Terracotta
3mo ago
Notably, women's suffrage in most Western countries was not the result of women using violence to coerce men into accepting them as political equals. Rather, it was the result of successful ideological persuasion of male franchise-holders, achieved in no small part via the critical contributions of women to the collective industrial efforts in World War 1.
This seems like an oddly idealistic narrative of the origins of female franchise. I'd understood that early votes-for-women initiatives in the US were aimed at preserving the political power of the (gender-balanced) elite classes in the face of growing (mostly male) immigrant populations? I'm less familiar with the history of the vote in the UK, but given that many landholding women had local suffrage long before, which was removed with the expansion of male suffrage at the start of the 19th century, I presume most of those developments were similarly driven by cynical power-consolidation politics rather than by honest persuasion changing hearts.
Power is power. There is no interesting scenario "oooh what if Group A was more violent but Group B had more members, and they realized their interests were opposed, who would win" because both numbers and capacity for effective violence are just forms of power, and by definition the most powerful group has already won-- is, in fact, the group orchestrating the conflict, defining the teams and making it permissible to think about the opposition of interests in the first place.
As regards the gender gap in political affiliation, the actual power-holders are clearly not the anxious Millennial women who dutifully parrot the ACAB memes that turn up on their Instagram feeds; they're the mixed-gender, likely majority-male Instagram board and leadership, plus all the others of their class, who decided for obscure reasons of their own that those memes were fine and dandy to boost in feeds in the first place, then to bake into the rest of our tech-driven reality. Those are the folks to watch, and if 4chan ever does go to real-life war against the Emilies, it'll be when those people decide it would be a convenient development, not a moment before. But I tend to agree with the person upthread who said that this line of thinking is mostly an excuse to fantasize impotently about punishing the people who won't sleep with them.
Terracotta
3mo ago
In a state of nature, sure. But in a society, everybody is expected to muster the self-control to behave sociably to others in public spaces like the workplace, as long as others are behaving conventionally in return (and all the clothing mentioned in this thread has been extremely middle-class conventional; nobody's asking people to roll with assless chaps or nudism).
I think the problem is in assuming that because certain fear and arousal instincts have a biological basis, they're therefore radically "unavoidable," indeed unalterable, and justify making outsize demands for accommodation from others. It didn't make sense back when anxious students were demanding full veto power over triggering college syllabus material, and it doesn't make a lot of sense in this context, either.
Terracotta
3mo ago
Affirmative! Sorry, was writing in haste above.
Terracotta
4mo ago
I believe OP mentioned braless women on the commute, not at work; the work attire I've seen criticized here was tight AKA "skinny" pants and tops with cleavage. But if you're asking if all these garments can be worn strictly with a view to looking presentable according to current fashion standards, then the answer is emphatically yes. Check out reddit femalefashionadvice and various women's clothing blogs, and you'll hear women trying to use clothes to communicate things like effortless, comfy cool (the braless or bralette tank, loose crocheted cardigan, 90s jeans look) and tailored polish (the skinny office pants look, which you'll be pleased to note has been replaced with swingy trousers). Sometimes women think about sexual display for date-night outfits, but in my decades of fashion discussions I have literally never heard or read a natal female remarking excitedly that an everyday outfit displays her nipples or shows how her breasts move, and will thus doubtless inspire random men to imagine emotionlessly fucking her as they pass by on the train.
On the bra thing specifically, visible bra straps (unavoidable under some tops) have at various points been considered un-presentable, and I've heard women express relief that the braless option solves that fashion problem.
Terracotta
4mo ago
I think I was responding to this bit:
But when you see a woman wearing a super cut low tank top with a pushup bra and high-heeled pumps, and the absolute tightest pants she could possibly wriggle into... cmon. That's sexy. [...] It's more like a mild discomfort. It's just a feeling that never, ever goes away when you're surrounded by women like that at work and in daily life, constantly,
I'm not seeing the concern in the passage above that one's strictly chaste, "accidental" and "innocuous" glances toward women might be misinterpreted as sexual; it seems more about someone who is annoyed that they get a constant arousal response, to an "uncomfortable" extent, from any visuals that show the shape of a woman's body? Thus, the opening of this conversation was about whether it's fair to complain about constantly getting aroused around boobs, while also deliberately entraining that exact response pattern, and keeping oneself in a state of artificial sexual hyper-sensitivity, through regular masturbation to porn.
If it's pivoting instead to a conversation about how women overestimate the perviness of the male gaze, then I don't see how clothing is relevant one way or the other. Men can look at women lustfully no matter what they're wearing, so presumably a woman could also level a wrongful accusation of ogling regardless of her dress.
Terracotta
4mo ago
Again, I'm not saying that there isn't a hardwired component to sexual arousal. But organisms are very good at using environmental information to upregulate and downregulate behavioral programs depending on what's most reward-rich at the moment. The dynamics of this are pretty consistent; remove a reward and there's an extinction burst of increased drive to regain it, then after a while that program gets turned down as temporarily no longer profitable.
So if someone expresses that their constant impulses toward free-floating sexual opportunism with random women are troublesome and uncomfortable to them, BUT also a primary leisure activity is protracted rubbing of their genitals while they look at a bunch of images of random women in postures that suggest sexual opportunity, then I feel like they clearly aren't doing all they could to persuade their bodies to turn down the constant sex-seeking.
Terracotta
4mo ago
I'm just saying that women's bodies have greater and more pronounced visibly sexual qualities than men's,
I agree with fribble that this is a statement about the viewer's sexuality, not about women's bodies. Women are not pleasing, others are pleased to imagine the things they could do to them. Women are not sexual, they are sexualized. (We also need more gay dudes in the conversation, I guess.)
Re: social consequences, here's a weak parallel case. One reasonably common hardwired female response to a man's body is fear. Men are on some level intimidating to be around, with their height, thick muscles and wide shoulders. To a much smaller person, male bodies telegraph, accurately, the potential to inflict violent physical harm and domination, regardless of how nice the guy actually is. This is why many little kids are instinctively afraid of strange men, before they're socialized to suppress that feeling. Some women find it attractive, particularly in a context where it could be aligned with their own interests. But the physicality of an unaligned male is generally at least a little viscerally scary.
Male fashion is also designed to emphasize and aestheticize those same traits of physical dominance. It accentuates shoulders, chest and neck, making the body look squarer and more muscular. Much male fashion even mimics the working clothes of violent occupations, like military uniforms and gangster clothing! If you're a guy and have an outfit that you think looks really sharp, odds are good that some part of the design, deliberately or not, is making you look more intimidating.
Now, suppose you're wearing your favorite perfectly normal mall-purchased outfit to work, and a woman in the office objects. It's anxiety-causing for her, your big scary body in these strength-emphasizing clothing makes her feel on edge all the time and limits her ability to act freely around you. Why should you be allowed to dress to frighten other people? If you were really considerate, you'd wear something softer, frillier, maybe with a cute animal print or something to signal your harmlessness.
That woman's biological fear response to your body is just as real and unpleasant as your biological arousal response to a sexy coworker. But you didn't dress to be "scary" to her! Probably you didn't think of her reaction at all. You just wanted to look presentable within the normal idiom that gendered fashion currently provides for you.
Does it seem more reasonable that you should go home and put on something frillier? Or that she should get therapy to gain more control over these maladaptive biological responses?
Are you under the impression that historical modesty and sexiness exists on a simple linear scale from burqas to tank tops? Probably there's a universal thrill with full view of certain parts of the anatomy, but past that, modesty norms and male perceptions of "sexiness" are very much in the eye of the beholder. Plenty of extremely "conservative, old-fashioned societies" in equatorial regions have far less covered-up norms of dress than we do. Public breastfeeding used to be far more common in the West, while there's a huge amount of historical hand-wringing about the immodesty of women showing their sexy, sexy free-flowing hair, which today men view in their co-workers without experiencing unmanageable erections.
My point is that there is underlying instinct, but then there's a huge amount of situational conditioning on top of that. If a man complains that he feels uncontrollably, painfully aroused and frustrated by the tops of a woman's breasts at work, then goes home every night and deliberately stimulates himself while looking at images of the tops of women's breasts, then all I'm saying is that he's clearly the dog AND Pavlov in that situation.
Terracotta
4mo ago
If you accept that fashion is signaling, then the overall move might be less toward "informality" than toward subtler and harder-to-fake signals of wealth and status.
Formal clothing controls and covers your body, allowing most people to look presentable if they can buy approximately correct garments and keep them in good repair. By contrast, sweatpants look good almost exclusively on women who can afford to spend a lot of time at the gym and yoga studio (or later, the plastic surgeon's), and who know how to do understated high-quality makeup with expensively well-maintained skin and hair; everybody else just looks schlubby and run-down, like the poors they are.
I've heard a similar argument made about the transition from corsets to the "freedom" of bras and elastic waistbands: every body fits neatly into an hourglass-figure dress when wearing a corset, but now we have to stress and starve ourselves to manufacture de facto corsets out of our own abdominal muscles, yay. And I suspect stockings, bras and other undergarments probably work the same way. Lissome twenty-somethings, and the class of older ladies who drop $$$ on sclerotherapy and implants, look fine in bare legs and bralettes; not so much the rest of us.
Terracotta
4mo ago
A Bacon allusion in a bra debate is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to the Motte. Well played.
Terracotta
4mo ago
I hadn't considered the role of anxiety before, but there is a match with the kind of edgy, restless, compulsive feeling that comes after eating a bunch of shitty nutrition-free junk-food.
Terracotta
4mo ago
Serious question: I know nothing about you and the guy posting above you, but if y'all are (like seemingly every other male around here) going home and jacking off to images of breasts for hours every night, aren't you somewhat responsible for greatly strengthening the existing circuitry that links that visual cue to a state of arousal and sexual reward?
Sure, it's natural for men to find bodies sexy, just as it's natural for that lady to find chocolate delicious. But if I knew that your coworker went home every night and deliberately spent hours burning chocolate-scented candles while watching candy-tasting shows, baking brownies and licking them then throwing them away while fantasizing resentfully about what it'd be like to eat them... I'd have a lot less sympathy with her complaints that thoughts of forbidden chocolate were ruining her focus at work the next day.
Terracotta
4mo ago
and men do best in somewhat more risky environments where they might sire children with many women.
This is not your main point, but it's always seemed like a particularly BS part of the whole redpill evopsych narrative to me. Men may have evolved instincts to take advantage of conditions where promiscuity is possible, sure. But that's not the same as them "doing better" under those conditions.
I recall a discussion here pointing out that the modal historical outcome for superfluous weak males is not frustrated inceldom, but early violent death. Given that a monogamous pairbonding system vs. a lothario/harem system necessarily offer identical expected value in terms of offspring, and that the harem almost certainly offers lower expected value in terms of personal pleasure owing to the lothario's diminishing marginal returns from screwing multiple partners, I don't understand how men in these spaces seem to regard promiscuity as some kind of inherently manly value that's unfairly gatekept in our women's world.
Terracotta
4mo ago
I think I was arguing that rapists and predators are by definition Bad. Also that even rich elite clans usually have a couple of members and hangers-on whose individual genetics would not be a valuable addition to anyone's family tree.
I'm not aware of any helpful published surveys supporting this, but to my mind the counter-narrative where Southern patriarchs eagerly guard the honor of their random enslaved field hands is making the more extraordinary claim. Who would even dare to come forward with a rape accusation in that context? Given the overall attitude to women of that class, why would they be believed and avenged rather than punished for causing trouble and/or assumed to have themselves been the seducers?
I thought at least some of the minor Southern aristocracy was descended from transported and otherwise indigent emigres, and that there were overall more situations of modest households owning 1-2 slaves than of big aristocratic plantations? In any case, whatever their strengths in bravado or disease resistance or whatever it took to succeed economically in the Old South, by definition the failsons who will rape the most servant girls are not the ones carrying the best genes for impulse control and orderly prosociality.
It also seems plausible that even the enslaved women on big estates would be highly vulnerable to opportunistic sexual assault from random employees and other poor whites in the vicinity.
Terracotta
4mo ago
Through generations of sexual assault and limited-opportunity marriage, that sub-population was also forced to incorporate substantial genetic contributions from the most brutal and impulse-driven individuals among the white Borderers in their vicinity, a group that had overall been actively pre-selected for violence and low conscientiousness. Given the way white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore, I haven't heard anyone rule out the possibility that the whole thing is just those Borderer genes, full stop.
Terracotta
4mo ago
Actual woman here (although not the woman in question), and my read is that although you had the best of intentions, this one was kinda on you. Why did you kiss her the second time in the same evening without any positive feedback from her, and the third time after substantial negative feedback from her (saying she'd like to call an Uber, mentioning too many people buying her drinks, telegraphing tiredness)?
First kiss definitively declared your sexual interest and established you as a confident guy who's comfortable taking the initiative. At that point, initiating more kissing, unless she's first initiated some reciprocal physical move toward you entirely of her own accord, adds no new information and risks tilting it over to "dude is overly aggressive and may or may not think he's bought himself a BJ with some figurines." You seem to be interpreting her passive compliance with handholding/ getting in the car/ being kissed/ etc. as encouragement, but plenty of women and especially preacher's-daughters-turned-leftist-activists were intensively socialized to be polite and go along when people demand interaction in social situations, particularly after somebody gave them a present. Then, at least in the normal social argot of the girls I know, "God I'm tired/ I've had too many drinks" is an expression of vulnerability, cue to visibly set aside your own goals and switch into gallant caretaking mode, "Cool, and you have a busy day tomorrow, so let's get you home safe, can I call an Uber? Is your friend around?" and then chastely load her in the cab with a squeeze of the hand and text the next day to say you enjoyed the evening, like Tom Hanks would do in a 90s romcom.
Note, this is a perfectly honest misunderstanding and I'm not trying to be harsh, more to address your fatalistic "why am I not allowed to do things regular people do??" This doesn't seem like anything wrong with you or her, just colliding sets of instincts, like you might see any day with a toddler feeding squirrels.
Terracotta
5mo ago
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?
Terracotta
6mo 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:
-
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
6mo 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
6mo 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
7mo 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.
Historically, the distinction was "gender"= social norms for manhood and womanhood, while "sex"= biological X/Y/ gamete status. A child raised in a distant lab by sexless robot aliens, with absolutely no conception of human society, might not have a "gender"; but they would still have a "sex."
That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy, which runs: sexual dimorphism is natural, therefore (a) all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change; and (b) a society's sex-specific stereotypes are "natural" and nature is good, so women should try to perform their society's conventional stereotypes of womanhood (and men: manhood), and those who less closely match those stereotypes are unnatural and bad.
Basically, trying to circumvent the fallacies in "But you have to dress your XX baby in pink because pink is naturally for girls!"/ "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob because he supports a family, that's just the nature of things."
Unfortunately, I think this usage ran afoul of the trans folks' desire to deliberately re-conflate the natural and the social in order to argue that their social performance of gender stereotypes was, indeed, "natural," therefore biological, unchangeable and good. So whether there's a definition distinct from "sex" on that side of the aisle, I couldn't say.
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