Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4hr ago
Clearly on TheMotte, it’s the men who are writing most of the posts about the ills of promiscuity. (I have specific names in mind.)
That attitude may ultimately stem from their Christianity. But there are also a lot of atheist manosphere types who get REALLY upset about female promiscuity. You can’t dismiss it as a purely female concern.
Primaprimaprima
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1d ago
Julian Edelman can be caught in a one-night-stand with a chubster, Conor McGregor can be filmed heading off with an outright fatty
It’s quite plausible that they were simply acting on their own preferences!
Primaprimaprima
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1d ago
I think the main feature male friends can't provide is being the confidant of deep secrets and more purely emotional revelations from the inner reaches of your psyche.
That's interesting that you say that. I'm incredibly lucky to have some male friends where we have essentially no secrets (or close to it, at any rate). But I recognize that that's unusual and most friendships (regardless of gender composition) never get to that level.
There are a lot of blackpilled guys who feel like sharing secrets and being emotionally vulnerable is one of the things that they explicitly can't do with women, because any perceived display of weakness could cause her to lose attraction, even deep into a committed relationship. I'd like to tell them they're being overly cynical, but I also can't say that their fears are entirely baseless either.
Primaprimaprima
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1d ago
she should be satisfied with her own personhood
Do you know how many humans (male or female) are "satisfied with their own personhood"?
Not many!
We are all, at all times, engaged in a vain and desperate struggle to alter ourselves in order to solve the riddle of the Other's desire. It's not a woman thing it's a human thing.
"However, the thing to add at once is that the desire staged in fantasy is not the subject’s own, but the other's desire, the desire of those around me with whom I interact: fantasy, the phantasmatic scene or scenario, is an answer to: ‘You’re saying this, but what is it that you actually want by saying it?' The original question of desire is not directly 'What do I want?', but 'What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I for those others?' A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations, he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him. His father, mother, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, fight their battles in his name; the mother sends a message to the father through her care for the son. While being well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom just what kind of object he is for these others, just what kind of games they are playing with him. Fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am for my others. This intersubjective character of fantasy is discernible even in the most elementary cases, like the one, reported by Freud, of his little daughter fantasizing about eating a strawberry cake. What we have here is by no means the simple case of the direct hallucinatory satisfaction of a desire (she wanted a cake, didn't get it, so she fantasized about it). The crucial feature is that, while tucking into a strawberry cake, the little girl noticed how her parents were deeply satisfied by the sight of her enjoyment. What the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake was really about was her attempt to form an identity (of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents) that would satisfy her parents and make her the object of their desire."
(From Zizek's "How to Read Lacan")
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
· Edited 8hr ago
Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs
I have to be careful to distinguish here between how much of my experience is idiosyncratic and how much of it can generalize, because I find the Sanchez woman to be rather repulsive, but evidently there are many men who do not.
If you listen to TRP/manosphere content, you'll frequently hear them say "men have the biggest variety of preferences, men can fall in love with anything, but women only want one thing (and that thing is Chad)". This is one of their favorite talking points, they repeat it quite often. And women often react with incredulity when they hear this, and they claim that reality is in fact the exact opposite. "What? All men just want a 'hot' woman. But my hubby, he's got a bit of a potbelly and he isn't the tallest, but he's got a great smile and a heart of gold, so I love him all the same. Obviously women's preferences are more varied and less superficial."
I think the key to resolving the dilemma is that, although the secondary and tertiary traits can vary greatly, there are certain key traits that, if absent in a man, will make it very hard for a woman to be romantically attracted to him. As far as my observations can confirm anyway. Although, pinning down exactly what these traits are is a bit difficult. It's not stability per se, nor is it social dominance per se, nor is it social adeptness per se, but rather it's more like an abstract distilled commonality that forms a part of all these traits. We might call it "agency", or projecting a sense of "in-control-ness", if not over his external environment then at least over himself. If a man can't demonstrate at least a minimal amount of "put-together-ness", then he's not going to have much luck with women.
What the TRP guys are correctly intuiting is that men have no such minimal criteria. In spite of the fact that there are clear patterns, at the end of the day they really can go for absolutely anything. There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls. As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that". You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself. And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter. Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"? If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
It’s not going to work in the US because the ship has simply sailed. We’re in far too deep.
The most we can do is try to give the US a smooth controlled landing and encourage European countries to not go down the same path.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps
If you’re smart enough to get a math PhD then you’re smart enough to code. Might take some time but you can do it if you want.
I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away.
That’s… the majority of what awaits you outside of academia. Especially if you’re restricting yourself to opportunities of the form “trading my STEM skills for financial compensation received at regular, reliable intervals”. Are you sure you want to leave academia? The grass ain’t always greener.
There are always people on LessWrong from bespoke AI research institutes posting about their work and sometimes even advertising open positions, maybe you could explore something like that? (They tend to recruit from within their own social circles but it’s worth looking into…)
Primaprimaprima
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3d ago
It’s possible that the THC was the principal culprit. I have witnessed THC inducing acute psychotic episodes on other occasions before. Bit counterintuitive since most people would think of THC as being less “intense” than psilocybin but I suppose the whole thing is under-studied. I’m surprised that the risks of THC haven’t really permeated cultural consciousness.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
Had a friend who got really into shrooms. It basically ruined his life for a while, and he was only able to recover after he fully quit doing drugs. Went into a sustained severe manic state, spent his entire life savings in short order, lost multiple jobs in quick succession due to erratic behavior, revealed to me detailed plans that if acted upon would have lead to severe social and potentially legal/criminal damage. And the entire time he was subjectively convinced that he had achieved enlightenment and his actions were infallible. It permanently put me off of ever trying shrooms and has made me skeptical of all accounts that portray psychedelics as "harmless".
(Full disclosure, this was confounded by the fact that he was also doing massive quantities of THC at the same time. But then, people present THC as harmless too, so you'd think that harmless thing 1 + harmless thing 2 would be fine...)
Primaprimaprima
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3d ago
Well, the problem is that some people have the exact opposite intuition! They can’t see why qualia should pose a problem for physicalism at all. Thus the debate carries on interminably.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
What's your favorite Nietzsche book?
(If you say Zarathustra or WtP you're a poser.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
the greater risk of women having impossible standards for men
A lot of women who are heavily invested in gay M/M content report enjoying it because it feels "safer" and "less complicated" than hetero content. They want to enjoy a romantic relationship in a "voyeuristic" way without having the worry about the imbalanced power dynamics that are intrinsically a part of any relationship between men and women. If the characters in the story are both men, then she can enjoy it without having to worry about the possibility of "self-inserting" as the female character and getting too personally enmeshed in the story, which could dredge up uncomfortable hang-ups about her own real life sexuality. It's not so much about running to the image of an idealized man as it is about running away from the dangers that real men present.
Obviously, it's something that she mostly has to work out for herself. I think the best thing you can do is to just set a good example in your relations with your own family, and if it ever seems appropriate to bring up, be open and honest about your own political views, what you perceive as the deleterious effects of modern wokeness, etc (the danger here isn't so much the porn per se, but rather the fact that the communities for this type of content tend to be filled with radfem and woke types who could reinforce negative beliefs).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
Quizno’s deserved a better fate.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
No it’s… not?
There’s pretty strong agreement on that from all sides of the political spectrum.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
Many people here have been asking about my politics: it's actually remarkably simple: I want the old America back where children were born within marriage, didn't try to change their gender, and got all the vaccines their pediatrician recommended.
This is not politics. This is an arbitrary list of demands.
Your "politics" is the constellation of principles and cognitive patterns that cause you to demand certain things. (Or, alternatively, as a Marxist might say: politics is the analysis of the material and social conditions that give rise to certain principles and cognitive patterns, which in turn give rise to concrete demands.)
The interesting thing isn't that you like vaccines, it's why you like vaccines (and what makes you different from people who don't).
Primaprimaprima
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4d ago
I obviously don't know my own level of testosterone or how that compares to other men.
A shy, quiet, intellectually-inclined friend of mine got his T levels checked and he was dead center average (by male standards).
Obviously there's something important going on with sex hormones and how they affect cognitive and personality traits, but it's not as simple as "number go up = big manly man, number go down = beta nerd".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
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.
Yes, you're correct about all this. There is something qualitatively different about male sexual impulses (their "seriousness", and all the downstream effects thereof that you mention) that sets them apart from other basic biological drives.
I think this seriousness stems from the fact that a man's sexual impulses (and the fulfillment thereof) are closely tied to his sense of self-worth and self-actualization, in the same way that a career or other major life project might be. When he has sex with an attractive woman, he gets more than just the raw physical pleasure of the act: he gets a sense of holistic contentment, he feels that everything must actually be going quite swimmingly right now, he feels like he's exactly where he needs to be. Threatening the fulfillment of his sexual impulses is the same as threatening the fulfillment of his life project as a whole. This extends, albeit in a limited or distorted sense, even to fetishes that are shameful or harmful. The crossdresser might be ashamed of his crossdressing and try to hide it, but he still feels like he's expressing something vital by crossdressing, he's exploring an integral part of himself that might otherwise remain obscure. Asking him to give up his crossdressing is the same as asking him to give up part of his soul, even if it's a part of his soul that he's ambivalent about.
Now you might reasonably ask: can't you see, in a moment of sober reflection, that this is all a bit silly? Can't you see that there are plenty of other sources of meaning in life (friends and family, career, creative projects, etc) that obviate the need for this obsessive sexual drive? And the answer is, well... no. No matter how much I reflect on it, I can't disavow the importance that men place on sex and their particular sexual fetishes. Perhaps that's just the testosterone-induced delusion that I can never extricate myself from (it's a bit like saying "I've shown that love is just a chemical reaction, so now you can discard love as nothing but a useless illusion, yes?" -- the biology is whatever, but the feeling remains real regardless). But from a certain perspective, it also kind of just makes sense. Objectively speaking (not subjectively/psychologically), it's more difficult for men to reproduce than it is for women. Significantly more women than men throughout evolutionary history have reproduced. He's competing against an army of other men who are all offering large quantities of the same commodity (sperm cells) at very cheap rates. If he's able to enter into a normal and healthy (not talking about extreme fetishes here) sexual relationship with a woman, where she gives herself not just willingly but enthusiastically, then that is an accomplishment that he should objectively feel proud of.
Evolution had to instill men with a strong drive towards sexual competition (complete with that whole "all reward centers firing at once, total-soul-actualization" feeling) because otherwise they would be out-competed by other men. And the extreme fetishes that you bring up (necrophilia, self-mutilation, etc) are a result of this basic drive going haywire and becoming misdirected. The drive is, by necessity, strong enough and all-encompassing enough that its behavior becomes unpredictable.
It’s all a bit difficult to talk about because there are multiple types of sexual impulses (everything from “normal” relationships to extreme harmful fetishes) directed at different types of objects, and multiple levels of explanation (objective “marketplace” dynamics, biologically-mediated instincts, and the internal-phenomenological experience) all interacting with each other.
I'm absolutely not saying that men are crazy
No worries! Those were my words, not yours. I really do think that men are crazy (for good and for ill).
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
On the one hand, a desire that extreme (plus the will to actually act on it) is foreign to my own experience, so in some sense I can only speculate. But on the other hand, I think I can say that, yes, I do get it. At least on a theoretical level. I could see a path where, if you kept turning up the dials on my currently existing sexuality, I could end up in a place like that. It's just that the vast majority of men don't have the dials turned up that high.
Primaprimaprima
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5d ago
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.
It's a good question!
All humans are familiar with the experience of impulse control, and the failure thereof. You should start that project tonight, but you don't. You shouldn't eat that donut because you're on a diet, but you do. You know that rationally you should be able to control your impulse, and it would be better for you if you did, but that often doesn't help much in the moment. These are universal experiences. The only difference with men is that they experience particularly strong sexual impulses, of a variety which many women find foreign. 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 ones who are cursed with a sufficiently deleterious combination of high impulse intensity / poor impulse control are the ones who become criminals.
The fundamental point you're gesturing at is correct: men are insane! Their insanity has been the engine of so much death and destruction throughout history. But it's also been the engine of so much beauty and goodness. Things in life have a habit of working out like that.
Primaprimaprima
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5d ago
Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia.
Just wanted to drop a quick correction here: “qualia” does not mean “non-physical”. Qualia just means “conscious experience”. The word is entirely neutral regarding the question of what conscious experience actually is or what causes it. It could be physical, or it could be non-physical. But it’s still a qualia all the same.
I say this because the word “qualia” has gotten a reputation in some circles as being a “woo word” which causes people of a more materialist bent to nope out of the conversation whenever it comes up, and I really don’t think that has to be the case. It’s just a convenient word for describing the, well, actual conscious-experience part of conscious experience, as opposed to say its objectively observable behavioral or neurophysiological correlates. It’s just a handy word for talking about a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with. That’s all.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
This has always fascinated me when I read accounts by trans men. Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever.
I've found at least some of their accounts to be startlingly accurate, and quite revealing.
I was once reading a book -- can't at all remember the name now -- written by an FTM transsexual describing her experience with testosterone. She was older and she would have been going through this before the internet (and before free 24/7 porn, keep that in mind).
One of the effects she described was how her visual perception seemed to become "more 3D" (lines up with how men tend to do better on spatial rotation tasks), especially whenever she looked at women or images of women. A billboard showing a sexy woman suddenly "popped" for her in a way that it never had before which consequently made it much more attention-grabbing, despite the fact that she had always been a lesbian even prior to starting testosterone. She was still subjectively viewing women in a new way, which is exactly the sort of effect I would expect testosterone to induce.
She described an episode where she went with some female friends (all of them lesbian or bisexual) to watch a series of film screenings at an indie theater. One of them was a short reel that showed various women in bikinis and underwear doing things like dancing, striking sexy poses, maybe a bit of a striptease, things like that. And all of her friends were laughing at it: like, oh look at these girls being so silly, haha. But she couldn't help but be struck by how serious the images seemed to her. 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.
Kind of frightening to think that one little chemical can unlock such complex emotional states. But, there you have it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
I'd be somewhat interested in other men's experiences of this.
Totally agree with your description of puberty. It was a nothingburger, way overhyped.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
I found a much simpler way of explaining it.
Say you're in a large crowd of strangers, you don't know anybody. You scan the crowd and every individual person looks largely the same to you, they just melt into a sea of anonymity. But then you notice your best friend somewhere in the crowd; suddenly this person "lights up" in a way that none of the others did, to you this person looks quite different, even though to anyone else they would look like just another stranger. Importantly, this isn't a conceptual/discursive thing: you don't have to consciously think to yourself "oh there's my friend, we had plans to meet up today, I should go talk to them now". It's baked into the immediate visual perception itself that they just "glow" in a way that the strangers don't, pre-discursively, even though from an "objective" point of view there's nothing really to distinguish the raw visual image of your friend from the raw visual image of any other person.
People who are higher in "meaningfulness of experience" have these experiences more often and from a wider range of stimuli, people who are lower in meaningfulness have them less often.
We can hypothesize that the mechanism of action in full blown schizophrenia is that this meaningfulness becomes so excessive that the person has to adopt delusional beliefs just so they can build a coherent internal model of their own sensory experience (e.g. that signpost on the side of the road looks so salient because it must be a coded message just for me that was planted there by the CIA).
Primaprimaprima
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6d ago
The author is making the case that the current status quo privileges men’s interests at the expense of women’s.
I mean, of course she's wrong about this point. An unregulated sexual marketplace (assuming all individuals are as free as possible from physical and economic coercion) privileges women over men for much the same reason that an unregulated free market privileges large corporations over workers. I assume that most of the commentariat here is already familiar with this analysis.
But the thing is that you can know she's wrong without even doing a full analysis of why she's wrong, because you can see that she fundamentally doesn't understand why people around her act the way that they do. She admits that she's confused by the actions of both men and women around her and she doesn't have a comprehensive theory to explain their behavior, so she resorts to mystifying explanations that are grounded in morality and "mental illness" (a synonym for throwing your hands up and saying "idk"), instead of seeing the people around her as rational actors who are doing the best they can within the constraints laid out for them by biology and decision theory.
Also I have to comment on this:
the ‘male centered woman.’
because it's just so wild that she would use this phrase without even a hint of irony or reflection. Thanks to "J. Allen" for mentioning it in the comments under her post. ("Men don't worry about whether we're centering women--most of us are in some form or fashion." -- lol, exactly). She talks about the "male centered woman" like it's a unique affliction that only burdens women, but her friend from New York whose entire social life revolves around setting up and going on dates with women isn't a "female centered man" because...?
Primaprimaprima
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6d ago
I've also noted one instance of an AAGP in the wild (a woman who wanted to be a man who wanted to be a woman)
I will admit that the inverse of this has crossed my mind on more than one occasion.
Yes but this is a topic that comes up with some frequency and there are certain male posters who have strong opinions on it as well.
Yes but the point is that they care about it at all, regardless of their motivations. (The motivations are at least somewhat complex and multilayered. Yes at the end of the day it’s really about “all the women should belong to me” but I think there’s at least some genuine pro-social concern mixed in as well.)
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