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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8351 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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I'd like to draw attention to a specific passage from Marcuse's The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man (the full essay begins on page 44):

Now there is, in the advanced technological societies of the West, indeed a large desublimation (compared with the preceding stages) in sexual mores and behavior, in the better living, in the accessibility of culture (mass culture is desublimated higher culture). Sexual morality has been greatly liberalized; moreover, sexuality is operative as commercial stimulus, business asset, status symbol. But does this mode of desublimation signify the ascendancy of the life-preserving and life-enhancing Eros over its fatal adversary? Freud's concept of sexuality may provide a cue for the answer.

Central in this concept is the conflict between sexuality (as the force of the pleasure principle) and society (the institution of the reality principle) as necessarily repressive of the uncompromised claims of the primary life instincts. By its innermost force, Eros becomes "demonstration against the herd instinct," "rejection of the group's influence." In the technological desublimation today, the all but opposite tendency seems to prevail. The conflict between pleasure and the reality principle is managed by a controlled liberalization which increases satisfaction with the offerings of society. But in this form of release, libidinal energy changes its social function: to the degree to which sexuality is sanctioned and even encouraged by society (not "officially," of course, but by the mores and behavior considered as "regular"), it loses the quality which, according to Freud, is its essentially erotic quality, that of freedom from social control. In this sphere was the surreptitious freedom, the dangerous autonomy of the individual under the pleasure principle; its authoritarian restriction by the society bore witness to the depth of the conflict between individual and society, that is, to the extent of the repression of freedom. Now, with the integration of this sphere into the realm of business and entertainment, the repression itself is repressed: society has enlarged, not individual freedom, but its control over the individual. And this growth of social control is achieved, not by terror but by the more or less beneficial productivity and efficiency of the apparatus.

TL;DR - "It was more fun when we were in the closet."

The suggestion here is that as sexuality (outside the context of reproduction in a heterosexual marriage) becomes more socially acceptable, it begins to lose the creative and rebellious aspects that made it so distinctive in the first place. As a Marxist, Marcuse's overriding concern here would have been with the political dimension of sexuality, specifically with how societal views on sex relate to the hypothetical future proletarian revolution. Dreaming dangerously in the bedroom leads to dreaming dangerously in the political realm as well - that's the hope, anyway. But if the bedroom simply isn't dangerous anymore, because our liberal tolerant society has declared that everything is acceptable now, then this opportunity for political agitation is lost.

It was suggested in last week's thread by certain posters of a more traditionalist bent that a libertine attitude towards sexuality destroys the "magic special soul-bonding" that is proper to an authentic sexual connection. It is quite ironic to see the arch-Marxists of the Frankfurt school arguing for much the same position; although admittedly, in different terms, and for different ends. Maybe Hlynka was right after all??

Of course, our current political situation throws a bit of a wrench in Marcuse's account of things, because there's plenty of old-style repression to go around; likely more than at any other time prior to the sexual revolution, despite superficial indications to the contrary. The global e-commerce market is not friendly to sexualized media, and is mostly getting more stringent over time (pornhub can't even take credit cards!). #MeToo can be seen as a spontaneous regeneration of older, more strictly codified standards surrounding courtship and interactions between men and women; although it has been purged of overtly religious content, it seems to me to derive from the same impulse as the more familiar religious style of moralism, because humanity clearly abhors a vacuum in this domain.

It was suggested in last week's thread by certain posters of a more traditionalist bent that a libertine attitude towards sexuality destroys the "magic special soul-bonding" that is proper to an authentic sexual connection. It is quite ironic to see the arch-Marxists of the Frankfurt school arguing for much the same position; although admittedly, in different terms, and for different ends. Maybe Hlynka was right after all??

Hlynka was right in the sense that some men just want to watch the world burn. Arch Marxists want Norms to overthrow, that’s what a revolution is, and they miss norms to overthrow when there aren’t any.

#MeToo can be seen as a spontaneous regeneration of older, more strictly codified standards surrounding courtship and interactions between men and women; although it has been purged of overtly religious content, it seems to me to derive from the same impulse as the more familiar religious style of moralism, because humanity clearly abhors a vacuum in this domain.

There’s an extent to which this is true, but there’s some clearly missing ingredients. Old style courtship was aimed at marriage with normal heterosexual sex as an inherent part therein. #metoo is not described thusly. It’s about stigmatizing normal heterosexual sex because it’s inherently an exercise in power relations between the sexes.

We can talk about the underlying motivations all you want, but at the end of the day the substantial difference in practice is right up above.

Marcuse reads like typical Freudian mythmaking. It is an interesting read if you assent to his implied assumptions, but worthless if you don’t. Is it actually the case that being sexually “rebellious” outside of norms leads to political revolutionary interests? I don’t think so; female thot-leaders online who parade themselves as sex workers often have the most boring political ideology, and that is still “impermissible” today, whereas the typical incel online has insane and sometimes truly revolutionary beliefs. Is it actually the case that sex outside of norms is freeing to an individual? Probably not. I can just as well argue, with the same amount of empirical evidence as the Freudian, that Freudian thinking is an elaborate psy-op to confuse a generation of Westerners, and my explanation is more parsimonious.

Regarding the naughtiness of sex, a new take: every human has an evolutionary predisposition to have “naughty” sex, where naughtiness is the feeling of secrecy and haste and aggression. In our evolutionary environment there were copious opportunities to copulate outside the view of other competing humans (don’t copulate in view of the woman you previously copulated with, or in view of another interested party, or another potential mate, or just in view of other humans generally). So humans have an instinct to want to have sex covertly. And they also want to have sex with haste, which increases the probability of pregnancy and permits more opportunities. And lastly they want to have sex with aggression, explained by men stealing women from other tribes or members and all of the historical evidences of that (founding myth of Rome, the tradition of fake “wife-kidnapping” as a marital rite in certain cultures).

If you can introduce the vibes of secrecy and haste and aggression — which describes so many fetishes and deviant communities and role-play and erotica — then the sex is more enjoyable. The liberalization of sex has taken away these features: sex itself is no longer a “secret” thing that polite company doesn’t talk about, something that maybe a married couple doesn’t talk about bluntly. It is no longer something you do hastily because of all the relatives who share your humble abode. And it is no longer intrinsically tied to male aggression because of the paranoia regarding consent culture and spousal rape and etc. Notice that all of these features could apply to vanilla, married sex! The more puritanical your culture is, the greater the vanilla sex. Making sex itself taboo actually cements its pleasure.

An aside: men also have an instinct to have sex with lots of novel women. This is the one thing that vanilla married sex cannot satisfy. But many tens of thousands of years ago, enterprising young women learned that if they changed their hair style, changed their hair color, changed their perfume, and wore new clothes, they could trick their mate into thinking she’s a whole other woman. Behold! The invention of make-up and deception. The women with an instinct to play dress up gained an enormous fertility advantage.

Marcuse reads like typical Freudian mythmaking. It is an interesting read if you assent to his implied assumptions, but worthless if you don’t.

I don't think you need to share many of his theoretical presuppositions to understand and evaluate the passage I quoted. You can just read his description of the phenomenon and see if you think it's accurate or not.

Is it actually the case that being sexually “rebellious” outside of norms leads to political revolutionary interests?

Well, there's not a one-to-one direct causal link, no. I think there can be surprising interrelations between seemingly disparate domains of life and culture though. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something that could be said here.

(For what it's worth, I'm not a Marxist, and I don't believe in the urgency of "revolution" in the way that Marxists do, so my investment in this question would be quite different from Marcuse's.)

I can just as well argue, with the same amount of empirical evidence as the Freudian, that Freudian thinking is an elaborate psy-op to confuse a generation of Westerners

I don't think it's that at all. In fact I think it's just the opposite - psychoanalysis provides a lot of clarity and insight into why people do the things they do.

To give a very simple personal example: every year, my mother hosts a rather large Christmas party for our extended family. Every year, she swears she'll never do it again, because it's too much stress, because her family is taking advantage of her generosity, because they don't appreciate all the work she does, etc. And yet every year, she continues to host the same party right on schedule.

What is the reason for the discrepancy between her words and actions? I used to think, well maybe she's just too meek to tell everyone "no", maybe she's just that selfless, maybe she just doesn't want to upset people. But psychoanalysis gave me an alternative explanation: she keeps doing it because she enjoys it! Meaning she enjoys all the parts of the process that are allegedly such a "hassle" to her. She enjoys the feeling of being stressed, she enjoys feeling like all the work is being unfairly shoved on her, she enjoys being judged by our extended family, even if she's not consciously aware of enjoying it.

Psychoanalysis posits that, when someone keeps doing the same thing over and over, the most parsimonious explanation is that they're doing it because they want to. It's possible that someone can want to do something even when they claim to not want to, and even when the pleasure of the act takes on the superficial form of pain. (This has immediate applications to politics - why do leftists find cishetero patriarchal oppression under every rock they turn over? Because they want to, it's what they're hoping for. They want the feeling of being oppressed - that's the whole point. It's just the same patterns that Freud observed in his "hysterical" female patients, inflated to a societal scale.)

You might say that this is just obvious, or that it's common sense, or whatever - that's fine. But I can't recall this point being made anywhere else as forcefully and clearly as it is in psychoanalytic thought.

psychoanalysis provides a lot of clarity and insight into why people do the things they do.

I used to think, well maybe she's just too meek to tell everyone "no", maybe she's just that selfless, maybe she just doesn't want to upset people. But psychoanalysis gave me an alternative explanation: she keeps doing it because she enjoys it!

Witchcraft also gives us an alternative explanation: she keeps doing it because she is under a witch's spell! She may not even be consciously aware of it!

Having more alternative explanations does not necessarily give you clarity and insight. Having more alternative explanations to choose from could just as well confuse you, and having more explanations that are wrong can lead you away from insight.

Mercuse is such a fascinating figure to me. I can never tell whether he's so brilliant that I can't understand him, or deliberately obfuscating with his crazy word choices and meandering sentences. It's like every sentence from him is some sort of motte and bailey.

Still, even though he frustrates me, I do often get a feeling from his words that I find myself agreeing with. In this case I think he's onto something. It's sort of like going to a "punk rock" concert, where the band is all middle-aged millionaires, performing in a stadium with corporate sponsors, and the audience is also middle-aged begging to hear the same songs they've heard their entire lives. Or a "school of rock" where adults teach teenagers exactly how to pose, dress, and perform. Technically there's nothing with these things, and people seem to enjoy them, but still you get the sense that something ineffable has been lost. The traditional music scenes where young people made up stuff themselves and performed live in front of other youth with no rules seems to be disappearing.

Maybe an analogy would be a "soft" martial art, like Judo. As I understand it, Judo works by trying to redirect the opponents force, instead of directly opposing it. So while an old-school oppressive society would say "don't have sex outside of marriage! sex is bad and evil and illegal!" and that leads to young people directly opposing it, with crazy chaotic energy. A modern liberal society says "yes, have sex, it's perfectly fine, we won't stop you. But here are the recommended, socially-approved ways to do it." it channels you into just a few specific venues and styles, which have long sense been mined out of any sort of new ideas. "Go on tinder, then go to get coffee, then go for a walk in a public park, then get affirmative consent, then engage in at least 1 hour of female-centric foreplay, then wash and use a condom, then discuss what happened." It turns sex into some sort of bizarre job-hunting process, and manages to make sex unsexy.

Meanwhile internet porn just gets wilder and wilder, because it's one of the few places left that's explicitly outside the control of mainstream American media, and young people feel free to do and ask for whatever they want. I wonder how much longer that will last.

Mercuse is such a fascinating figure to me. I can never tell whether he's so brilliant that I can't understand him, or deliberately obfuscating with his crazy word choices and meandering sentences. It's like every sentence from him is some sort of motte and bailey.

I think on a word-by-word level, Marcuse is pretty clear and straightforward. He's more straightforward than Adorno, at any rate. Can you provide an example of a sentence or paragraph that you thought was deliberately obfuscated? It's possible that you're just missing some necessary context for what he's saying.

It's sort of like going to a "punk rock" concert, where the band is all middle-aged millionaires, performing in a stadium with corporate sponsors, and the audience is also middle-aged begging to hear the same songs they've heard their entire lives.

Everyone wants to think that they're more punk than they actually are.

One time I was at a concert to see Slipknot and their singer said "this is a big fuck you to all the corporate suits who want to keep this music down!" And I'm like, dude. You are literally a corporate and mainstream band. Your songs are in Guitar Hero. Chill dude.

Phrases like "desublimated higher culture", "the pleasure principle," "the institution of the reality principle," or "demonstration against the herd instinct" are not part of my normal vocabulary. Maybe they're common in marxist/freudian writings, and maybe people who have spent enough time reading that stuff know exactly what he means. But for me, I have to guess, and I'm never quite sure if I really know what he's talking about.

But yeah, fell you 100% about going to a modern day big-budget "punk" concert. It's still fun but it's weird. I assume the band is in on the joke though and it's all kayfabe.

Those are all more or less well-defined terms you could bump into depending on your social circles. It might be beneficial to just read up on them a bit

if your social circle is full of people still discussing 100-year old pseudoscience as if it's something to take for granted, you might wante to reconsider your life choices.

Phrases like "desublimated higher culture", "the pleasure principle," "the institution of the reality principle,"

Ah, I see. These are all common terms in psychoanalytic theory and they have relatively straightforward definitions.

It's easy to forget how much of this stuff you start taking for granted after you've been immersed in it for so long!

"demonstration against the herd instinct"

Just another way of saying "not being a conformist".

Man, screw you. This started with you posting something you had just read and apparently you've devoted a huge chunk of your life to reading this nonsense. I admitted in good faith that it was hard to understand, as I think any normal person would, and you just look down on me with this obvious snobbishness. That's exactly the same feeling I get from Mercuse and all of his ilk. Go enjoy immersing yourself in Freudian pseudoscience, I'm sure that will get you a tenured humanities position.

Man, screw you.

Don't do this. One-day ban.

Wow. That wasn't my intention at all. I'm not sure where I went wrong, but I didn't mean any of that.

At a basic level I just wanted to reaffirm what you already guessed: you were right that they were common phrases in philosophical circles. When I said that they had "relatively straightforward definitions", what I was trying to convey was that they're nothing to be intimidated by. People aren't smart just because they use those words. You too could look up the words and learn what they mean (if you wanted to! you don't have to, of course!), and then you'd understand them just as well as the "experts". The words are no big deal. That's all I meant. There was certainly no snobbishness intended.

I didn't actually go into the definitions of the terms myself because I wasn't sure if you would actually be interested, but I'm happy to do that if you or anyone else is.

I fed "desublimated higher culture" into Google and found this conversation, Marcuse's book and

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 5 already displayed.

Trying Bing.com

There are no results for "desublimated higher culture"

Check your spelling or try different keywords

Typing

"the pleasure

into Google gets me various autocompletions

The pleasure principle Geometrie De La Mort TV series

The pleasure principle Studio album by Gary Numan

Clearly the phrase once had cultural cachet.

It gets worse. Wikipedia has articles on Pleasure principle and Reality principle. I want to be one of the cool intellectuals, who is down with these sophisticated concepts. How can I do that when Wikipedia puts their vapid triviality on public display :-(

Wikipedia has articles on Pleasure principle and Reality principle. I want to be one of the cool intellectuals, who is down with these sophisticated concepts. How can I do that when Wikipedia puts their vapid triviality on public display :-(

Pleasure principle and reality principle are very simple concepts, yes. Which is exactly what I said in the post you replied to.

Freud's concept of sublimation is that unacceptable impulses (especially sexual ones) get redirected towards socially acceptable ends (especially art and science), thereby instilling the target of the redirection with a sort of elevated aura of importance. "Desublimated" higher culture would then be higher culture demystified, stripped of its aura so its material reality could be laid bare, and deprived of the underlying psychic intensity that had been redirected from the sexual drive.

The traditional music scenes where young people made up stuff themselves and performed live in front of other youth with no rules seems to be disappearing.

Wait, isn't that TikTok right now?

The middle school I volunteered at had to implement strict restrictions on cell phone use because the students were engrossed in social media, in particularly TikTok. From what I saw, the kids weren't merely passively consuming it. Quite a few posted their own videos, and a lot of the classroom distraction / disruption resulted from these locally-made posts rather than from viral videos. (Those happened too, of course.) That's youth communicating with one another and jockeying for status and recognition among themselves. Way more interesting than the official school curriculum. (Relevant Far Side cartoon.)

Thirty years ago, a way to impress other youths was to get start a band, or to know some good local bands, or to know a local spot where some good local bands would be playing. Now, a way to impress other youths is to post a video that goes viral (at least among your group), or to know someone whose video went viral, or to be plugged in to some less-known sites that share videos that may go viral and be the first to share those among your friends.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

thats why i specified live. very different to perform in front of your local peer group, with a whole party atmosphere, vs uploading a video for random strangers. most kids just passively watch videos that already have millions of views.

Yes, most youths watch videos that are already viral. What I observed is that, even then, a lot of the time the youth's motivation for watching those videos is social. Either someone they know shared the video with them, or it's the video that other kids are talking about. "Fear of missing out" is a key driver here. Yes, a lot of it is just that stuff on their phones is much more interesting than the boring class, like videos and games. But a lot of it is social, and specifically social with the kids they know in-person rather than randos on the internet.

Once I was at this social gathering; my acquaintances brought their teens, the latter also friends. So the adults are all talking to each other, and these three teens are sitting quietly off in a corner, side-by-side, absorbed in their phones. So I watch them, and I see that occasionally one of them giggles, like out of the blue. I casually drift to their corner, peek at their phones. Sure 'nuf, they are texting each other, and sharing links. "Really?", I said, "y'all sitting next to each other, and still texting?" They just gave me this look, like, how-can-you-boomer-possibly-understand?

Kids these days.

Sharing links seems like a reasonable...reason to text, since you can't say links. I suppose also if they want to dissuade prying ears (the adults in the room).

But, I have a sneaking suspicion that fondness for texting is related to the younger generation's socialization problems. Usually people point out that technology causes awkwardness, but I imagine there is a feedback loop here: If you're bad at reading body language and tone, you might prefer the clarity of text.

That's a reasonable hypothesis. These three in particular were very well-adjusted young people with plenty of in-person friends, but maybe in general there is that feedback loop.

But if the bedroom simply isn't dangerous anymore, because our liberal tolerant society has declared that everything is acceptable now, then this opportunity for political agitation is lost.

Well, aside for that one group that it is much more dangerous to take to bed than it was in the '70s (or any time in the last 100 years before them). Which, speaking of political agitation and old-style repression, consider the following:

"There will be nothing but curiosity and enjoyment of the process of life. No competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always, do not forget this, Karen - never will be the intoxication of power, never increasing, but constantly growing more overt. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of elevating a friend who is worthy. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an attractive woman pressing her breasts into a little boy's face - forever." (SFW, enough)

You'll recognize that "stare at my [metaphorical] goods, and be enriched simply by their existence" as the promise of liberalism. We don't tolerate expressions of that any more because we are no longer liberal; instead, the women who should be encouraging young men to develop properly by doing that are instead invested in [quite literally, in some cases] cutting that expression off right to the quick. It can't be permissible for people to give sex or commitment outside of what biology dictates because there's serious money to be made instead- the organism needs to exists as an instrument of alienated labor, not as a subject of self realization.

(Which is the steelman context for the above. There's literally zero benefit to older women [traditionally: extracts zero resources while not benefiting from looking pretty] matching with younger men [traditionally: provides zero sex appeal while not benefiting from being able to extract resources]; which means that if they do it and stick together, they do it for self-actualization: because they want to. And if you squint a little, you'll notice that "this is ultimately what I want you to have, here it is, I know you're not quite ready but your wanting to be is enough" is exactly how God operates. I'm sure that's a total coincidence though.)

KulakRevolt made an interesting point a while ago about how society is dominated either by the scowls of bitter old women or the howls of laughing young boys (along with a few posts about how old women abuse young boys in the public education system); and I think there's something to the prohibition of the latter in a society as the former starts to take over, starting with the pathologization and assumptions of bad faith in everything they might do, making sure women who are psychologically closer to men are marginalized/suppressed or outright mutilated, disrupt the pipeline for people who don't have sex-magic-soul-bond/see sex as merely a means to an end goal to realize that about themselves, and the like. It's trying to cut the people who see sex and commitment as described above off entirely- they can't be allowed to exist, because how would anyone be forced to buy their sexual labor then?

Maybe Hlynka was right after all?

Yes, but you have to distill the initial conditions and sociobiological incentives of the groups in conflict to figure that out because our language is insufficient to explain that. Much like how I use "straight", for that matter.

KulakRevolt made an interesting point a while ago about how society is dominated either by the scowls of bitter old women or the howls of laughing young boys (along with a few posts about how old women abuse young boys in the public education system);

Should I browse his substack, twitter, or motteposting to find these?

and I think there's something to the prohibition of the latter in a society as the former starts to take over, starting with the pathologization and assumptions of bad faith in everything they might do, making sure women who are psychologically closer to men are marginalized/suppressed or outright mutilated,

Does Kulak write more about this? Can you? Why would bitter old women disrupt the Tomboys? Is it so bitter old women can get more men? Earlier you allude to the tension between self-actualization and... performing sexual labor? But now you're alluding to the tension between which share of women get higher market power?

I've heard some lamentations about Tomboys (trans'ing, etc.), and one of the things I also don't fully understand is the vitriol thrown at "pick-me's." But it makes sense to me as a pejorative for psychologically-male women. If this is true, it doesn't seem to go with your thesis. I don't see how bitter old women (feminist Cathedral, journos, etc.) as driving pick-me hate. It seems to me pick-me hate is more grassroots.

disrupt the pipeline for people who don't have sex-magic-soul-bond/see sex as merely a means to an end goal to realize that about themselves, and the like. It's trying to cut the people who see sex and commitment as described above off entirely- they can't be allowed to exist, because how would anyone be forced to buy their sexual labor then?

This is where I get really confused! Are you saying the bitter old women are disrupting the pipeline for "asexuals" (I mean those without the soul bond - not the way queers use it) to self-realize? Why does common knowledge of asexuals' existence mean that less sexual labor will happen?

My experience: It's been system-2!obvious to me for a very long time that sex is a part of power, and also a currency with value. But that has not changed my behavior at all towards obtaining sex and status. Also, the talk of "magical soul bonding" makes me think I don't have it. So I'm confused why asexuals becoming "woke" or "redpilled" (to appropriate more terms and applying them differently) will mean less sexual labor.

Maybe this has already happened? Did dating-app-ification, and social media in general, cause people to become more skilled socially? By that, I mean have we become more mimetic? Are we more meta as we mention "vibes," "bad looks" and "reading the room?" Last week's first Frat post had a comment claiming women don't actually desire sex, so maybe this is because of the novel, widespread female dating app experience? Maybe all this is contributing to modern adolescent sexlessness?

Should I browse his substack, twitter, or motteposting to find these?

Twitter. He's on a kick ranting about this.

Can you?

You posted (either intentionally or unintentionally; I legitimately cannot tell) one of the replies to the comment where I unpacked this. In fairness, my replies to this topic are starting to get fragmented, since I make a similar post every few months rather than just copy-pasting.

Is this it or do I need to go way further back? I had forgotten about this thread, but I do see the resemblences!

I was more directly thinking about this. Being a high-decoupler and what I describe as "asexual" in the comment I liked are more or less the same thing; 'asexual' is a slight refinement to 'high decoupler' but maybe the 'sexual' throws people off too much.

Speaking solely to your question regarding pick-me hate (I’ll let your original interlocutor handle the rest), my theory has always been that pick-mes are the equivalent of scabs in the sexual marketplace. Let’s assume that most women don’t want to act male-brained: they don’t want to have to play video games or watch anime to land a good boyfriend. In the absence of pick-mes, they don’t have to: if all women categorically refuse to engage in male-brained behavior, then any man who wants a girlfriend will have to accept that. But now, if we introduce the existence of pick-mes, the equilibrium changes: it is possible for men (including presumably high-status men) to get a girlfriend that aligns more with their interests, meaning that ceteris paribus, a man would choose a pick-me over the equivalent “normal girl”. This means that in order for a normal girl to maintain her same level of attractiveness, she has to engage in a bit of pick-meing herself to stay afloat (and as we’ve previously assumed, most women don’t want to do that). Shaming pick-mes is therefore a method of preventing this from happening, in the same way that anti-scab tactics are methods of preventing wages from being lowered. I also hypothesize that the male equivalent of this is “simp-shaming”.

Note that the one time I shared this theory in real life to a woman, she wholly denied it, saying that the reason for pick-me shaming is that it is simply fundamentally embarrassing to see a woman debasing herself for a man. But even if that’s how this behavior is psychologized or rationalized, it still serves the broader game-theoretic purpose discussed above. (The same goes for simp-shaming.)

saying that the reason for pick-me shaming is that it is simply fundamentally embarrassing to see a woman debasing herself for a man

Discussing how salespeople negotiate deals puts the salesperson at a disadvantage, hence her refusal to entertain the notion. Of course, I already covered that too.

to see a woman debasing herself for a man

Which is why my entire thesis is "the women who don't see it as debasement aren't normal". That's why I have to cut a line between the two; most people seem incapable of acknowledging such a distinction even exists (then proceed to bury it in the term "women").

Well, aside for that one group that it is much more dangerous to take to bed than it was in the '70s (or any time in the last 100 years before them).

Right, I noted at the end that Marcuse's empirical description was not entirely correct today (especially if you're a straight white male).

If you want a picture of the future, imagine an attractive woman pressing her breasts into a little boy's face - forever." (SFW, enough)

This was a great anime by the way.

KulakRevolt made an interesting point a while ago about how society is dominated either by the scowls of bitter old women or the howls of laughing young boys

What? No it's not. It's dominated by adult men who have a lot of money.

Maybe Hlynka was right after all?

Yes

No. My apologies, that was an attempt to interject humor into the OP. He wasn't right. He insisted that non-identical ideologies were actually identical. Our language was insufficient to justify his position because his position was incorrect.

Older men have only the authority vested into them in their ability to lead younger men: either in the personal level in tribal and medieval context, or in the ideological and abstract state apparatus in the current era. Young men are the currency of science, warfare, and economics. No vigorous movement has succeeded without them.

I disagree. The currency of economics is, ultimately, capital.

Sure, young men (and women) could band together and take over Somalia, and live without any older person telling them what to do.

However, most are wise enough to see that that this would be a terrible decision. Instead, they live in big cities paying high rents to older people, working in companies controlled by older people (at least indirectly), and voting for political parties controlled by older people.

You are mistaken: the currency of economics is homo economicus, the idealized man-laborer/manager in the shape of a spherical cow. It is human beings who are the primary agents of subjective value, who give meaning and purpose to capital and the commodities it produces.

You make the mistake of looking at the top of the pyramid: and seeing that they are all old, and conflating that with power. Experience and expertise count for much but the simple fact of biological death ensures that transition of power is inevitable. Institutions, by necessity, are constantly replacing their principal agents.

Which leads back to the original premise: any organization that fails to appeal to the young (and young men in particular) will be swiftly made irrelevant. Feminists are only successful insomuch as they are able to appeal to the resources of powerful men (in the suffragette era) or abstractly through the mechanisms of taxation and policy (now.) Old, infertile women have no power over young men and must sway their younger, more beautiful counterparts to have any political power at all.

As an analogy, someone might argue that the ultimate power in society lies with the ones who produce food, for everyone has to eat. However, this would ignore the fact that there is a competitive food market: plenty of food producers are willing to sell food for some marginal profit instead of requiring to be made lords of the realm.

With the work force it is just the same. Anyone with capital to spent on salaries and PR can reliably find young persons to work for them. Provide the correct incentives, and people will work for you just almost as reliable as water powering a hydroelectric plant. We generally assign little agency to that water, because while individual molecules move in a Brownian motion which seems random to us, in aggregate we can model what water will do very well. Humans are a bit harder to model, but the principle is the same.

For quite some generations, gaining money through paid work has been the best pathway to reproductive success available for most men. As long as the boundary conditions are correct, getting some of them to work for you is easy.

I also don't understand why you emphasize fertility differences between genders in old age. The power that old people wield is almost completely orthogonal to their reproductive capabilities. Nobody gives much of a damn if a male leader is impotent or not, and it has been that way for a long time. "Leader X has knocked up five women in the last year, so his family will be very big an influential in the future, while Leader Y has not given birth in a decade, so who cares what she has to say" is a thought pattern which is alien to most humans who have ever lived, and certainly is obsolete today.

The suggestion here is that as sexuality (outside the context of reproduction in a heterosexual marriage) becomes more socially acceptable, it begins to lose the creative and rebellious aspects that made it so distinctive in the first place.

This isn't right at all. The issue for Marcuse isn't the acceptability of previously-taboo sexual preferences in the first place; its the way in which that acceptability is generated. If the acceptability comes from a critical mass of people exercising their own independent choices, for Marcuse it's a good thing: "[r]eactivation of polymorphous and narcissistic sexuality ceases to be a threat to culture and can itself lead to culture-building if the organism exists not as an instrument of alienated labor, but as a subject of self realization." Eros & Civilization, ppg. 191-192. What Marcuse is criticizing is pseudo-sexual liberation handed out by a "culture industry" just as controlled by the bourgeois and alienated from the great mass of the population as the means of industrial production. It's also tied up in Marcuse's (and the rest of his fellow Frankfurt School colleagues') instinctive revulsion at the American culture they got plonked down in, which they viewed as horrifyingly common and unrefined compared to their highly-individuated and sensitive central-European lives got ripped away from them.

As Horkheimer wrote in his letter on Freud, "the greater a work, the more it is rooted in the concrete historical situation." As refugees from Central Europe, who had been tutored in all its rich cultural heritage had to offer, they were inevitably ill-at-ease in the less-rarified atmosphere of their new American environment. On occasion, this alienation meant unresponsiveness to the spontaneous elements in American popular culture - Adorno's unremitting hostility to jazz, for example, suffers from a certain a priori insensitivity. But at the same time, it provided an invaluable critical distance from the culture, which prevented the Institut from equating mass culture with true democracy. The category of "repressive desublimation" which Marcuse was to develop years later to characterize the pseudo-liberation of modern culture, existed in embryo in the personal experiences of the Institut's members. Having known an alternative cultural milieu, they were unwilling to trade in its promesse de bonheur for the debased coin of the culture industry.

As Adorno later explained, the phrase "culture industry" was chosen by Horkheimer and himself in Dialectic of the Enlightenment because of its antipopulist connotations. The Frankfurt School disliked mass culture, not because it was democratic, but precisely because it was not. The notion of "popular" culture, they argued, was ideological; the culture industry administered a nonspontaneous, reified, phony culture rather than the real thing. The old distinction between high and low culture had all but vanished in the "stylized barbarism" of mass culture. . . .

Increasingly, the Institut came to feel that the culture industry enslaved men in far more subtle and effective ways than the crude methods of domination practiced in earlier eras. The false harmony of particular and universal was in some ways more sinister than the clash of social contradictions, because of its ability to lull its victims into passive acceptance. With the decline of mediating forces in the society - here the Institut drew on its earlier studies of the lessening role of the family [!] in the process of socialization - the chances for the development of negative resistance were seriously diminished. Moreover, the spread of technology served the culture industry in America just as it helped tighten the control of authoritarian governments in Europe. Radio, Horkheimer and Adorno argued, was to fascism as the printing press had been to the Reformation.

~Jay, Martin: The Dialectical Imagination, pg. 215-217.

"[r]eactivation of polymorphous and narcissistic sexuality ceases to be a threat to culture and can itself lead to culture-building if the organism exists not as an instrument of alienated labor, but as a subject of self realization." Eros & Civilization, ppg. 191-192

I've never encountered this passage before (my first-hand knowledge of his work doesn't extend much past The Aesthetic Dimension and some isolated fragments), but it did occur to me while writing my post that he probably thought or said something like this at some point - that there's sexuality under capitalism, and there's sexuality in a future post-alienated state, and they're distinct phenomena that require distinct treatments. But I didn't want to bloat the post by going into those distinctions, so I just tried to provide a gloss on the passage I quoted, particularly these sentences:

By its innermost force, Eros becomes "demonstration against the herd instinct," "rejection of the group's influence." In the technological desublimation today, the all but opposite tendency seems to prevail. [...] to the degree to which sexuality is sanctioned and even encouraged by society (not "officially," of course, but by the mores and behavior considered as "regular"), it loses the quality which, according to Freud, is its essentially erotic quality, that of freedom from social control.

Since this passage is specifically about the nature and function of sexuality under capitalism, rather than a non-alienated sexuality, I think the summary I gave was basically correct, albeit simplified.

It seems to me the linked post (by ThisIsSin) is talking about sex as magical-pair-bonding activity and Marcuse is talking about about sex as magical-thought-criming activity. They seem only cursory related to me, only both lamenting a too-sex-positive culture. I guess you sort of pre-empt this by saying they argue for it "in different terms." I suppose I should take this to mean "vaguely agree in direction, but for unrelated reasons."

I also think MeToo only has a superficial similarity to traditional sexual norms. There's nothing traditional about acknowledging "power dynamics" and being creeped out by older men and younger women being together. I would say the impulse that drives MeToo is "increasing the status of women." Like the earlier example, MeToo is vaguely in the same direction as protestant prudes -- it is the 2020's version moralistic sexual judgementalism.

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