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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7774 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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If you're asking me, my guess is that:

  • Not every celebrity is like this, but a significant proportion are, and that proportion is much too large for anybody to feel comfortable. You should not feel confident that your favourite celebrity is an exception.
  • This is true of both male and female celebrities. In general you should assign a high probability to the thesis that any given celebrity is an awful person in private. That said, I theorise that sexual misconduct specifically, at least in the sexpest sense, skews heavily male among celebrities, just as it does in wider society.
  • This is in part due to selection effects. Celebrities aren't a random selection of the populace, but rather are skewed heavily towards certain personality types and ambitions. I confidently theorise that celebrities, on average, rate higher on Dark Triad personality traits than the general populace.
  • That said it is also due to the corruption of power; or as you put it, because everyone has a lot of darkness in their hearts, and we are restrained by social pressure and lack of opportunity as much as by morality. We should not be confident that we would act better.

From here on I'm going to get more religious, so you may wish to disregard the following if you have a more secular mindset:

The conclusion I draw from these observations, personally, is to be very aware of the depth and temptation of human sin, to show mercy even to those who seem like great sinners to me, and to be aware of and do my best to fight against my own inclination to sin. I very much hope that I'm not as bad as some of those public figures I'm aware of, but it would be foolish of me to be confident in that, so this is another reminder for me to repent and seek a conversion of the heart.

As mentioned, I think disordered sexual behaviour is a more common manifestation of the inner sinful nature among men. I don't think it's entirely absent among women, but I think it's probably more common for women to engage in different types of sin. Both sexes, however, stand very much condemned by their own inward natures and desires. So I don't see any final moral advantage, as it were, for women over men, nor for men over women.

Good answer! Thanks. I'm not religious, but I do think in a similar way- we're all vulnerable to temptation, and we have to constantly use willpower to guard against it. Different people respond to different types of temptation, so I think women more often go down the path of emotional manipulation and narcissm rather than physical sexual debauchery.

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