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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29975 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Maybe I'm just outing myself as a sexually enervated low-T guy but I honestly don’t relate to this at all.

I don't think you're outing yourself as anything. The premise that sexual urges are just too strong to control is bullshit. Men can, and do, control their sexual desires, even if they are very strong.

This is my experience too, but there's been a lot of discussion lately about typical mind fallacy. Trans people supposedly feel their gender directly, and I have no such experience. I'm not being flippant here, there is some possibility that it's just the case that we're missing out on some kind of widespread experience that many other men have. Like that theory from a while back that bronze aged stories about conversing with gods wasn't metaphor but the actual felt experience of the people involved.

I feel like it depends on the context and how hard they go.

While I really struggle to understand the professors enthralled by light flirting or the guys that did women's homework for barely even that, I do feel like people might not appreciate how hard it can be to say no when you're directly sexually propositioned by someone young and attractive in a context where sex clearly is an option and you're drunk.

It is clearly possible to control these urges but I don't think it's easy. I don't think it's typical minding going on here as much as it's an experience that many people have not had (or only very rarely and not as intensely) and therefore cannot fairly evaluate the difficulty of.

"And you're drunk" is a hell of a caveat. Self-control is strategy. Internal emotional strategy and external material strategy. Self control is about having the experience required to avoid and/or mitigate mind-controlling influences in situations where their effects may be catastrophic.

I don't think this is easy either to be clear. Right Action is teleological. Results oriented. The unwise are always going to make myopic mistakes in the process of learning their lessons, and all new humans start out unwise.

I think that typical minding is a real thing for sure. The unfortunate problem is, it doesn't tell you much useful in cases like this. Perhaps most men really are possessed of sex drives so strong that it is literally beyond their control, as @coffee_enjoyer claims. On the other hand, perhaps that's just an excuse for bad behavior, as I claim. While both could be true for different individuals, they can't both be true as a rule of thumb for the population.

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