Terracotta
5d ago
She looked at her friends laughing and thought, "why are you laughing? This isn't a joke. Stop laughing." And I just thought... yes, this is it! This is the difference between male and female sexuality! You couldn't ask for a more perfect illustration, it's amazing.
I fully believe that this is the testosterone experience, because it matches observed behaviors. But I've always wondered how people on testosterone from birth reconcile that hormone-induced aura of intense seriousness and urgency around whatever their sexual desire of the moment is, with the fact that if you look at it objectively the sexual impulse is pretty ridiculous.
Like, rub your penis on her foot. Rub it. On her foot. Or on that corpse. Go on, DO IT. Rub your penis on that unconscious person. Rub your penis on that toddler. Look at that girl's nipple. It's very important that you look at it! Go on, make visual contact with the external part of our mammalian glands designed for feeding young. You need to see it! You do! Look at it!
In service to this feeling of seriousness, men have betrayed their friends, their families, their country, they've lied, stolen, squandered fortunes, murdered and courted their own deaths because it was so deadly important to rub their penis against this specific thing in this specific way. I mean, I totally get why the evolutionary programming would exist, and ours isn't even that extreme in a world where some spiders' mating instincts get them slowly eaten alive. It just seems as though it would be weird to be a self-aware, reasoning person who's nonetheless in the grip of that kind of perceptual distortion. Women also do dumb things for biology, and women also have plenty of our own weird animal instincts, but for the most part we don't have anything quite so trippy as "this specific flap of somebody else's flesh is now the literal most important thing in the whole world."
Terracotta
7d ago
Some things aren't worth taking risks on, especially when the payoff is low, the risks are enormous, and my disposition is the catalyst for those risks
Well, it's not like you're signing the marriage license by asking a woman out; you could just enjoy learning about her and having a fun time together, day by day. I totally get the masochistic appeal of shutting oneself away in proud, bitterly high-minded self-isolation. But in the meantime you do miss out on the opportunity to share some potentially good (or at least interesting) company, to appreciate somebody's good points and be appreciated by them in turn.
As for overweight women, well, that is just prejudice. I'm in the USA. Our fat is a special kind of fat, and the fatter that fat gets the more viscerally I am repulsed by it.
You doubtless know that this means being viscerally repulsed by like 80% of adult men and 75% of adult women in the country, and as a smart guy you probably realize that such big feelings must be coming from a bunch of your own and your parents' stuff, not just from the bodies in front of you. Sometimes I look at old photos of working people, and those people are also tragically less beautiful than they should have been, through a similar combination of too little sleep, poor-quality food, shitty jobs, contaminated surroundings, illness, sorrow, sin and old trauma. I'm not sure any of us is all that beautiful, inside or out, but it would be hard to feel this stressed by it, and I'm sorry you're dealing with this.
I've really appreciated how reflective and fair-minded your responses are here; thank you! Hope better days are ahead for you.
why is it unreasonable for me to set as conditions my own characteristics (not with children, not overweight/obese)?
Well, both of those features are much, much more important to men than they are to women. Some women may care, don't get me wrong - but numbers of women irl don't mind a potbelly if the guy is kind/confident/funny, and could cheerfully learn to love somebody else's cute kid in the right circumstances. So in saying "She shouldn't have 25BMI, because after all I don't have 25 BMI, and no kids because I don't have kids," you're trying to buy two things that are somewhat rare and highly valued, with two things that are nice but not especially highly valued. By contrast, charisma and good social skills do matter a lot for women's attraction, so your challenges there also align you at a somewhat lower percentile on the global scale, where to match properly you might have to make corresponding concessions in some domain of male attraction.
But surely that's just self-awareness, not despair? You're saying "My 1010 SATs/2.8 GPA didn't get me into Duke, guess it's miserable NEETdom and food stamps for me," but millions of people are living happy, fulfilled lives with community-college degrees. You're a good writer, you seem intelligent; you worry about long-term prospects with a "low-value" woman, but many of those plump ladies and single moms are very nice, smart and kind people who would at minimum be fun to get to know. Is it really better that you and all the plump/ slightly older/ kid-having ladies in your vicinity should be lonely and celibate, rather than compromise your standards to connect with each other?
Terracotta
9d ago
certainly not relations on the terms I'd have once looked for (not overweight, not a single mother, not a drug addict, not older than me, not prodigal).
So you haven't had much response from younger women who are 75th+-percentile slender and wholly unencumbered. Out of curiosity, what happened when you reached out to women who were slightly plump, slightly older than you, or divorced/had a kid in tow?
Terracotta
11d ago
Hard to say much without specific examples. But if this is an AFAB person and she's saying she feels cared for but not romanced, or seems appreciative but also a little disappointed, then possible issues could be
- The care feels dispassionate, needs more personal attention (when you do nice things, do they match her needs/ do they show you've been listening? do you confidently express delight in things you find attractive in her face or body, mind or mannerisms specifically? Is it clear you're a man in love with a high-quality lady, not just some milquetoast people-pleaser who would do this for anyone?)
- The care feels low-value because you're so grateful, so there's no challenge or chase involved for her (obviously don't play hard-to-get like a '90s romcom, but if you clearly have various joyful, prosocial pursuits you're invested in in addition to her, it will establish that your time is valuable, and she'll be more appreciative when you choose her over those other options. Don't neglect the great stuff elsewhere in your life, is what I'm saying.)
- Maybe you're actually doing fine but the long-distance is killing the momentum, so she's poking around at random to try to reignite things
- Maybe you're doing fine and she's just kind of an unstable person as people said below, or things have just run their course without either of you realizing it
Terracotta
12d ago
Girl here. @kky makes a great point about starting fights (especially with big reconciliations) sometimes being an unconscious bid to restore emotional intimacy when the relationship feels stuck.
Note that although Words of Affection or whatever are the official Love Language, the actual underlying currency is attention, intimacy and low-key daily consideration. There's solid evolutionary reason that many women respond to this, because if a partner is fundamentally not interested in a woman as a person, if he gets no great positive utility from caring for her and knowing she's happy day-to-day, if he's not the kind of guy who can notice and spontaneously help if she or a kid are struggling, then that's a very dangerous partner to risk a potentially difficult pregnancy plus years of infant caregiving with.
If paying mechanical compliments feels too weird, with many women you can also maintain feelings of relational care and intimacy in other ways:
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Asking more questions, especially about her emotional state or other intimate topics as a follow-up to superficial life updates ("how did you feel about that?" "wow, was that really hard on you, given [past trend]?" "what are you really excited about this week?"). There's a list of random intimate questions called The 36 Questions to Fall In Love circulating somewhere, with some good possibilities if you need ideas.
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If you ask a question about feelings, not offering pushback or disagreement about the feelings themselves, just affectionately validating. If you think she's 100% wrong and crazy in a situation, you can express generic care like "you are trying so hard, wish I could be there to give you a hug."
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Remembering her answers to past questions and actively following up in a supportive way ("what happened with that big work project, anyway? were you happy with how it turned out? what is Sharon scheming about these days?"). If you can, try to compliment any admirable things about her approach and validate that her negative feelings are OK to feel.
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Sharing little intimate details about your own feelings, hopes, dreams, fears, vulnerabilities as a way of requesting care from her (nothing actually icky/humiliating unless it's in the past). This is the Ben Franklin Effect for emotional labor and it works really well: just look at how many romance heroes have tragic backstories requiring the heroine's sympathy.
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Engineering any little acts of care so that they also express low-key attention- so don't just send an article link, send an article relevant to something she mentioned, with a note "your mentioning __ got me thinking about __ and I thought I'd send this. I love that we can explore this together!"
Terracotta
12d ago
If this is a TikTok/ Twitter/ Insta thing, have you considered that the algorithmic video influencer mechanic is also what brought us mukbang, cinnamon challenges, contour makeup, Lil Tay, faking your own death for clout, etc. etc.?
The bad guy in a pro wrestling match is not actually trying to kill anybody with a folding chair, the monster truck with the teeth decals is not actually trying to eat the cars. The crazy infuriating shit influencers say (or their followers parrot) is not actually representative of what sane people act on in their personal lives.
Terracotta
17d ago
At least in England, poor men of the middle class and above marrying rich women was a super standard trope all through the early 20th century. If anything, it's a massively more common and culturally prominent phenomenon than the female gold-digging situation, largely because a rich man who fancies a poor girl can just seduce her and keep her as a mistress until he gets bored.
When a fashion for sentimentality came in in the mid-18th century, there was a mini moral panic among middle-class parents that their young sons might now run off and marry somebody hot instead of a nice rich girl, and there are letter-writer manuals giving advice to parents on how to dissuade sons from doing this.
If the "kept" man doesn't feel familiar as a character, it's because everything a woman owns, including money and land, becomes the full legal property of her husband upon marriage (although by default she'd get about 1/3 of it back upon his death). So the male gold-digger just gets to take his wife's stuff, not be "kept" by her.
Terracotta
18d ago
Freud is practically synonymous with BS these days, but repetition compulsion is deeply real. My prior assumption for anyone who had a horribly traumatic childhood and is now cruising on a "but I made a sudden dramatic escape and now things are so much better" trajectory with no extensive therapy/ monastic meditation step in between, is that either they will shortly get restless and blow everything up themselves, or that they will shortly find they're experiencing similar levels of abuse in their new context, having unconsciously gravitated toward familiar dynamics of exploitation.
Aella's dad beat her up, denigrated and aggressively dominated her; by some online accounts somebody raped her as a child. Then she escaped and, surprise! found a profession where smart men could aggressively dominate and rape her, but supposedly on her terms; then in time she found that once again, the men denigrating her were doing so less and less on her terms. If she flees again, I really worry about the next set of partners she winds up with, and I'd worry about escalating drug use. I worry about Lindsay Lohan's new dude and ostensibly new situation.
Memory-wipe technology for selected childhood baggage really would be an amazing development, such a shame we'll get the totalitarian Matrix brainwash version instead.
Terracotta
18d ago
Now, people can translate ideas into images without that deep understanding of the medium*, with that translation process bypassing all/most of the skills and techniques that were traditionally required.
But this account leaves out the equally critical perceptive and analytic skills that are normally built side-by-side with physical skills as an artist practices their craft. The bare act of clicking a shutter is the same for me and for a pro photographer, but the pro will take an immeasurably better picture because they have a trained eye to compose it. I suspect they'll also take a better picture because they understand from long experience what are the strengths and weaknesses of that type of image, versus a painting or architecture, and can better choose their subjects in consequence.
I think part of the problem is using the same word, "idea," to describe both what goes through my casual-consumer mind and what goes through the mind of a trained artist when we think of a new image. The two are strictly different in informational content, but also in structure, as anyone can see for themselves if they scoot out from their Dunning-Kruger zone to consider an area of craft or creation where they are experts. Coding or software engineering are probably the most familiar arts for the Motte; when we're talking really elegant and well-built programs, is your uncle's "y'know I always thought we should have like an app for identifying hot dogs" the same as a technical concept that occurs to a high-level professional with years of practice? Is there anything shared between the two "ideas", beyond the inchoate consumer instinct "I want a thing to make me feel _____"?
I think a lot of speculation about the value of AI art relies on the stickiness of cultural premises from the pre-AI age, so when Joe says to ChatGPT "paint me, uh, a pretty elephant with an orange hat in the style of Monet" and gets some random pixels farted out using patterns from 10,000 human-painted images, we instinctively respond to the patterns with the delight we've learned to afford skilled human work. It may seem that we get that delight from Joe's "idea," but what we are actually enjoying is those other artists' artfully-constructed patterns. I don't think we can fairly expect that 40 years hence; I suspect people will just paw indifferently past most images the way we walk past tree leaves today, with the exception of any pics that happen to raise a boner.
Some may argue that diffusion models are a medium unto itself with its own set of skills to develop and practice, akin to how photography and painting both generate 2D images but are considered different mediums.
Artistic skill-building requires a medium where you can exercise agency, though, because the agency or artfulness is fundamentally the part that we admire about it. For example, nobody looks at a Jackson Pollock painting and feels delight over how this black droplet aligns with this other black droplet, even though subtle visual details at that level are matter for praise in other painters. But things we know to be random or unintentional are generally not interesting, so instead fans enjoy Pollock's expressive choice of colors or line or concept, areas where he clearly did exercise artful choice.
With AI image generation, there are so many levels of randomness and frustrated choice that it's hard to imagine how a user could work for years to achieve progressively greater mastery. Don't most commercial models actively work to disrupt direct user control, e.g. by adding a system prompt you can't see and running even the words of your prompt through intermediate hidden LLM revisions before they even get to the image generator?
Terracotta
19d ago
For every artist that can produce something anyone wants to look at, you have perhaps 1000x as many people who see something in their mind's eye but they don't have the skill to render it. That thing, maybe even that stunningly beautiful thing, never sees the light of day and dies with them.
This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how creation works, though. Good ideas arise from craft skill, innate talent plus long hours of practice honing your perceptive faculties and understanding of the medium.
Feel-good movies love ego-boosting scenes about the regular ol' Joe Schmoe whose genius idea puts all those snooty artists to shame. But in reality, there are no people who've only ever bothered to cook instant ramen, who also have genius ideas for a creative dish, and there are no one-finger piano plinkers who also have great ideas for an amazing symphony. Tyros will have either painfully conventional ideas that they don't realize are copies, or completely random ideas that add nothing. At most, in some rare cases, they might have natural inclination plus the germs of some concept that needs to be worked out through long years of development; so having that natural process short-circuited through easy access to AI slop will result in fewer good ideas ever seeing the light of day.
I guess the one exception might be niche porn as mentioned downthread, where each man knows best the precise configuration of tentacles, chains and peanut butter that will get him off. But that's less creativity than it is targeted stimulation.
Terracotta
24d ago
That's such a vivid account of the overall thought process; thanks for posting! If St. Augustine's depiction is accurate, it sounds as though there's a strong element of visceral carnivore/ hunting drive in there, which I guess checks out. It certainly makes sense for a partly meat-eating species to have a mode where it enjoys the sensory experience of catching and ripping apart a living animal while it screams. "Eew fresh meat, its pain gives me the squick" isn't exactly a survival-friendly instinct.
Terracotta
24d ago
(I say all this as a former Naval officer who was become a committed pacifist. One reason among many for the transformation is just how fun it is to kill.)
I can fully see how this would be true of mowing down dim figures with ranged weapons at a distance, videogame-style. Can I ask, from curiosity, if in your experience it's also true of killing in hand-to-hand combat, where you can see/ hear/ smell the physical damage being done and watch the life leaving people's bodies?
Terracotta
1mo ago
Right, but OP was specifically critiquing
the fantasy among some dateless conservatives that if only they were born in some bygone era where women didn't have nearly as many options then they'd surely get a girlfriend almost by default.
The point of the trad dating vision, at least as I understand, is not "If only it were The Past, I could have become a more socially adept man, then they'd want to date me." Instead, it's "if only it were The Past, I could have access to more desperate women, then they'd have to date me."
And I think that latter claim is wrong: women's standards are variable above a certain threshold, but there's also a hard limit of interpersonal function below which instinct just says it's better to go it alone.
The parallel question is also interesting to investigate for heterosexual male desire. For instance, if every woman (including every woman in porn) suddenly weighed 4x more, what proportion of men would just opt for permanent singledom? Would any?
Terracotta
1mo ago
This seems directly contradicted by the various attempts at measuring the frequency of baseline human relationships.
Why would the existence of undatable people in every era imply that their frequency must remain constant over time? That's true if datability is entirely genetic or if it's strictly relative (e.g. datability = being in the top 70% [or whatever]). But if animal courtship rituals involve complex, learned social behavior, then you could easily have cultural and environmental shifts that would reduce the number of people with the social ability to do courting effectively, regardless of their motivation or desire.
For instance, it strikes me that in every era, when you see intelligent young people who grew up like Extremely Online young men today (that is: indulged but also isolated, mostly sedentary life between school and home, 0-2 siblings under the care of a pampering mom or nanny, pressured to study hard with no economic constraints well through their early 20s, socializing largely virtually or in adult-controlled spaces, allowed to pursue status by developing obsessive, frivolous solitary or same-sex hobbies) - the introverted ones also commonly end up unpartnered or childless and a little eccentric. That's the H.P. Lovecraft story and it seems like practically the median trajectory for Gilded Age scions especially, but you can find instances all through history and across cultures.
So as more people are raised like this, you'd expect the ranks of the undatable to grow over time, assuming that some level of charisma or social confidence are necessary to inciting female desire in the absence of countervailing factors. It's just the "zoo animals can't mate in captivity" or the "my dog doesn't get along with other dogs" problem.
Roadway peeing is fine but does incrementally degrade the commons.
Also, it's unnecessary. If you have four kids, you're in an SUV or a minivan, so get a folding potty seat like a Potette and have the kids use it right in the back seat of the car. Potty gets lined, trash-can-style, with a plastic shopping bag (double up for security) plus an absorbent puppy pad or leftover diaper in the bottom of the bag, tie up the bag for easy discarding when everybody's done, and it's surprisingly tidy. Advantages are that it allows toilet paper use and works with #2 as well as #1.
fyi for when you're on foot, they also make pee pals for girls!
Terracotta
3mo ago
Main characters in media and games are depicted as unrealistically powerful across virtually all material domains, including physical contests and bodily feats of skill but also depictions of physical handicrafts, animal interactions, vehicles and projectiles, etc. That's because almost nobody in the audience has any actual experience making, building or doing anything with their bodies in the real world, so they have zero gauge of what's plausible and no reason to care.
So yeah, a woman can't beat a guy at arm-wrestling, and also mining doesn't mean swinging a weightless pickaxe until big nuggets of gold drop out of the rock face, and also IRL that pudgy gamer could barely even lift that longsword, and also a roadrunner mostly can't outsmart a coyote. But audiences like cartoon logic because it's nice to imagine that we are powerful and other people's skills are easy.
Terracotta
3mo ago
This one Im confused by. I think I do this and see others do it. My father, who is most definitely not a feminist, does it.
Wish I could meet your father, he sounds like a cool guy.
Terracotta
3mo ago
In that specific story, yes, but the emotional thrust of the trope is that a little guy can beat a much larger opponent through his superior bravery, skill or virtue. And underdog physical conflict stories are all over 60s-90s boys' media, from Tom & Jerry through The Karate Kid. TvTropes helpfully points out that this is the convention for final boss levels in videogames, as well.
So Muscles are Meaningless is not one-sided in its gender appeal.
Terracotta
3mo ago
In all fairness, there's a very long history of underdog sports and fighting stories where it's also presumed that tiny, willowy men can totally beat the brawny jocks through sheer pluck or clever moves or ancient Asian secrets, or whatever. Likewise films and books where humans defeat obviously larger and stronger animals in physical fights.
Cope-oriented David-vs-Goliath media tropes were being served up to insecure men long before they got cross-applied to women.
Terracotta
4mo ago
Sounds like the object-level positions are secondary to some underlying value or ethos that is perceived to be shared with Bob but not Carol. In Walterodim's read, this value would probably be "logical consistency." But it could just as well be a certain type of class consciousness: both anarcho-libertarians and socialists have a kind of working-class, artisanal sensibility that values the individual worker's control over what he creates. Or a perceived character feature: maybe they're small-government conservative because they value tight communities of mutual aid, which socialists could also be perceived as chasing even if they go a bit astray with it.
Terracotta
5mo ago
Wasn't my premise, and if it was OP's it was pre-disproved by the guy upthread saying men should statusmax through their twenties to avoid marrying somebody fat (!).
I was responding to hydroacetylene's comment on the psychology of women wanting to finish at least college and maybe some entry-level career groundwork before marrying, but if we're talking practical fertility decisions I also don't see a bunch of 23-year-old romantic tradhusbands lining up to woo and support their young wives and eventual five children, 1950s-style. If a single person in this thread knew an early-20s family-minded guy who'd proposed to his girlfriend and been turned down, I'd be surprised.
I actually don't know what anybody's vested interest is in having other people do young tradmarriages, since nobody seems to want it for themselves. Maybe I'm wrong, but to the extent that people argue from personal experience, it mostly seems to be about getting annoyed by movie/TV girlbosses or DEI chatter in college and feeling like those would go away if we could make young SAHMhood a thing.
I'm still lost. I was responding to @hydroacetylene's point, where he argued that women avoid 20yo SAHMhood not from vanity but from anxiety about risks. He blamed media "fearmongering" about rape and abuse.
I said that while I agreed about the anxiety/risk part, it was unfairly dismissive to round it off to women gullibly believing fear porn. I listed various misfortunes that families semi-commonly encounter, where a woman could spare her eventual children a lot of hardship by having decent career options in place, including the unexpected death, disability or long-term unemployment of the husband.
I really don't see how it's relevant that in those cases the husband should also want his wife to have good career prospects? AFAICT the only way the husband's alignment would have "big implications for our general picture of the situation" is if we're arguing about 20-year-old SAHMhood as a proxy for WOMEN BAD MEN GOOD. In which case I guess, sure, gotcha, this is totally an instance where MEN GOOD, but I was never denying that! And I sure hope it's not what everybody else was arguing anyway.
Could you say more about how you think the general picture is changed by the husband and wife having common interests in the scenarios you cited?
Terracotta
5mo ago
I hope I'm following what you're saying. It seems like you're asking me, since we agree that both men and women should want wives to have good career options in the event that the husband dies or becomes disabled, why I'm listing "husband's unexpected death or illness" among the reasons a family-minded woman might still want to finish college and work for a couple years before marrying and having children.
Is that summary accurate? If so, what does the fact that this is a "non-conflicting" concern have to do with the debate over whether women could be justified in not marrying at 20? I don't get it.
The everyday impulse/akrasia thing you're describing matches female sexuality just fine, I think: certainly pure horniness does impel women sometimes to make choices they later regret. But I quoted your passage upthread, re: male sexual desire conferring an aura of importance and seriousness on its object, because that seems interestingly different. Normal appetitive impulses like eating junk food are hard not to act on, but they don't really involve a sense that "this is serious, this is not a joke," do they? I've gobbled a donut in a weak moment, but I would never say that the donut felt serious at the time, nor would I be annoyed if somebody joked about eating. In fact, I was very aware of the ridiculousness of it, even as I was eating. If somebody offered me donuts in exchange for state secrets, no part of me would think it was the right thing to do. I don't think I would have willingly hurt someone to get at the donuts. If somebody took the donuts away mid-binge, I would be relieved; I wouldn't have laid deep plots to get some more.
Whereas, the passage you quoted seems to be getting at a kind of a weird transvaluation-of-values field that testosterone creates around the object of desire, where whatever the penis wants seems worthwhile and important in itself: not just having a moment of weakness and regretting it, but having one's whole will redirected, such that old values or priorities just aren't relevant anymore. That's probably a stretch based on just the one statement in your comment, but I can think of various other examples that this makes sense of. I've heard people remark on the cold, unapologetic demeanor of men who have midlife-crisis affairs or come out as gay, etc.: maybe they cared about their wife and kids before, but now absolutely nothing feels as important as pursuing that hot secretary or that succession of Grindr hookups, whatever. Fetishists have laid incredibly complex, years-long plans in starry-eyed pursuit of goals that violate basic self-preservation logic, like freezing off their hands to replace them with paws or recruiting another man who will cut off, fry and eat their own balls. That value-revision power gets deployed for good in the whole manic pixie dream girl trope, where just the experience of sexually desiring a fetishized girl (usually a cypher, not a person: normally the guy lusts at first sight after noticing her 1-2 incredibly attractive physical features) supposedly revitalizes the hero's whole life, changes his priorities and makes him a permanently better man.
I obviously have no firsthand experience of male sexuality, but sexual desire that can change your sense of what's important, your affections, and your character, making you permanently callous to loved ones or calmly indifferent to the loss of your limbs, feels qualitatively different from donut-binge genital impulses. The only other thing I know of with that eerie character-rewriting effect is substance addiction.
I'm absolutely not saying that men are crazy, because I don't know what it would mean to be "sane" at the level of basic motivational wiring. It just is what it is. Obviously the process can work for good if young men lust after wholesome people in wholesome ways. I was just saying that it would feel very strange to have a constantly-on hormonal system that could fully rewrite one's conscious sense of reality itself like that, because aside from having a baby, I don't know of any female hormonal dynamics that can accomplish anything similar. But I'd also be curious if this resonates, if testosterone-based sexual desire feels to most men as it does to the hand-freezing-off guy, or if there's something fundamentally missing from my outsider's impressions of how the whole thing works.
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