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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24079 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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I think its interesting you draw a parallel between violence and sex. "Women have sexual power over men, and they know it" is the bog-standard water I live in, and if pressed to provide a parallel for men, I'm not sure I would have thought violence. (To be fair, I wasn't given very much time to think about it).

It reminds me of something I posted over on Scott's new blog, although it didn't get much engagement because I do not fit into Scott's comment demographic as much anymore. Reposted for convenience:

I've long suspected a big part of why Nice Guys are unattractive is that women are not afraid of them.

If a woman was just raped in an alley and is limping around town trying to get back home, she is probably still in shock. If she sees a distant figure on the sidewalk approaching her, she would probably panic more if the figure is a man -- on average. There are edge-cases to this: if the man is her husband, she probably thinks to herself, "thank God" instead of "oh no."

I suspect women clock Nice Guys without talking to them. Nice Guys tend also to be "thank God" edge cases. The same underlying psychology in women causes both the (unconscious) feeling of safety and the (conscious) feeling of ickiness.

Introspecting -- at no point during puberty did I ever become aware of myself as a "violent being" (to appropriate the term "sexual being"), and even today I don't think I've ever used threat of violence as a bargaining chip. I suspect the same is true for the stereotypical incel-type. I think I agree with your taxonomy.

Thanks!

It's definitely "harder" to see because Men, in the west, are taught that violence is almost never appropriate outside of self-defense situations*. There's also the decline of violence adjacent physical work - most pointedly agricultural work. If you're working with various kinds of livestock larger than a chicken, you're going to spend time literally coercing a living thing with your physical will (we don't negotiate with terrorists heifers!). But that's the kind of thing I meant when gesturing towards men and puberty. It would be odd and bad if most guys came online at 13,14,15 with the thought of "Oh, I can go kick somebody's ass now!" But I still think guys at that age think, "Hmm...I can like, do stuff with my body"

  • There are subcultures that do teach there is room for violence outside of drastic situations. Most of those subcultures are quite obviously dysfunctional.

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