SkookumTree
4d ago
No, but people ask if I have kids. It seems odd. Like asking if I’ve climbed Everest.
SkookumTree
4d ago
What about just hooking up or dating or something other than marriage? Also hospitals suck.
SkookumTree
6d ago
Thanks, I guess; when you laid it out like that and suggested I shoot myself instead, you essentially argued that the stigma was too isolating and the dysfunction too great. Basically you’re in hell. Seems hocking would be a better bet…
SkookumTree
7d ago
Hell, Cesare Beccaria described something like this in 1768!
SkookumTree
7d ago
I guess? Idk, I just had a lot of bitches as friends
SkookumTree
7d ago
Thanks, I guess.
It’s different if your wife becomes fat during the marriage, but too much of that is not good and might break it. Maybe should break it.
SkookumTree
7d ago
Thanks? It’s different if you have a wife and she becomes fat. But eating herself into a nursing home at 45 is probably grounds for divorce in my personal book. Yours may be different. Hopefully you can obtain ozempic. Good luck.
Basically that Faustian bargain doesn’t pay out, fair deal. The devil is naturally the devil.
SkookumTree
7d ago
Essentially: your partner’s food addiction plus or minus bad genes will drag you down into social poverty, possibly financial poverty. You and any children will fight a shit ton of bad genetics (ozempic might help and it will be a generic in ten or fifteen years) stigma and other bullshit.
Remaining single, you can have the fig leaf of being “focused on your career” and that is more respectable. There’s probably a reason why short working class guys go for women twice their weight and short upper middle class guys are very “focused” on careers in medicine or tech. Single, you aren’t also hauling damn near a quarter ton of fat and the bullshit that comes with it around and swimming upstream against it. Were you swole of spirit enough to successfully fight this fight, you would also be able to find someone better and not have to engage in a heroic and largely futile attempt to make a designer purse from nothing but pig ears.
Fair defense. I buy it. Essentially the stigma is too strong for most to overcome, and isolates you and your partner. Healthcare costs eat up the sophisticated or expensive mechanisms like boarding school that can be used to partially mitigate this dysfunction. Thank you.
SkookumTree
7d ago
Bitches in the Jo freeman sense. Makes sense that career women got a reputation for being difficult and shrill. Also competent.
Hmm. I would like to hear more about your reasoning. Either path can be defended as honorable, but you are arguing for the monk one. Certainly that one seems the cleanest, in many more ways than one. I can swear l will genuinely hear you out on this one, Southkraut.
SkookumTree
7d ago
Or he might just be short and upper middle class such that he’s disgusted by women twice his weight.
I don’t remember, but I think puritans married in their mid 20s
SkookumTree
7d ago
Why not have a gender neutral way to discriminate somehow? Debt payments tied to years of practice or something.
SkookumTree
7d ago
I still think they’re out of my league. I have seen neurotypical people turn in performance that could probably pass for voice acting commercials on their deathbeds. I can’t do that. Therefore I’m hoping for basic hygiene and not getting killed, maimed, or jailed. I hope that’s achievable.
SkookumTree
2mo ago
And possibly honorable life paths for perma-single people; there are some valuable, honorable economic niches that are hard on marriage and family. Not impossible - but hard. Long-haul truck driving, neurosurgery, stuff like that.
SkookumTree
2mo ago
I suppose. But holy shit were there a lot of perplexed guys when locker-room talk took place in my youth. The guys would talk about tits and ass and I'd say I wanted an abrasive bitch.
SkookumTree
2mo ago
Ha - the 400-pound ones that nonetheless maintain basic hygiene and work their jobs? Five years ago, I was rather disinterested in that prospect; now, it seems like it might not be too terrible. Sure, there might be home health aides a couple decades earlier than I'd hoped and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, but that's not terrible; I had a medical school classmate like that.
SkookumTree
2mo ago
No, but a couple of years ago I became reconciled to the possibility of dealing with severe weight-related health problems in a partner in middle age. That isn't ideal - but What's Eating Gilbert Grape beats the crap out of kids with FAS, a mom on fentanyl maybe causing chaos and legal problems, or just plain crazy - as in 'felony child abuse' crazy. Therefore I don't consider fatness a dealbreaker until it makes them unable to do basic hygiene...although "a sprained ankle away from being bedridden" is a bit of a hard sell to me now. Five years from now I'd be OK with it to be honest.
SkookumTree
2mo ago
That's because of 1) motivation - if Everest was as easy as seeing the Grand Canyon, how many would go and 2) you probably hang out with many more autistic people than even somewhat casual mountaineers. The criteria I'd use is something like "Do you own an ice axe and crampons?"
SkookumTree
2mo ago
Yeah, that is a hell of a bullet to bite. "Humans must be controlled or their sexuality will destroy society" seems broadly reasonable, but fundie Islam/Handmaid's Tale seems like a durable abomination.
SkookumTree
2mo ago
If this is true, you have a nasty problem where you're running civilization off of restricting otherwise-capable women from competing for jobs or niches like 'surgeon' when they can do the job just as well as any other man. It's arguable that a civilization that doesn't have enough people willing to voluntarily contribute should just go belly up.
SkookumTree
2mo ago
men need a parallel kind of deference in childhood, mostly focused on their much delayed organizational skills
Have you just considered scaring the ever-loving shit out of them, coupled with describing organization and neatness as a moral virtue - and the opposite as a MORAL failing? I am reasonably sure that a sufficiently extreme level of shame, fear, and valorization of neatness and organization could make most boys well-organized. If we see a teenage boy's messy room as an indicator of moral failure and potential evil, rather than a common peccadillo? Teenage boys will have cleaner rooms.
I mean - I successfully applied Cold War-era deterrence theory at 11 to a family argument that I was highly motivated to win and perceived as an existential danger; Westerners in the middle class are generally uncomfortable with threatening this level of consequence to preteens except in extremis.
SkookumTree
2mo ago
If I had to guess at examples/exceptions, the Puritans would be pretty high on the list. The island of Inis Beag might've been too small for aristocracy.
SkookumTree
2mo ago
Yes. Very few people can be professional ballet dancers, either - and "Chad" is every bit as determined as any world-class athlete. His social gracefulness probably cannot be described in English, at least not the dialects any of us speak. It would take Paul Ekman and his team a hundred years to articulate what Chad can do - a microexpression held for a tenth of a second too long can communicate an entire sentence.
SkookumTree
2mo ago
Essentially, dating is a hock like challenge, good luck in the boreal forest and tundra.
Ha, I guess it’s an Alaskan wilderness adventure for me. The hock provideth.
More options
Context Copy link