BahRamYou
22hr ago
I read an interview once with a prostitute who also had a boyfriend. She said she loved him very much, but it caused problems all around. When she was with him she was tired from having sex in her job and just wanted to take a break. When she went back to work, she felt like she was cheating on her boyfriend. Not sure if she was telling her boyfriend the truth about her job, but it caused problems all around.
Good review. I'm also a big fan of that book, and of Houllebecq in general.
Worth noting that the book came out in 2001, presumably based on what it was like in the 90s (I'm very curious how much of this he experienced directly and how much was just his imagination or interviews with other people). I went there a couple years ago, so I can speak to what it's like. In some ways things are still the same, but in some ways things are different:
- onlike ticket sales, no need for a travel agency. Not a lot of people doing prepackage travel tours, at least not from Western countries.
- online dating is a thing. In Thailand a lot of the female profiles are either obviously prostitutes or blatantly looking for a rich husband. But brothels and streetwalkers are still a thing there
- The Thai economy has developed a lot, going from roughly $2000 per capita in 2000 to $7000 now. Still a rather poor country, but a lot less of the desperate poverty it used to have. The average Thai girl has a lot more options now, and there's an upper-middle class who are on par with the poorer foreign tourists who go there. The girls who still do it there now are usually either from Isaan (by far the poorest, most rural part of Thailand) or from Laos or Cambodia. So it's a bet less normalized there than it used to be.
- Prostitution in the tourist areas is mostly focused on "short time". It's harder now to find the "long-long time" that used to be common there, where you basically hire a girl to be your girlfriend for the week or whatever and show you around. Still exists, but you have to look outside of the main tourist areas. And that's a shame, because I think that sort of thing does a better job giving tourists the "Romance" experience the way Houllebecq showed it in the book.
- Bangkok is weirdly segregated by race. There are different bars for whites, chinese, japanese, indians, arabs, and probably other types of people too, but those were all the ones I saw directly. They might or might not ban you directly, but they'll look at you funny for being the wrong race when you go in there.
- Most bars are run by a "mamasan" who's MTF trans. They sort of act as a third gender, helping men and women connect with each other despite limited English and general awkwardness. They're really good at it! I wish the LBGTQ community in the west could taken more of that role to bridge the gender divide.
In general I agree with your review. Houllebecq holds up a magnifying lens at the ugly warts of modern society, forcing us to confront some of the things we'd rather not think about. The sexual revolution idea of "free love" isn't going to work for everyone, it can't work for everyone because there's not enough attractive peole to go around and western society is still kind of awkward and cold about sex. One obvious solution is to solve that problem like we do everything else in capitalism- hiring poor people to do it with money.
And sure, in principle it's not that different paying a poor 3rd-world person for sex just like we pay them to sew garments or grow fruit. But it does feel different when you experience it directly. Most of us are never going to run a 3rd-world sweatshop, we just buy the t-shirts and don't think about it much. But when you go to Thailand, and some woman quote you a price for sex that you know is too high, and you don't want to get taken advantage of like a sucker, but it's still not that high and you know how poor this woman is, but then you look around and see so many other women around who look hotter and are offering it for cheaper... you feel a little piece of your soul die.
On the other hand, it was an interesting experience to see capitalism "solve" sex, the way it solves everything else. Unlimited liquor, junk food, and sex, all for sale in the same place and for basically the same price. Whatever you want, you got it. Now with legal marijuana, too!
BahRamYou
4d ago
I think the important part of the metaphor is that this isn't just any old set of tools, they belong to someone called "the master." He might lend them to you for a specific purpose like doing housework, but if you start trying to destroy his house, he will instantly call down the thunder on you. The only way to really destroy his house is to forcibly take away his power.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I think "nerds," as a specific subgroup, have lost their identity. For one thing, basically eveyone uses computers now, at least a little, so one of the core parts of being a nerd became gentrified. And all those other things you mention- band, cross country, anime, Magic, AP classes, chess, sci-fi, whatever, it's very popular with a huge swath of different people. At the same time, there's so much of that stuff that it's basically impossible for even the nerdiest to keep up with all of it.
Put it this way- I think that in the 80s there was a very real subculture of nerds, like the guy in "Ready Player One." They could all handle basic computer skills, watch Star Trek and Star Wars, quote Monty Python to each other, and play chess at an amateur level. They all had a shared reference of nerdy interests, which few normies were interested in back then. But now, that's changed in both directions- too much nerd interests to learn them all, and too many normies invading to keep the culture. Black nerds were an even more specific subtype, so they probably got pushed out even harder.
BahRamYou
5d ago
I thought that New Englanders used it to mean someone from New York, and New Yorkers used it to mean the baseball team.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Is there an objective ranking somewhere for "top five most famous chairs of the 20th century?" How would you measure that?
BahRamYou
5d ago
Hahaha. The Bauhaus strikes again!
There was always a set of bentwood chairs,blessed by Le Corbusier, which no one ever sat in because they caught you in the small of the back like a karate chop. The dining-room table was a smooth slab of blond wood (no ogee edges, no beading on the legs), around which was a set of the S-shaped, tubular steel, cane-bottomed chairs that Mies van der Rohe had designed—the second most famous chair designedin the twentieth century, his own Barcelona chair being first, but also one of the five most disastrously designed, so that by the time the main course arrived, at least one guest had pitched face forward into the lobster bisque.
Though, in this case I guess it kind of makes sense, serving double duty to both look cool and as hostile/defensive architecture to prevent people from sitting there too long.
BahRamYou
6d ago
I don't think it's an "irrational bias" to say that hurting someone emotionally is wrong. What about hurting someone physically? Can you logically prove that it's wrong to hurt someone physically, or is that also just an irrational bias?
I think it's fine to turn emotions into a moneyed exchange. Normal people do it all the time with therapists, and maybe with all service jobs like bartenders, salesmen, etc. But those people know what they're getting in for, it doesn't get sprung on them by surprise from someone with power over them. It would also be wrong to trauma dump all of your psychological problems on some poor retail cashier.
BahRamYou
6d ago
I don't really understand your point. Isn't it genuinely considered wrong for a boss to order their employee to do something that's wildly out of their job description? Or likewise to suddenly cut their pay for no reason? Usually there are rules against that sort of thing. Of course she has some agency, she can say no, but her life is going to get messed up when she gets fired, so she'd be justified in filing a lawsuit in that situation. Or at least cursing out her boss to anyone who'd listen. Making it about sex just makes it worse because it makes her think about gross things, so it's emotionally disturbing even if she can say no.
Are you an anarcho-capitalist who thinks that absolutely everything should be legal as long as there's no physical force used? I know there are some people who think that way, but that's a really fringe view that now many people share.
BahRamYou
6d ago
I feel like a lot of this could be avoided if we had paid public toilets, like they do in Europe. But those are illegal in America, so we rely on private businesses to offer bathrooms as a weird public service, and that trust can easily be broken.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Well, the short easy answer is that it's clearly illegal, and almost everyone would think that it's morally wrong. So this feels like you're asking a weird academic question like "can you logically justify from first principles why murder is wrong?" I'm not an ethical philosopher, I'm just some guy, going off of what feels right and wrong.
But sure, I'll play along. To start. this:
you are intuiting, as many do, that sex is sacred and people who trade it it engage in sacrilege.
Absolutely not me lol. I'm a lifelong atheist, and a huge degenerate who has often paid for sex. I also have some friends who were former sex workers.
I think I can confidently speak on this topic because I have so much experience with it. When you're paying for sex, it's not just a simple business transaction. It's still an intimate act that triggers strong emotions. Scientifically, it causes a huge spike of oxytocin, which is a hormone linked to pair-bonding, especially in women. So it's actually really hard to just wham-bam-thank you maam with no emotions. The girls I met who could do that seemed incredibly damaged. Most still liked to talk a little and have some sort of emotional intimicy (and I liked that too).
They also usually have a pimp/manager who can handle the business side of things. Partly that's for pragmatic reason (they can bring in customers and chase down the deadbeats who don't pay up). But I think it's also an emotional need, to separate the business side away from the sexual side. Most working girls have strict rules that they do not have sex with their own manager, and the less-shady managers should also follow that rule. If they do, they usually end up horribly abused. In that sense, even asking for sex is wrong, because it turns what used to be a strictly business relationship into this weird mixed thing, and the woman will have to constantly think about that every time she's with her boss now. Sex work is work, but it's emotional work in a weird way that's very different from normal jobs, and part of that emotional work is just dealing with men constantly propositioning you for weird sex acts.
The market will price in the value of it
In my experience there's not much of a "market price," you have to haggle for everything like an old-school bazaar. So that's another area where it gets weird, and the girl can get taken advantage of if she doesn't know how much to ask for. (or the customer can get ripped off also). I guarantee this 20-yr-old Au Pair did not know how much to charge a famous rich guy for kinky BDSM sex.
as you do, that taken to their logical conclusion make any sort of arrangement involving sex (including marriage) into rape.
Also that is totally not my position. I was trying to explain why I think what he did was morally wrong, even though it wasn't rape. There should be a middle ground of scumminess, where there's deception and coersion but not actually rape.
@FiveHourMarathon this is also my answer to you
BahRamYou
6d ago
There are many forms of power besides just physical force, which is the entire reason we have laws against underage sex or sex with drunk people. Please don't tell me you think it's fine and dandy for a boss to tell his female employee that she must have sex with him to get a job because "she has agency and can say no."
BahRamYou
6d ago
Good answer! Thanks. I'm not religious, but I do think in a similar way- we're all vulnerable to temptation, and we have to constantly use willpower to guard against it. Different people respond to different types of temptation, so I think women more often go down the path of emotional manipulation and narcissm rather than physical sexual debauchery.
I feel like the real story is that this isn't just one guy. It's part of an ongoing pattern where a lot of men turn into creepy sexpests when they're given fame and power. And this guy was able to cover it up for decades, so it makes you wonder if basically every celebrity is secretly like this and they're just hiding it. And to some extent it makes me wonder- are these celebrities uniquely terrible, or is every man a creepy sexpest at heart, and we just restrain ourselves because we don't have the power to get what we want?
BahRamYou
6d ago
I had that thought too. I think a lot of us just don't have to think about these things very much, because we don't live a life where young attractive women are constantly throwing themselves at us. For most guys "sexual ethics" are pretty simple- you go to your wife/girlfriend/LTR and see if she's in the mood. I don't know what I would do if I was living the celebrity life. I imagine that must be one hell of an intoxicating experience, and this guy has been living it for decades.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Stuff like this makes me think that "consent", as a binary yes/no, is not a good model of human relations. Like, we all agree that having sex with who's falling-down drunk is wrong, even if she enthusiastically says yes. And there's no clear line for "how much alcohol is too much." For age, there's a clear legal line, but most people still think it's creepy for a too-old man to have sex with a too-young woman. But everyone has different opinions on how much age gap is too much. A supervisor at work dating their employee is also not inherently illegal, but there's a lot of guidelines about it and situations where it can be considered into sexual harassment.
In this case, there's all sorts of things that create a power imbalance. The guy was rich, famous, and apparently charming. He had legions of fans reading his stuff when they were teenagers, so he was effectively "grooming" them without even having met them. He liked to play dom during sex, and had a lot of experience in it, while he was meeting young women with very little experience. It seems like he met a lot of women who were enthusiastically into it, to the point where he might be genuinely confused that someone wasn't consenting with him.
I wish there was a middle ground. Something in between "he's guilty of rape, send him to prison for 20 years" and "he did nothing wrong, so let him off scott-free." A fine seems meaningless when he's so rich. Maybe a good dose of social shaming is the right punishment. Even rich people still care a lot about their social reputation, and this can be a good lesson to everyone about some of the darker sides of human sexuality. Maybe sex-ed classes could include a lesson on the dangers of falling in love with a celebrity.
BahRamYou
17d ago
Bro, you must realize that what you're proposing has been proposed many times before, in various forms. Mostly famously by Bush in 2000s. I think there was a decent argument for it back then, but also lots of arguments against it which I paraphrased. I didn't doing anything malicious to you, it's just I've heard this debate way too many times. It's definitely not a good idea to pump government money into equities (either as a soverieng wealth fund or any other similar form) when equity Price-Earnings ratios are near all-time highs.
BahRamYou
18d ago
We did though... we had this debate for the entire 20 years. It went and on, it was miserable and depressing and no one seemed to offer any good solution until finally Biden pulled the plug on the whole ordeal.
No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally. We just wanted to capture/kill Bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders, and stop Afghanistan from being used as a terrorist training center. That was accomplished.
Unfortunately, in doing so we also removed their government and created a power vacuum in one of the most violent and unstable countries in the world. Everyone kind of felt bad about that, as well as worried that this would lead to more recruitment of terrorists in the future, so there was a great deal of effort expended to try and keep the country peaceful and stable.
Turns out it's very difficult to change a culture! The people there are really, really religious, so a religious government like the Taliban had a lot of popular support. They're also very poor, so often there were no good options for local allies. If you shut down their money from Pakistan and bin Laden, that pretty much leaves Opium as their only source of money, which was controlled by the Taliban.
On the plus side, after retaking power the Taliban has started to act a little bit more like a real government and less like a terrorist organization. They're doing formal diplomacy with other countries, fighting the Islamic State, and seem to be cracking down on Opium production.
BahRamYou
18d ago
The thing is, I was already a good student before I had that shitty job. It didn't motivate me to go and work harder, it actually just distracted me a lot from my studies. Saying I hopped-in-and-out is like saying someone can quickly move from from a brief drug addiction or short prison sentence. It's possible, there are people who do it, but it's not good for anyone, and there's an awful lot of people who get stuck there for lifetime. Most of the people I saw there were stuck there or in a similarly shitty job for their entire life.
I agree with you that it's unrealistic to not have shitty jobs. You seem to think that they can be done by native-born people who are just working there briefly on their path to a better life. I think that's unrealistic too, and that we should help citizens find a better life while letting immigrants from 3rd-world countries work the shitty jobs because it's still better than what they would have faced back home.
BahRamYou
18d ago
I could have phrased it better, but my position is basically the mainstream economist view that a soveriegn wealth fund like you describe wouldn't make sense for the US:
To understand SWFs—and why America does not need one—consider two issues: the source of their wealth and how they use it. Traditionally, funds have been the preserve of countries flush with either commodities (Norway and the United Arab Emirates) or foreign-exchange holdings (China and Singapore). You might assume that the creation of a wealth fund is proof that these countries are rich. To some extent, that is true. But the funds also reflect scarcity: resources are finite, and good financial management is needed to ensure future generations benefit from the current bounty. (In the case of countries with bulging foreign-exchange holdings, their resources are proceeds from intervening in markets to restrain their currencies from appreciating.) America has no such windfall to manage.
BahRamYou
19d ago
Thanks. So by way of comparison, (statistica)[https://www.statista.com/statistics/193261/unadjusted-monthly-number-of-unemployed-men-in-the-us/] tells me there's a total of about 3.5 million unemployed men in the US right now. So we even if we took literally every single unemployed man and sent him to work in construction, it wouldn't massively increase the number of construction workers.
BahRamYou
19d ago
At least by numbers, it's absolutely possible.
There's 37 universities in the top tier in China, which used to be known as project 985. It's super competitive to get into them, you need an extremely high score on the Gaokao national exam, which is like a series of AP/IB tests on crack. Top student basically devote their teen years to cramming for it. I don't know the precise score breakdown, but this comment: https://www.quora.com/In-China-what-percentage-of-students-get-admitted-to-tier-1-universities-and-how-hard-is-it says you need to be roughly in the top 1% of the general population to make it in there. This comment https://qr.ae/pYvrbd is in agreement, saying that 0.79% make it in there, which is 150,000 students per year.
By way of comparison, most ivy league schools are a little under 2000 students in each class. I'm not sure what you want to define as a top school, but let's say there's 20 of them each with 2000 students average. That's only 40,000 students in total. So you could easily fill every single spot at top American schools with Chinese kids, and it wouldn't even shrink the Chinese universities very much.
I think this really varies from person to person. I've seen too many single guy friends get married, and then when I visit their home, it's totally dominated by their wife's style. Frilly cute things everywhere, and not a single visible trace of the stuff the guy used to like (or maybe it's hidden away in a single room, the mancave). The women in a modern western marriage just have so much power they can take over the house if they want to. One of the benefits (for the man) of prostitution is he can still get sex very conveniently but allso still have his own living space just the way he likes it. Including being roommates with a close male friend if that's what he wants, which most married women wouldn't tolerate.
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