Terracotta
1d ago
You sound pretty firm that this isn't any kind of inferiority complex. Have you tried unpacking a bit more what it actually is?
For instance, when you think about the body-count disparity, are you angrier that you waited (FOMO) or that she (maybe) didn't?
When you say you wanted it to be "special" and that you feel "bitter" about your first time, are you most upset about the experience getting devalued in itself? Or that she might value it less (giving you feelings of rejection/ being unappreciated)? Or that you are getting someone less pristine? Or just pure anger at the idea of someone preceding you?
For what it's worth, although randy Aellas apparently do exist, a large proportion of most young women's early "body count" outside committed LTRs will have been owing to some combination of: unpleasant direct pressure or manipulation by a date; unpleasant social expectations to seem cool and not like a boring prude; and/or maladaptive coping impulses from some kind of painful trauma or personal issues. Women mostly talk about these youthful encounters as war stories, and while not everyone would admit outright regret, I've never, in my whole life, heard a (non-professional) woman express enjoyment of the sex itself in an early-20s hookup. No icky memory of a casual hookup will make the average woman less appreciative of the deep, intimate sexual connection she's finally found with the love of her life, so if you're at all concerned that she won't find it special... that really really is not an issue. You might as well be jealous that she had some near-miss collisions with drunk drivers before setting out on a road trip with you.
Terracotta
3d ago
It's pretty easy to argue that any psychology based on survey data is bullshit-- which is, from what I can see, most of psychology. Much of the rest of it, even when you take out the large portion that was derived from outright fraud or BS methodology-juicing, suffers from the problem of being so abstract that the results are baked into the terminology itself: for instance, once you create a taxonomy for "attachment style," or once you agree that homosexual inclinations are or aren't a disorder, you've guaranteed a certain range of findings for your studies no matter what.
On the other hand, as an expression of our society's current conventional wisdom about human personality and relationships, I think most mainstream psychology does fine. It really does seem to serve a cultural function similar to the role of mainstream theology in earlier eras, which I guess makes sense given that etymologically psychology is "study of the soul."
This happened a while ago but I have been thinking about it lately because I feel like my falling out with Alex illustrates a quintessential failure mode of the sort of polite liberalism espoused by commentators like David Roberts, Bill Kristol, and Scott Alexander.
I'm confused by this; are you in the role of polite libertarian here, or is Alex? Facially, this sounds like a bog-standard case of pampered sociopath twentysomethings happily bullying a weaker person for laughs, but feeling shocked and offended when any unpleasant consequences come for a Real Person of their class and social circle. Tale as old as time, surely? As Mel Brooks said: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
The only slight wrinkle here is that Alex had the cognitive capacity to build a bullshit ad-hoc argument around his visceral indignation at a system that would impose any suffering on him or his friends. But as you point out, the argument makes no sense, and presumably Alex himself would drop it immediately if someone ever committed a crime against him. What is the connection to Stand Your Ground laws?
Virtually all political structures seem like an attempt to engage group dynamics and/or abstract logic to remedy personal grievances. What does gender have to do with it, or what are the male-coded political structures that you see as somehow pure of personal considerations?
Are you sure it's not just that areas of greater practical concern for women (family, children, sexual morality, domestic violence, etc.) seem inappropriately "personal" to you because you don't share the concern, whereas you naturally perceive male-coded personal issues as just objectively Important?
Edit: for instance, there's a discussion lower down about Stand Your Ground laws, which seem clearly like an attempt (on both sides) to use the law to work out a set of very personal, very male-coded feelings about physical aggression and dominance, regulating a set of interactions that are overwhelmingly between men. One might argue "oh no, that's actually a question of objective safety/ public welfare/ individual rights," or "plenty of people of the opposite gender also take sides in this debate," but after all the exact same thing could be said about family law or rape legislation, right?
Terracotta
9d ago
Seriously? Stories of guys eagerly pursuing naive virgins, seducing them with promises of marriage, then becoming becoming disgusted and rejecting them once they succumb ("I could never marry such a slut") are commonplace to the point of cliché through most of Western history. If you don't hear as much about the dynamic in the context of marriage, it's because (a) people generally have more serious reasons than pure arousal for entering or maintaining a binding economic contract, and (b) the SOP for a man who's less aroused by his wife has not been to shout it from the rooftops but just to pursue alternative options elsewhere.
Terracotta
9d ago
Well, innocence of personality can be endearing. And chastity, continence, fidelity, strength, self-control are admirable character features in both men and women.
But purity isn't any attribute of the beloved themselves, it's just an imagined state of non-contamination by sex: for instance, feeling that a woman is pure when no cocks have ever touched her but impure when 1,000 cocks have touched her, whatever. That's a clear setup for a fetish-based arousal, i.e. arousal by a thing itself separated from the person, because the energy of the appeal comes from one's feelings toward the contaminant, not toward the partner themselves.
For some folks, it appears to be impulse of underlying disgust for one's own sexuality, the virginal submissive tradwife envisioned as a retreat from all those dirty whores and your uncomfortable desire/repulsion toward them. For others, it seems more motivated by aggression/dominance and the appeal of getting to be the one whose sexual contact destroys the pure thing. Either way, the big complex feelings driving that attraction would be between the guy and his own self-image, not actually between the guy and his partner.
Which is a point the article also makes, actually, when the writer realizes that all the gooners' cave photos seem to center on their own erect penis standing up in the middle.
Terracotta
10d ago
Do I think that Ezra Klein or other feminists are primarily or even substantially responsible for a subculture of porn addicts? No, but the force they apply does push in that direction.
Am I recommending "men being allowed to rape" as being better than this or that social ill? No! But the thinking that supposes that that's the only alternative is going to be increasingly destructive.
From the original article:
What binds these disparate masturbators together, then, are the communal rituals surrounding the goonstate... By far the most popular of these rituals is “feeding,” a sort of porn-mediated cybersex in which one gooner sustains another’s session by sending them curated porn from their private collection.
There is, it should be said, a separate, equally vibrant, and by all accounts far less psychosexually muddled world of gay-porn gooning.
this phenomenon in its full sweep can be traced at least partially to the fact that, in the span of about five years earlier this century, virtually every child in the developed world was granted instant, unrestricted access not merely to hardcore pornography but to some of the most extreme examples of it ever produced in human history. Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit.
he’d spent part of our call trying to explain the appeal of damaging your penis badly enough to permanently prevent getting an erection, but not so badly as to prevent masturbating for hours on end.
In the introduction to his recent video “Follow Me,” a woman’s voice whispers ominously, or perhaps sexily, that “over two hundred ten million people worldwide are addicted to social media. You are one of those people. Keep scrolling. Further. Deeper. Forever. And ever. Submit. To porn. You can’t. Turn back.”
Whatever conversation needs to be had about little boys getting traumatized by hardcore images at 10 and proceeding to spend 20-30h/ week frantically rubbing themselves to 27 windows' worth of simultaneous pumping penis images... the need for more tradwives is not at the heart of that conversation. If anything, tradwives are the shadow selves of egirls and thots: the two reciprocally determine each other within the same memetic system, and that system doesn't make a lot of sense beyond online porn.
Plenty of people have thought they could escape tedious self-loathing by using/ controlling/ hating/ destroying another person instead, but I don't think it ever really works that way.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Yeah, I do understand using the LLM for search or even for a link-enriched overview to cross-check with real resources, as you describe.
I mostly get confused when people Ask ChatGPT, consume the generated content and stop there, which (for a Motte level of understanding "assertions can be wrong," "sources can be mistaken," "context matters," "models sometimes confidently hallucinate") seems like a weird combination of definitely caring and definitely not caring about whatever fact you're researching.
Terracotta
2mo ago
So effectively you're using ChatGPT as... an ad blocker for spammy sites?
That's a pretty interesting development in the eternal war of consumer versus enshittification. It'll become still more so when all the wiki content is itself LLM-authored and the LLMs pivot to putting secret ad space in their system prompts, like Google's sponsored results.
Terracotta
2mo ago
It still leaves unanswered questions, though, because however cursed bars and the internet may be, it's not like they actively interfere with developing relationships by more normal means (do they?).
Nobody needs another rape-culture/ perving-at-work debate, so let's set aside the decline in school and workplace relationships, but that chart also shows an approximately 35% drop in the proportion of people who met through friends and a 50% drop in the proportion who met through family. Say in 1995, Ann's cousin might have set her up with his cute pre-vetted army buddy Jim, or Cathy might have invited her friend Dave to a board game night with one of the single girls from her softball league. Well, cousins, army buddies, softball leagues, personally compatible humans still exist, so what's happening to interfere with those connections now? Do Ann and the army buddy still meet, but now he thinks she's too fat or she thinks he's too short compared with the hotties they shop online? Do Dave and the softball friend still do board games, but now they're under-socialized and both kind of self-absorbed, so neither of them makes a move while still feeling offended at the other sex's lack of interest? Or what?
Terracotta
2mo ago
And maybe it's regional, but after HS I never once encountered a woman who wasn't "acting like that".
This feels so bizarrely foreign, because almost every married couple I know, myself included, built their early relationship in a way that closely matches @urquan's account. This happened mostly in college, but with a smattering of post-college relationships as well. Just a lot of average-looking, average-quality people hanging out and doing random social club things, shyly getting to know a similarly average-looking person and asking them to a play or movie or something, eventually getting serious then either breaking up or getting married and starting a family in a more-or-less dual-career household. Nobody "acted like that," that I'm aware of. No first-date hookups, negging, harems, nude pic demands, findom, tradwifery, false or true rape accusations. Very rarely any cheating, even. The guys were mostly respectful, earnest and nice, the women were mostly honest and friendly. Some of those marriages got worse over time, but many are still doing OK.
I would really love to know where all these apparently horrible young singles (of both sexes) come from. Are people trying to date way above their league and getting toyed with as a result? Did all the helicopter parenting just raise a generation of unpleasant narcissists who will never play well with others?
Terracotta
2mo ago
It’s more akin to web surfing or browsing Wikipedia than chatting on a forum or whatever. I will use it as an open format encyclopedia and explicitly not as a conversationalist sounding board.
OK, this has mystified me for a long time. I use LLMs for various editing, writing, coding tasks, occasionally to kludge a moderator for party games, to simulate human feedback on human-oriented questions, and once in a long while to suggest a starting point for a lit review or to locate a half-remembered link. But can you help me understand the "encyclopedia" and "web surfing replacement" use-cases, when we have actual encyclopedias and a web to surf?
When I see a granny or a teen just asking ChatGPT, I assume it's because they can't internet, can't read, or don't give a shit about the quality and provenance of their information, but for a super-online, epistemically hyper-aware Mottizen to do this feels like hearing someone say they hire a guy to order all their food, chew it and spit it in their mouth.
Terracotta
3mo ago
I mean, I chose engineering because it's an area where genuine technical ability/ technically excellent work exists, and because it draws personality types (both male and female) who tend to get excited about the material work itself and who want to use their technical ability to do a good job. Also because I have first- and second-hand personal experience of adjacent things happening.
Sales and similar bro-professions seem much more like jobs where persuasion through performing a social role is the whole point, so it's hard to imagine someone complaining about their externally-imposed social role getting in the way of their good work. I know a realtor who works her augmented breasts very effectively as part of her job, and she doesn't seem upset about it at all, any more than the local car salesman who leans into stereotypes with his down-home aw-shucks accent. But maybe I'm being unfair to sales, and actually there is a lot of technical subtlety there as well, who knows?
Terracotta
3mo ago
As far as I can say she does, in fact, get to say this. Literally what is standing in her way?
People normally engage with the world using preconstructed schemata, so once a set of expectations is in place, everyone's pleasure or disappointment in you gets measured in terms of those expectations. For most people, a pet cat that decided it loved playing catch-the-Frisbee would just be a fucked-up and confusing pet, even if it was really good at Frisbee. Because Frisbee time is what you want from your dog, not from your cat.
What people want from the office hot girl is cute mannerisms, new outfits, and opportunities to flatter her (and smugly affirm your own superiority) by overpraising her work. Nobody expects actual valid professional ideas from the office hot girl, and if she volunteered any, she almost certainly wouldn't get genuine interest or constructive critique. Similarly, what pro-DEI people want from their diverse colleague is fierceness and funkiness, unusual hair and activist politics, and the opportunity to appear younger and more hip by ostentatiously approving of her. Nobody expects or wants actual good work ideas from that person, either, and they would almost certainly be confused and annoyed if they bothered to listen in the first place.
Solid professional ideas are what you expect from Bob down the hall who is neither a hot dateable woman engineer nor a brave diverse woman engineer, but just an engineer. So everyone listens seriously to Bob's engineering ideas, hopes they will be good, and is pleased with Bob when he meets those expectations.
(When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest. Same with the strong diverse woman engineer if a more fashionable political category turns up. This is why women like the one who wrote the OP's article seek permission to be Bob instead.)
Thanks, that's a fascinating bit of anthropology right there! Wish I could read a thorough firsthand account by a straight guy who's tried it: the male experience of unreciprocated male sexual attention is really intriguing to me.
What breaks the symmetry in your example is the fact that straight women do, actually, find at least some men attractive some of the time. Some of the attention she gets throughout her life will be from creepy undesirables. But some of it will be from men who are genuinely attractive, and who she may be attracted to in turn, and who she may judge to be good romantic partners.
The tricky part there is that there's notoriously no reliable way to convert male sexual interest to male romantic attachment, and in fact the former sometimes seems to operate at the expense of the latter (see: madonna/whore, "she put out too soon," etc.). Very inexperienced girls often do have a pleasant few months of mistaking sexual demand for actual social capital, but there's inevitably a rude awakening, and I suspect most hot women could tell you the painful story of when it happened to them.
Interestingly, in cishet girl lore, there's a coping fantasy about a particular kind of female physicality, distinct from the normal T&A variety, that somehow connects up with a woman's soul and channels male physical attraction into magical emotional intimacy and commitment. You can see it in Disney films and romance novels, where the hero absolutely never starts by noticing the protagonist's bouncing breasts, but may be magnetically drawn to something spiritual and ineffable about her hair or eyes or posture, which turns out to express some deeply unique feature of her personal character. I think the average-demisexual woman, if surrounded by men who find her beautiful in that way, would indeed be in the enviable position you describe, where she has only to wait for the right candidate to close the bargain. But unless she's 15 or has serious daddy issues, the average woman surrounded by men ogling her tits knows that she's about 180 degrees from being in that position, and if anything is depressingly farther than ever from pair-bonding with anyone willing to "pay a fair price," as you put it.
Terracotta
3mo ago
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about? Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between.
I don't know, she seemed pretty clear to me. Here's the key passage that answers your specific question:
Today, women are invited to succeed, but only as women; to claim rights, but only through the vocabulary of identity.
Regardless of norms in the family or on dates, earlier-wave feminists wanted to not be judged by their gender in the marketplace, in professional and political life. The idea was, as you correctly identify, for a female engineer to be perceived by her colleagues as an engineer first and not "hey, tits!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth."
The author seems to be arguing that the modern left has replaced that interaction with "hey, diversity points!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth." Either way, the individual woman is reduced to a passive carrier of purely instrumental value for somebody else, and (critically) not in ways she herself chosen. She doesn't get to say "my competent engineering, which I've worked hard to develop, is the value I offer the world," because the people around her have already decided that her key value is either (a) tits or (b) decorative diversity points, neither of which redound to her personal credit or are in her control. That's what I take to be her point about self-authorship still being out of reach.
Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate".
Yes, this matches how I read her argument. Although re: the intrinsic value of the male body... this is something I never quite understood about the whole female-privilege "men have to be human doings, women get to be human beings" meme. If a man longs to be passively valued for the fuckable parts of his body, by people he doesn't especially want to fuck, it seems like that should be trivially achievable by hanging out in more gay men's spaces. I'd imagine a comparable range of male body types would be admired there, and pretty young men could get nearly the same mileage a pretty young woman could get. Maybe the target audience is not quite as large, but there are easily identified locales where you'd have solid odds of finding someone appreciative. In complete seriousness, when guys complain that it would be so nice to have a body with intrinsic value in others' eyes, why do they not explore the many places where this is already true?
Terracotta
3mo ago
Fair, but that delicate interaction happened in a deeply individualistic society where you had the leverage of both parties knowing it was your right to choose. Tilt the conventional balance back toward hierarchy, connection, fixed roles and knowing your place, and now the peremptory or even tyrannical father comes back into the Overton window - the sort of father who is empowered to command rather than negotiate, who can refuse consent to a minor child's marriage or force an apprenticeship and back that up with physical discipline, and who has the right to make those decisions as he pleases without necessarily consulting his son.
Also back in the Overton window would be the full weight of social and political censure against rebellious subjects, disobedient sons, disorderly commoners, runaway 'prentices, religious heretics (I hope you're not Protestant?), innovators and entrepreneurs, misers and profiteers, and various other social groups who our present-day society lauds to the skies precisely for not accepting their customary role and place in the order of things.
Terracotta
3mo ago
I did have a ‘duty’ frame in mind, but what I was really trying to get at in my post was- different people have different duties.
Part of the problem is that underneath those surface differences, those varied daily duties were (and were explicitly claimed to be) the exact same set of primary duties: work as hard as you can, deny yourself, give up your life for those weaker than you, obey those set by God in authority over you. People forget that this cosmic hierarchy used to entail quite a lot of frictional social-class-based and age-based role rigidity, as well, so everybody had the daily experience of both authority and submission. In European trad systems, for example, the working man needs to obey both his lady and his lord and doff his cap to his betters of both sexes, everybody needs to obey the priest, who in turn needs to obey the bishop who needs to obey the Pope, etc. Sons and daughters need to obey both their mothers and their fathers, even as they reach uppity young adulthood. Of course, few humans are good at either authority or submission, so there are endless quarrels about boundaries for all this. But it's really clear how all of the role systems are upheld by the same explicitly analogical thinking and grounded in presumptions of not just difference but also similarity across stations.
The interesting corollary to this is that the dismantling of various family roles flows directly from the (economically-driven) political movement to dismantle class, legal and religious hierarchies, and is driven by exactly the same appeals to natural self-ownership, liberty of conscience and inborn equality before God. Although the US does pass through a couple of decades where class/political/religious hierarchy is gone but some limited gender hierarchy still holds, I don't think it's a stable equilibrium. For the middling sort, the system inevitably gets torn apart by the inherent contradictions in believing strongly in class mobility and spiritual self-determination but not in gender mobility or family self-determination.
Once you're committed to a class ethos of "you are not born to any fixed (economic) station, you can be anything you want to be! You should use your talents to try to rise in the world, in accord with your individual desires," then it's pretty hard to maintain the exact opposite line as regards genitalia. Even for yourself, I wonder if you'd get behind a system where a wife's natural duty to [whatever] implied that you also had a natural duty to obey your parents and go to college as they wished?
Terracotta
3mo ago
Nobody cares if the groom is not a virgin, least of all the bride.
But as @Clementine points out, in older systems the duty wasn't grounded in the preferences of the relationship partner. If you start with "your bodies doesn't belong to you as fun toys to fuck around with, and your lives doesn't belong to you as a fun game to score as much worldly status as you can; both of you are given this for a higher purpose," then you get rather easily to all the natural-law thinking about the high status of sexual continence and faithful marriage and self-sacrifice and family formation, for both men and women.
I don't think you can get there from quid-pro-quo negotiations between two rational actors with no common commitment to a higher moral purpose, because prisoner's-dilemma thinking kicks in immediately, as in fact you can see in responses below. Yeah, but what if s/he defects and I get exploited? Sure, I'll [maybe]cooperate eventually, but s/he needs to go first.
Terracotta
3mo ago
It could be just be part of a general tendency toward avoidant behavior and low resilience to stress. I'm sure "attachment style" is a useful handle for certain patterns of learned social behavior in intimate relationships, but getting anxious and ghosting after a mildly stressful text interaction doesn't seem meaningfully different from other kinds of maladaptive avoidance, like procrastinating studying with videogames or avoiding opening your bills.
All the literature I've read shows increasing screen use associated with impaired emotional regulation, increased irritability, anxiety and impulsivity, decreased long-term planning and persistence. Any one of those effects could handily account for people becoming less able to weather any stress in a relationship.
Terracotta
4mo ago
Like many impulses, they're fundamentally immune to examination by reason (knowing that the donut is unhealthy for you doesn't stop it from tasting good).
Impulse control follows a bell curve. Most men are able to rein in their sexual impulses and live perfectly normal lives in accordance with social expectations.
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.
The fundamental point you're gesturing at is correct: men are insane!
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.
Terracotta
4mo 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
4mo 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?
You seem very confident in your intuitions about your partners' enjoyment during sex, which is not something that men or women are notoriously great at judging. (And for reference, young women mostly giggle when they're nervous or uncomfortable, and vaginal fluid fluctuates with hormones, not necessarily with arousal.) But your experience is your own, and I'm sorry you apparently had some bad sex with a woman who loved you.
I'm a little confused by the wider claim, but if the idea is that women exclusively enjoy casual sex with Chads, hate sex with men they love, and are unaroused by romantic attention, emotional intimacy, care or commitment... well, that's a pretty extraordinary thing to argue, but if true it seems like it should be not "funny" but great? "Bang as many hotties as possible, no uggos, no fats, no true love, lie as much as you can" closely matches various classic evopsych statements about men's preferences and MOs, so if that's really what girls like too, then seems like we should be headed into a golden age of harmonious gender relations.
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