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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:
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I think I was responding to this bit:
I'm not seeing the concern in the passage above that one's strictly chaste, "accidental" and "innocuous" glances toward women might be misinterpreted as sexual; it seems more about someone who is annoyed that they get a constant arousal response, to an "uncomfortable" extent, from any visuals that show the shape of a woman's body? Thus, the opening of this conversation was about whether it's fair to complain about constantly getting aroused around boobs, while also deliberately entraining that exact response pattern, and keeping oneself in a state of artificial sexual hyper-sensitivity, through regular masturbation to porn.
If it's pivoting instead to a conversation about how women overestimate the perviness of the male gaze, then I don't see how clothing is relevant one way or the other. Men can look at women lustfully no matter what they're wearing, so presumably a woman could also level a wrongful accusation of ogling regardless of her dress.
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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.
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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.
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