site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   30070 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Out of all the issues in our world, "women around me are showing me more of their breasts" is not one that I personally consider a problem. I have some disagreements with women on average - for example, while I am pro-choice and so to some extent understand why women are reluctant to vote right, I also do not understand women's tendency to vote left despite it leading to some policies that are to both their own detriment and mine, such as when it comes to law and order. But overall, I do think that in some ways women are wonderful. They really do tend to be nice and gentle, at least to men. I have heard some horror stories from women about how other women treat them, but as a man I can say that the vast majority of women I have encountered have been very nice to me. And no woman has ever punched me in the face, whereas some men have. Some my closest actual friends are women. So my attitude towards women is more or less that for the most part they are like men in terms of the kinds of qualities that I value, but with the added benefit that I am also sexually attracted to some of them. Experiences of being intimate in bed with women, both sexually and emotionally, have been some of the highlights of my life. Obviously the vast majority of "extreme right end of the bell curve" intelligent people in history have been men but oh well, while I wish that I was, I really doubt that I am in that extreme right end myself as a man. It's not something to hold against women. And I have known a handful of women who are as intelligent or even more than I am.

This is all a long-winded way to say that overall, I tend to love women, and part of that is that I love enjoying women's erotic company. Female modesty seems rather pointless to me. One could make an argument that immodesty from both genders contributes to a chaotizing of society, a focus on hedonism instead of on the often-boring tasks of upholding a decent society, such as raising families. And that could be an interesting argument to make, but I am not sure how much truth there is to it. Overall, I would say that immodesty is extremely low on the list of our society's problems, if it even is a problem to begin with, which I doubt. It is not half-naked women in the streets that are causing Walgreens to get robbed left and right or politics to be ruled by corrupt incentives. And an extreme focus on female modesty has not stopped Islamic societies from being shitholes. Victorian England, from what I understand, despite all of its prudity was not some pinnacle of social order, it had a higher violent crime rate than modern England.

This is a bit of a tangent, but why do women tend to lean left? I say this as a moderate who dislikes both the left and the right. So I am not coming at this from a right-wing perspective, I just am sometimes baffled why so many women are actually left-leaning rather than being a centrist like me. What is the appeal? Is it mainly the fact that the right is associated with socially conservative prudes who favor patriarchy-coded social structures and are not pro-choice? Is it some higher degree of empathy from women that makes them feel more bad for the so-called oppressed of the world than men do? That is a common argument, but in my personal interactions with women, while I have found that the vast majority of women are nice to me, I have not found women to be more sympathetic to others abstractly than men are, on average, so I am not sure. Women do tend to be much more pro-social than men are on average, mainly because there is a small fraction of men who do the vast majority of both genders' anti-social activities. But do they really tend on average to be more "naive bleeding-heart liberal" than men are, and if so, why?

Women tend to be more about relationships and community membership- not exactly in agreement with anglosphere conservatism.

Women and their community memberships used to be the beating heart of Anglosphere conservatism.

The case for modesty, to me, is much the same as any other standard— it’s about self respect and dignity. And keeping a high standard both personally and culturally is important because it treats yourself and others as people worthy of respect. When a person doesn’t dress appropriately, either because they’re immodestly dressed or dressed sloppily, it tells me that not only are they not someone who I should take seriously (because they don’t take themselves seriously) but that they don’t respect the fact that other people might not want to see someone dressed in that way.

The same can be said of other standards. If you don’t put forth your best efforts, or can’t behave in public, or a thousand other things you do among others every day, eventually you have a society in which everyone does the bare minimum, you’re surrounded by trash, and so on.

While I don't think you're categorically wrong, I think there's the danger here of misusing a heuristic as a law.

Sloppily dressed people are often, yes, sloppy people who don't do good work, don't take care of their relationships, can't be relied upon etc.

And then, sometimes, they're astrophysicists who are so engrossed in their work that they never learned how to dress themselves. Before it become an coopted fashion signaling mechanism, the Silicon Valley "hoodie and shorts" was the mark of a developer who was a bit of a slob because he was dedicating 18 hours a day to working on his app.

On the modesty side of things, there are definitely women who use their wardrobes to appeal to the male lizard brain and attract attention that way. There are a lot of women who simply follow fashion trends and don't really put a lot of thought into what signals they're sending men but do care about what other women think. There is a certain small proportion of women who literally do not understand that wearing yoga pants and a sports bra 24/7 is going to result in increased male attention. Are any of these subgroups more prone to promiscuous and/or anti-social behavior. Hard to say. You can make some generalizations, but the danger there is the slippery slop of generalization --> heuristic --> iron law.

In the past 5+ years, I've never had a conversation about fashion expectations with a woman where she expressed frustration towards modesty standards (either too much or too little). Mostly, it was the simple and unending difficulty of keeping up with whatever is in fashion to signal (to other women) that you're "with it."

In the past 5+ years, I've never had a conversation about fashion expectations with a woman where she expressed frustration towards modesty standards (either too much or too little).

I may be misunderstanding you; let me know if I am. I don't know a women who isn't frustrated with the clothing available, and it's not all about pockets. I cannot easily find a shirt that isn't too low cut / designed to expose more of my chest than I typically prefer. Tshirts or fairly masculine tailored button downs are pretty much the only shirts I can depend on to meet my preferences. And hemlines are incredibly short. I can either go with long-and-flowy don't show an inch of skin, which tends to be too frilly and feminine for my preferences, or "this is so short it may not be long enough to cover my backside when sitting down" which is ridiculous. Apparently, wanting fabric to extend to my knees or there-abouts is too demanding.

But, I'm not sure I'd talk about these issues in regards to "modesty" because that term isn't really something I talk about much. I'd call it preference, or style. Modesty's part of it, but outside of a religious context I just don't see that term in use.

Apparently, wanting fabric to extend to my knees or there-abouts is too demanding.

Isn't this just a midi skirt? There's like a million of those on the market.

Tradcath women I know who can't sow often buy clothes from Mormon clothing stores, and while the modesty probably overshoots a little bit it probably overshoots by less than the undershoot you're complaining about. Their clothes seem feminine and not-frumpy.

I wasn't referring to the garments themselves, but more general attitudes / vibes around clothing expectations.

Too low cut and your other examples - absolutely, have heard that.

"I don't think I can wear what I want too because it's too revealing / I don't think I can wear what I want because it's too buttoned up" <-- Have not heard that.

I like the case for modesty as intimacy increasing. There is something to having a large delta between the woman that she presents to the world and the women she presents herself as to you personally. I'm not sure how that weighs against other interests but I am sure there is at least some value there.

As for why women are more lefty I can see this from a bunch of different lenses and have trouble coming up with as strong reasons for the opposite. the evo psych lens is pretty simple that women do best in stable safe environments where all their offspring can make it to adulthood and men do best in somewhat more risky environments where they might sire children with many women. When resources are plentiful women might prefer they be shared equally and men might prefer a chance to roll the dice and end up with a bigger share. From the self interested lens the redistributive state as it is today tends to take from men and give to women on average. The social dynamics lens tells us that caring, self sacrifice and gentleness are a feminine traits that women compete with each other on and leftists successfully pitch leftism as the humane alternative to callous and brutal liberalism. Older masculine framings of leftism like those in the soviet era of manly men menacing their enemies with the tools of their trade and demanding what is theirs would see a different skew but the feminine framing predominates today. From a propaganda lens it seems like the leftist strategy of just showing as many dead or suffering children as possible and drawing some plausible causal chain to the status quo is more effective on women than men.

and men do best in somewhat more risky environments where they might sire children with many women.

This is not your main point, but it's always seemed like a particularly BS part of the whole redpill evopsych narrative to me. Men may have evolved instincts to take advantage of conditions where promiscuity is possible, sure. But that's not the same as them "doing better" under those conditions.

I recall a discussion here pointing out that the modal historical outcome for superfluous weak males is not frustrated inceldom, but early violent death. Given that a monogamous pairbonding system vs. a lothario/harem system necessarily offer identical expected value in terms of offspring, and that the harem almost certainly offers lower expected value in terms of personal pleasure owing to the lothario's diminishing marginal returns from screwing multiple partners, I don't understand how men in these spaces seem to regard promiscuity as some kind of inherently manly value that's unfairly gatekept in our women's world.

What you correctly hit upon here regarding polygynous systems marks a crucial distinction between blackpillers/self-identified-incels and redpillers/PUAs. The latter are more in favor of polygyny and harems, as they see themselves as better able to thrive under such a system, armed with their Game. The former, in contrast, long for a patriarchal system of strictly-enforced monogamy and government-mandated gfs.

Of course, to any normal, well-adjusted person, this all has the same flavor as arguments between the People’s Front of Judaea and the Judaean People’s Front.

A fair nuance. I'm not quite a red piller and do think that monogamy is a good a social technology. For the evo-psych perspective though it's sufficient that men with the ability to influence such things would generally prefer more risk though as it's selected for where they can influence reproductive success and irrelevant where it doesn't.

The patriarchy's social norms regarding modesty, although never stated openly, functioned in effect as affirmative action / a safety net for ugly/fat/plain etc. women, basically as a treaty of nonaggression and voluntary disarmament among women, with a net benefit for all women and society as a whole. (Men used to have something similar, but that's another matter). When such norms are dismantled in the name of liberty and happiness, it contributes to a sexual arms race among women where they are given various socio-cultural incentives to pander to the sexual whims of the top 5-10% of men. This takes place in parallel with the erosion of other patriarchal norms, which results in women in general gradually losing their ability to elicit long-term commitment from the men they're attracted to, which in turn fuels the said arms race even more. This is a net negative for society, but once this said female cartel is gone, it'll not be replaced, because any woman who wants to dress modestly in effect opts out of the arms race and loses.

Very interesting idea. Whats the male version of this "disarmament treaty" you feel we have lost?

In the Christian patriarchy, every man may only have one wife and not more, premarital sex is not normalized, cheating isn't either, and keeping a mistress is only tolerated implicitly in certain circumstances. This, in effect, represents a tacit agreement among men not to fight one another over women.

No sex outside of marriage.

A tweet I saw recently suggested that women are hotter today than ever partially because Instagram has made the competition for attractiveness so cutthroat and winner-take all.

The ability of high-quality skincare, makeup, digital filters, and a wide selection of clothes to modify individual women's body shapes into ideal shapes makes it a system that requires a significant investment.

More like higher variance than ever, rather than higher mean. Mean or median might very well be lower.

On the right-tail, perhaps young modern hot chicks are indeed hotter than ever due to online dating- and social media-induced female intra-sexual competition and thot-maxxing knowhow with regard to skincare, makeup, filters, clothes, cosmetic surgeries, etc., that indulge the preference of young women to be sex objects.

However, on average, young modern women are also fatter than ever. Looking at old photos of groups of young women from the latter half of the 20th century, there are fewer smokeshows. However, in such photos, there are also far more WOULDs due to lack of obesity, as opposed to the WOULDN'Ts in modern day due to fatness.

Obesity is a big one, as it matters relatively little how good your skincare, makeup, nails, clothes, and surgeries are if you're fat. Something something about putting lipstick on a pig, and/or polishing a turd. Some other points against the modal young modern woman are tattoos, single motherhood, and promiscuity.

Yeah, this what I assume is going on as well. The sexual arms race is escalating among a subset of (mostly) young hot women that is small and probably becoming smaller due to the obesity epidemic, demographic implosion etc.

promiscuity

Has this actually risen for the modal woman, as opposed to a bigger right tale? My impression is that the modal woman is less promiscuous than typically portrayed.

This is a bit of a tangent, but why do women tend to lean left?

My basic understanding:

  1. The median woman is a lot less liberal (in the proper sense - "supportive of liberty") than the median man. Freedom of speech, in particular, is supported far more strongly by men than by women (e.g. Cato Institute poll - women tend to be far more easily offended and more willing to censor than men, mostly regardless of political valence of the speech). Free speech is now* mostly a right-wing issue, and is pulling men with it (like me!) but not women.
  2. As a strongly-related but mildly-distinct point, women tend to be more conformist, and the education system has made SJ the "default" among the younger generations*; more men defect from that default than women.
  3. A reasonable amount of SJ-influenced social policies are just explicitly stacked in favour of women (e.g. investigating male-dominated industries for sexism, but not female-dominated ones; here in Oz removing maths as a required year 12 subject but still requiring English); one should not be surprised that these tend to piss off men more than women, although this is AIUI less important than it sounds like it should be, because neither men nor women are Homo economicus and they don't vote purely their personal interest.

*Note the time-dependence here; IIRC in the 60s women tended to be further right than men.

Out of all the issues in our world, "women around me are showing me more of their breasts" is not one that I personally consider a problem ... I tend to love women, and part of that is that I love enjoying women's erotic company.

If you can get women's erotic company, of course you'll feel that way. But presumably you can understand why men who can't feel that immodest women are flaunting something in front of them that men are biologically hardwired to respond to, having no intention of rewarding that response with anything except disgust or punishment. From that perspective, it's oblivious at best and cruel at worst.

I grew up in a mostly-male environment, and my introduction to female company coincided with my introduction to online 'gamer girl' feminism which was anti-sex in a way that would leave Christian fundamentalists gaping. By the time I got enough worldliness to appreciate how far those feminists were detached from reality, it was too late. I had missed all the opportunities for learning how men and women were supposed to flirt in a low-stakes environment, and been warped into a sort of cringing resentfulness that is obviously toxic to women. Had things been otherwise, I would feel otherwise. Path dependency at its finest.

So while I too feel that there are greater problems in the world, I get why a lot of men would like sexiness to just go away and stop taunting them. As with our commentator however many months ago who wished that it was okay to enter a monastery in the modern world, or Scott Aaronson who wished to be allowed to chemically castrate himself.

Tangents:

Victorian England, from what I understand, despite all of its prudity was not some pinnacle of social order, it had a higher violent crime rate than modern England.

To be fair, modern England has CCTV and DNA forensics. I think it's quite possible that Victorian England mores transferred to the present day would be far better than what we have now.

why do women tend to lean left?

I think it's most a desire not to be nasty. Most right-wing philosophy ultimately gets to the point of saying, 'we are going to have to do nasty thing X to avert bad scenario Y'. I've generally found the women in my life much less likely to bite bullets than men.

As with our commentator however many months ago who wished that it was okay to enter a monastery in the modern world

You can 100% do this. Monasteries still exist. Sure, the median motteizean would likely have to convert beforehand, but a monastery is already a lifelong commitment.

A few times in my life I've done a retreat at a Trappist monastery a few hours from where I live. You get a small private room and have some interaction with the monks, including the Keeping of the Hours, which I particularly enjoy. What I enjoy more than anything though is that guests agree to the honor the same prohibition on speaking that the monks do. There are designated "talking spaces", everywhere else is Silent. I don't like talking. I don't like being spoken to. This is simply not something that is compatible with modern life. Going 5 days without idle chatter is like floating in a dream for me.

A random aside but I do sometimes wonder why in the west becoming a monk (or functional equivalent) a lifetime commitment while in the east it was possibly to take temporary vows.

I know there’s a world of difference between Abrahamic religions & Vedic religions and their offshoots but I’m simply unsure of the answer.

I wonder what the west would have been like if it were possible to take temporary vows like in Thailand and be a monk for a few years.

Temporary vows are totally a thing in the west, though. In fact the normal process for taking vows in Catholicism is to have a postulancy(measured in months) to see if the lifestyle is doable, then a novitiate with vows taken for a year at a time until the novice is ready to take lifelong vows(this is usually an expected number of years depending on the order, ranging from three to seven). Religious Catholic circles are overflowing with people who took one set of temporary vows but left before taking lifelong ones. Eastern Orthodoxy is less well regulated and defined, but likewise doesn't allow any rando to show up at the monastery gate and make a lifelong commitment the next day.

Obviously this is different in the sense that one doesn't make temporary vows without intending to later take permanent ones. But laypeople who spent time in religious life are part of the framework of apostolic Christianity.

Neat, I had forgotten all about that. Reading this does remind me that I’ve actually met someone who did just that, took vows for a year and then changed his mind when it came time for permanent ones.

He was… very gay.

The protagonist of Houellebecq's Submission tried joining a monastery for a non-permanent period, but left after just two days. I don't know how realistic that is.

So while I too feel that there are greater problems in the world, I get why a lot of men would like sexiness to just go away and stop taunting them

That's pretty much how I feel. At least, in environments where it's frowned upon to flirt with women, like in the office, I really wish they would stop wearing sexy clothes. It's like a constant mental tax I have to pay, "don't look at her don't look at her don't look at her," and there's no way to complain about it without sounding like either a huge pervert or an overbearing puritan.

I feel like food is maybe the gender-switch version? As a guy, I like chocolate, but I can take it or leave it. I have no trouble just eating one chocolate and ignoring the rest. But there was a holiday party at my office, and some woman sent in a complaint to HR, crying that she just couldn't stop eating the chocolate, it was making it impossible for her to work and maintain her diet with all these scrumptious chocolate lying around in front of her all day. And I was thinking... woman, you have no idea...

I just couldn’t imagine emailing HR over such an issue.

Serious question: I know nothing about you and the guy posting above you, but if y'all are (like seemingly every other male around here) going home and jacking off to images of breasts for hours every night, aren't you somewhat responsible for greatly strengthening the existing circuitry that links that visual cue to a state of arousal and sexual reward?

Sure, it's natural for men to find bodies sexy, just as it's natural for that lady to find chocolate delicious. But if I knew that your coworker went home every night and deliberately spent hours burning chocolate-scented candles while watching candy-tasting shows, baking brownies and licking them then throwing them away while fantasizing resentfully about what it'd be like to eat them... I'd have a lot less sympathy with her complaints that thoughts of forbidden chocolate were ruining her focus at work the next day.

I'm not. But maybe we could try an experiment. Let's take a large sample of men from a conservative, old-fashioned society where porn and sexy clothes are strictly forbidden. Let's bring them into a modern western society where it's normal for women's bodies to be on display all the time. Since they've never watched porn, they should have no problem with it right? They should easily adjust to this new society and not even notice the wanton display of sexuality, since they didn't have porn to hijack their brains, so they'll just be pure and innocent and oohhhhh crap that experiment didn't work out very well.

Are you under the impression that historical modesty and sexiness exists on a simple linear scale from burqas to tank tops? Probably there's a universal thrill with full view of certain parts of the anatomy, but past that, modesty norms and male perceptions of "sexiness" are very much in the eye of the beholder. Plenty of extremely "conservative, old-fashioned societies" in equatorial regions have far less covered-up norms of dress than we do. Public breastfeeding used to be far more common in the West, while there's a huge amount of historical hand-wringing about the immodesty of women showing their sexy, sexy free-flowing hair, which today men view in their co-workers without experiencing unmanageable erections.

My point is that there is underlying instinct, but then there's a huge amount of situational conditioning on top of that. If a man complains that he feels uncontrollably, painfully aroused and frustrated by the tops of a woman's breasts at work, then goes home every night and deliberately stimulates himself while looking at images of the tops of women's breasts, then all I'm saying is that he's clearly the dog AND Pavlov in that situation.

No but I feel like you're overthinking this. Nobody (well, hardly anyone) is going crazy over seeing a woman's hair or the idea of her breastfeeding. But when you see a woman wearing a super cut low tank top with a pushup bra and high-heeled pumps, and the absolute tightest pants she could possibly wriggle into... cmon. That's sexy. She isn't wearing that "just to be comfortable." She, or some fashion influencer, designed that outfit to sexually attract men. It's not "uncontrollably, painfully aroused and frustrated," It's more like a mild discomfort. It's just a feeling that never, ever goes away when you're surrounded by women like that at work and in daily life, constantly, and you're expected to not hit them with the dreaded "male gaze." Sometimes I feel paranoid that I might accidentally look in a way that makes someone feel sexually harassed. I feel like I need to get one of those eye trackers that some streamers use, to record my eye movement, in case I ever need proof that I wasn't ogling them.

Again, I'm not saying that there isn't a hardwired component to sexual arousal. But organisms are very good at using environmental information to upregulate and downregulate behavioral programs depending on what's most reward-rich at the moment. The dynamics of this are pretty consistent; remove a reward and there's an extinction burst of increased drive to regain it, then after a while that program gets turned down as temporarily no longer profitable.

So if someone expresses that their constant impulses toward free-floating sexual opportunism with random women are troublesome and uncomfortable to them, BUT also a primary leisure activity is protracted rubbing of their genitals while they look at a bunch of images of random women in postures that suggest sexual opportunity, then I feel like they clearly aren't doing all they could to persuade their bodies to turn down the constant sex-seeking.

OP: "Sometimes I feel paranoid that I might accidentally look in a way that makes someone feel sexually harassed."

You: "So if someone expresses that their constant impulses toward free-floating sexual opportunism with random women are troublesome and uncomfortable to them"

Way to miss the point. The problem isn't men's impulses, it's women being empowered to interpret men's behavior as explicitly sexual even if he doesn't view nor intend it as sexual and use that interpretation to exert power over him via creep shaming or other social bullying. The more we crack down on "creepy" behavior in men, the more we incentivize women to interpret even more innocuous behaviors as creepy in order to abuse that power. Cracking down on sexy dress (EDIT: by saying she "deserves" to be leered at and thus can't exert social power over men if she dresses that way) is one way to dis-incentivize such abuse.

More comments

aren't you somewhat responsible for greatly strengthening the existing circuitry that links that visual cue to a state of arousal and sexual reward?

It may be true but most men won't perceive it that way because our perception is that abstaining will just make you more distracted. This is actually the most common advice: fast long enough that you redirect the inevitable energy towards something useful. The idea of retaining your sexual energy has taken on a life of its own amongst the porn-saturated via NoFap but seems to predate it so the idea was out there.

It's unlike chocolate, so I think the condemnation might actually be stronger from the other direction: you're going to feel arousal anyway. The problem is you're associating sexual arousal with an ultimately fraudulent reward and powerlessness, which heightens the anxiety that comes with feeling sexual desire.

I hadn't considered the role of anxiety before, but there is a match with the kind of edgy, restless, compulsive feeling that comes after eating a bunch of shitty nutrition-free junk-food.

Also the same feeling you get when you’re stuck in a doom-scrolling loop. All three are of a kind.

I totally get that. When I was a teenager I was a sexually very frustrated person, the idea of actually flirting successfully with a woman seemed alien to me. One time when I was about 17, I literally cried after seeing a picture of a beautiful woman in a bikini online, I cried because I felt like there was no way I could possibly ever have sex with a woman, I felt miserable. It took me years to get over my shyness. It took a lot of effort, I forced myself to go out and interact with people in general and women specifically, and a lot of it was scary, but I was deeply motivated... back then, to tell the truth, it wasn't even that I was necessarily so motivated by my sexual urge. I could have alleviated most of my sexual urge with porn. It was more that I was motivated by hurt pride. I was like, "no, fuck this, there is no fucking way that other guys are having sex and I'm not". Which was part of my own problem... having my ego bound up with it. Once I started getting laid, that ego-driven thing started to cause me problems, and it took more years for me to address it and actually get to a place where I'm fully driven by erotic desire rather than by any semblance of wanting to ego-fix the insecurity I remember from when I was a young man. And it is so so much better that way, to not have the ego thing. But the ego thing did help drive me to force myself to go from a frustrated virgin to a guy who was competent at getting laid, so I guess I have to thank it for that even though overall it's not something you want to have in your life. Like a rocket stage, useful to propel you into orbit, but should be discarded afterward.

I have been on both sides. I remember being a frustrated guy who wasn't getting laid, and I understand what it's like to be a guy who gets laid. I totally understand that there is some fraction of the male population who have extremely hard issues getting laid for no faults of their own. If you are really short or fat or disfigured, obviously it's fucking tough. If you are average-looking, on the other hand, it's only your mind holding you back. I'm just a bit above average looking at best, I am average height and have a decent face, but not Brad Pitt or anything like that. There is an element of modern online culture that tells men that if they're not 6'5" with a six-pack and $1 million in the bank, they have no sexual future, and that is complete nonsense. How am I getting laid if that was true? Cause I'm no Brad Pitt and I don't have $1 million in the bank. What I do have is a willingness to try to shoot my shot, to try to flirt with women, won through long successful struggle against my shyness, and also a level of experience with women that I have developed because I succeeded in that struggle, so I have a certain sense for what turns women on, a sense that I have largely developed because of the experiences that I have had with women once I overcame my original brutal shyness.

Kudos, and thank you for the story.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats