment, some social clout and active power over one or two resentful underlings... or a widely-reviled middle-aged woman with a menial job, no money or future prospects, and the wistful memory of long-ago baby cuddles with grown adults who are now far away living their own lives, calling maybe once or twice a year? It doesn't seem obviously rational to choose the latter.
Terracotta
6mo ago
Why the non-related requirement? The point of honoring your mother is honoring the sacrifice she and her body made giving you life and then sustaining and raising you
The original discussion was specifically about young women giving up a career in order to focus on having kids right out of college. The compensation for 5 years of paid professional work in the mid-20s is not just $X salary, but greatly expanded skillset and prospects for future earning, a solid professional network, plus a certain amount of prestige/ social capital that can be traded in for increased power in community interactions, etc. If you're saying the only compensation needed for an equivalent amount of time spent in stay-at-home childrearing should be the freely-rendered love of your own hypothetical someday babies (assuming you don't do anything to piss them off), well, it's a sweet sentiment, but it sounds like a terrible deal for the woman.
Terracotta
6mo ago
Jeff and Mackenzie started out in their early 20s in roughly the same position, collaborating on a business, both presumably thinking they had talent and some good ideas. So they make a great test case for the options facing young women who choose between (A) early marriage/kids and (B) pursuing their career.
Mackenzie chose A, stayed home with the children and after two decades got to be the unilaterally discarded middle-aged wife with no future, no vocation, no social or professional power, no marketable skills to build on, and zero credit or respect for the 25 years of work she put into the supposedly-so-valuable work of motherhood and family-building (just "literally marrying a dude," in your words). She gets to keep some of the accumulated assets of their joint family project-- much less than half-- and the male public is in broad agreement that she should be damn grateful to emerge with even that.
Jeff chose B, cultivated his career, and gets not just riches but power, public respect, a robust personal and professional network, and a vocation/identity that will stick with him well into his '70s, where his value will increase, not decrease, over time.
Explain to me again why you think young women should follow Mackenzie's path, not Jeff's?
Terracotta
6mo ago
What other blogs offer ACX-style lit reviews, "Much More Than You Wanted to Know" effortposts, or adversarial collaborations on controversial questions? Any favorites?
Terracotta
6mo ago
What, as opposed to "she's a witch, burn her" and the associated other super-compassionate pre-therapy approaches to a society's superfluous old women? Can you cite a single historical or modern context where men as a group eagerly step up to show respect and deference for (non-related) moms in their 40s, 50s, 60s, on account of the erstwhile life-giving properties of their bodies? (And no, abstract Marian devotion doesn't count unless you can show it translating to heightened value for real flesh-and-blood older moms).
Even on this forum, would the folks lavishly praising young motherhood also endorse really serious social consequences for wealthy men who ditch their aging wives to pursue younger, hotter options once the kids have become teens? Consequences on the order of the philandering dude's losing his career or identity, since those are the effective results of family breakup for a wife who's made stay-at-home momhood her professional vocation? If not, then it's definitely safer to be Jeff Bezos than Mackenzie Bezos, and you can't blame young women for trying.
Terracotta
6mo ago
Really? Sure, there's lots of male respect for the cute twenty/thirtysomething new mom with a baby or two on her hip. Let's even be charitable and assume this does show genuine value for the Life-Nurturing Feminine, not just that hot moms are hot. But whatever that value is, it localizes pretty strictly around the 5-10 years of baby-toddler momhood. In mass culture, middle-aged moms of tweens and teens are bad cops and out-of-touch laughingstocks, older moms of grown-up kids are the ones who get vented about in therapy, accused of narcissism/busybodyness and subjected to aggressive "boundary-setting" if they're even tolerated in the kids' lives at all. Is it a wise choice for a woman to opt into an identity with a mandatory retirement policy that's at most decade out? What's she supposed to envision doing for the rest of the time?
Terracotta
11mo ago
English-language fiction and drama weren't taught in schools until (I believe) the 1900s? 1890s? So prior to that time, nobody would have read these works at all unless they enjoyed them and found them valuable. Some university lecturing on drama seems to have started up a decade or two earlier, 1870s, but that would be about sophisticated analysis of the rhetoric for students who already loved the content, like a film studies class today-- certainly not walking through the plot.
And yet, famously, the general American public of the day was so organically into Shakespeare that speeches from the plays were popular additions to vaudeville acts, and audience members would shout back lines at the actors. I've encountered lots of writing pre-1950 casually referring to how delightful and meaningful Shakespeare is, and it's interesting how free from defensiveness or concessions those statements are: nobody feels the need to add "... although obviously it's really hard to understand the words" or "... even though of course it's pretty boring and confusing," because they don't seem to find those things to be the case.
If we have 350 years of human beings demonstrably finding Shakespeare entertaining, meaningful, and easily comprehensible, followed by 70 years of intensifying complaints that the words are now too hard and the sentences now require too much focus, then my assumption is something has changed about our vocabulary, reading ability and stimulation threshold, not about the plays themselves.
Anti-excellence hot takes are pretty fashionable in these narcissistic times- the SBF-style "old books are booooring and useless" meme rhymes well with the education professors' "algebra is white supremacy," the admissions officers' "the SAT doesn't actually measure anything" and the fat activists' "actually size has nothing to do with health"- but I notice that they suspiciously often come from people who failed at those things themselves, thus have strong ego-defense incentives to convince themselves that anyway the grapes are sour.
Terracotta
11mo ago
Yeah, that "old literature is unlikeable" meme is marketing-addled cope on the level of "how could I enjoy a trip two states over when it's so far awaaaaaaay and anyway their food is weird?" For a solid 350 years I'm not aware of anyone complaining that Shakespeare was especially hard to read, and certainly nobody found him boring. Same was true of classical literature for 2000+ years. If all that suddenly changed in the ~50 years since the invention of cable TV, is it likelier that a play's 36th decade contains some sort of magic cultural expiration date, or that we're just experiencing a long superstimulus-driven atrophy of kids' ability to read, focus and explore?
Terracotta
1yr ago
I mean, a woman can go on fiverr and for low single digit $ get an out-of-work actor to say any of a number of gratifying things that most men would consider to be degrading and untrue in a relationship context. "I am dirt, a loser, I am nothing without you, I will never find anyone as good as you." "Honey, I agree, your best friend is way smarter than me, I should do everything she says from here on out." "Go ahead and gain 1,000 pounds, don't shower or comb your hair, you'll still be the sexiest thing alive to me." "My mom is a raging bitch, she should never have said that to you." So I should be resentful if my IRL man won't say those things, as well? What some people are willing to anonymously playact for a few seconds to faceless strangers, is different from what the vast majority of human beings are willing to do in a full-time intimate relationship where they believe they're showing up as their authentic selves.
Also consider that in the case of OF, while your $30 is maybe the precipitating factor that gets that one girl to rub herself in poo or whatever, in real terms your cash is just the visible tip of a whole iceberg of motivating factors, starting with whatever early traumas she's racked up and running all the way through what that run of bad boyfriends did to her, the practical life circumstances that ruled out less humiliating lines of work, and the desensitizing/Stockholm effects of the OF experience itself. Take an average nice girlfriend with a great family and good career prospects, retroactively run her through enough childhood conditioning and subsequent psychic or economic immiseration, and I bet at least some of the time she'd emerge more docile to your sexual suggestions. Arguably OF's cut of the $30 is for letting you carve off a sliver of that past abuse for your own benefit, while pretending that .001% rounds down to zero.
Terracotta
1yr ago
I question whether these specific activities count as virtuously ambitious in the way the op meant, though. At first glance they are all about staying safe by pursuing predictable or inconsequential toy successes in carefully controlled artificial toy environments, whereas at least in whittling or guitar you occasionally have to pit your skills against some kind of real-world physical resistance that might lead to real failure. Pouring passion into toys certainly reads as pussing out to girls, and even though you're seemingly not doing it for sexual display purposes, I suspect on some level your own awareness must make it somewhat anti-character-building as well.
As somebody upthread noted, monks were working on hard spiritual struggles, often with elements of voluntary physical suffering (at minimum, sleep deprivation). I don't think it was quite the comfy life of happy puttering that you seem to imagine.
Terracotta
1yr ago
Hey, I am a married mom, interested in domestic stuff and lurk on The Motte a lot! Pm me in case we're nearby, and I would be very interested in finding an online gathering space as well.
Terracotta
1yr ago
I mean, if you see people in everyday life deferring a lot to the views of older women while ignoring older men, then I guess we'd have to hit the sociology literature to resolve it, because it seems very much the opposite to me. In my experience, at least, if a 60-year-old male customer complains about the poor service at a coffeeshop, people may think he's an asshole, but they will listen respectfully to him and try to correct it. A 60-year-old woman complaining is a Karen, a ridiculous figure, the object of derision and deep resentment, and people will roll their eyes and try to get her off their backs rather than addressing what she has to say. Ditto in work meetings, when knocking on a neighbor's door, in political action, etc., etc.
IME, men on average don't seem to want to pay much attention to any person who's not (a) a sexual target, (b) sexual competition, or (c) a potential physical threat. Other men get to be at least 1-2 of those three from about age 18 to age 75. Woman get to be at most one, from age 14-35ish with steep dropoff thereafter. Maybe they're pitied a little thereafter, just because they're obviously physically vulnerable,. But that doesn't equate to being effortlessly treated as a peer in social relationships, the way older men seem to be.
Terracotta
1yr ago
It's interesting how these discussions always reflexively equate "women" to "women age 17-35", well under half of the adult lifespan. No amount of makeup and toning is going to make a 55-year-old woman physically attractive to the broad majority of men, much less a 70-year-old woman. And as evidenced by the shape of this conversation itself, for a woman to be unfuckable by men is for her to not exist at all: nobody's interested in her plans, nobody's interested in her capabilities, nobody wants to hear from her apparently because nobody wants to look at her.
Terracotta
1yr ago
Traumatic experiences can have that paradoxical effect, though, where some victims become intensely avoidant while some victims go the opposite direction and obsessively repeat the trauma. Show a bunch of 5-year-olds a scene from a scary monster movie, and some will become so terrified of monsters that they can't even handle* Sesame Street*, while some others will get painfully hyperfocused on that type of monster and deliberately seek out all the possible media about it that they can find- not joyfully, but with an anxious kind of obsession. I've personally observed both reactions, and both make sense in their way. One effect of fear is to focus the attention, so it makes sense that kids would develop a compulsive interest in processing or making sense of the trauma by repeating it on their own terms.
Mapped onto sexual trauma, that would mean that a boy molested by a man might become a sexually voracious gay dude, or might flee into borderline asexuality. A girl molested by a man might become a sexually compulsive straight woman, or might flee into lesbianism. All four of which do seem to match at least my anecdotal sense of the real-world outcomes for these cases.
Terracotta
1yr ago
Lack of access to full-immersion bathing in no way implies that people were historically just super gross, smelly and unwashed, though. I believe it was pretty standard in Europe to take a sponge bath/ wipe yourself down with a wet washcloth from a basin of water at least once or twice a day, which would cut down on any smell pretty substantially. People also wore linen that absorbed sweat, oil and dead skin and was changed daily, kept their hair closely braided and covered or combed through it with powder to remove the oil, etc. Plus, some portion of the greasiness and odor we currently experience between showers seems to actually result from overcleansing that strips the skin of oil and unbalances its microbiome.
I've heard reports from a number of historical reenactment folks that it's not especially hard to stay clean using period methods.
There are some Catholics on the Motte, right? What do you do for guidance/ clarification on finer points of doctrine as they relate to everyday moral behavior? I'd imagine the first-line recourse is just "ask your parish priest," but for questions that are a little more theologically complex, or where you've gotten conflicting information already?
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