{In my limited experiences as a hetero male} Women identify their breasts as important or not important less by the size of their breasts than by their bodyweight. In this model, women prefer to be skinny, but if they can't reasonably say they are skinny it is better to be "curvy" with big tits than be a pudgeball. So a woman with small tits will still identify herself as curvy (emphasize her breasts) if she's fat, but a woman with large tits will identify as skinny even if she has large breasts. A woman with medium-sized breasts will emphasize or de-emphasize how nice they are based on her body weight, a mostly-unrelated variable.
Guys to the upper left, more athletic than smart, identify as jocks; guys to the lower right of the line, smarter than they are athletic, identify as nerds. But the result is that many guys who identify as nerds aren't actually as smart as guys who identify as jocks. And many guys who identify as nerds are actually a lot stronger than guys who identify as jocks. Which attribute you identify with has less to do with what you have than with what you lack, it's the balance between the two that makes the difference.
So I think, to cite SA on themotte, the best way to figure out if someone identifies as something odd has to do with a need for a quirk to avoid being "basic." So maybe it's like skinny vs curvy, you'd rather be a manly man, but if you can't be manly you'd rather be nonbinary.
the best way to figure out if someone identifies as something odd has to do with a need for a quirk to avoid being "basic."
I think that's the default anti-woke explanation for this kind of behaviour, or as I said in the post itself: "The default explanation among the woke-sceptical is that such people are 'snowflakes': they want to be seen as special and unique, but are hampered in this goal by the critical defect of not actually possessing any special or unique traits. Hence, they dress up their perfectly ordinary traits using language which implies that they are far more unusual than they really are."
What I'm trying to get it with my post is that maybe people aren't just describing themselves as "ambivert", "non-binary" or "grey-asexual" because they don't want to be seen as "basic": perhaps some of the people describing themselves as such are legitimately (and understandably) confused about what the terms in question refer to.
So maybe it's like skinny vs. curvy, you'd rather be a manly man, but if you can't be manly you'd rather be nonbinary.
There's been some recent discussion on this forum about how, prior to coming out, trans women tend not to be exemplars of "peak masculinity" (and vice versa for trans men), so identifying as trans could be thought of as a sort of "you can't fire me, I quit!" response when a person realises that they're losing a game which they were entered into against their will.
I don't dispute this hypothesis, and it certainly jibes with my experience of trans people I know personally. But I don't think this is necessarily true of non-binary people. As I said in the post, if you've been raised in an environment in which even banal and unremarkable instances of gender non-conformity are interpreted as red flags for gender dysphoria, you could be forgiven for believing that only "peak masculine" men are actually men (and vice versa). Whereas twenty years ago we would've said "Alice doesn't wear makeup and likes playing rugby, but she's still a woman - she's not a man, or something other than man or woman."
Or if you've consumed a great deal of porn (which almost exclusively depicts fictional characters with hypersexual/nymphomaniac sex drives), you might come away with the inaccurate impression that the average person is always rearing to go, and hence that your (perfectly normal) level of sex drive is below average - something intermediate between sexual and asexual, when in fact it's nothing of the kind. Hence "grey-asexual". It's the social-justice equivalent of men feeling inferior about the size of their perfectly average dicks because porn has given them a skewed impression of what the average dick looks like.
What I'm trying to get it with my post is that maybe people aren't just describing themselves as "ambivert", "non-binary" or "grey-asexual" because they don't want to be seen as "basic": perhaps some of the people describing themselves as such are legitimately (and understandably) confused about what the terms in question refer to.
Sure, and I think that's a good point, some people will always take the rhetoric too seriously and break the kayfabe. But it's still downstream of feeling that X is something that needs to be labeled about oneself, or that Y is a valid axis on which to build one's identity. There's a lot of groundwork that goes into those assumptions.
It's sort of the Nietzsche-an idea of Achilles acting without thinking to satisfy his desires and labeling that the good, versus the slave morality of overthinking and labeling everything.
I think what you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, is that Gray-Asexuals aren't acting in bad faith when they do so, they legitimately think that label describes them. What I'm saying is that their need to label it is downstream of their attributes or lacks. I don't think there's anything consciously false about their cope, but it's still a cope. The need for an explanation for their own misery is at the root of their need to explain themselves and identify themselves.
I'm stepping into a tangent off the 2nd shitty sketch, but do you agree with the "middle school bullied kid = loser" paradigm ?
I'm sure plenty of Motte-folks got bullied through school. So did I. I have my reasonable theories on why it happened to me. But, I don't agree with the "loser" paradigm. In my school, losers were ignored, quickly formed their own group and then stopped interacting with the rest of the class.
What was your 'bullying' journey like and what do you think put you in the cross hairs?
I'm stepping into a tangent off the 2nd shitty sketch, but do you agree with the "middle school bullied kid = loser" paradigm ?
I disagree Middle School Bullied kid is automatically a Loser under the definition I gave of a loser (low IQ, low athleticism). But sometimes he is, and sometimes he isn't; more often than not kids in the Loser quadrant but north of the 45* are bullies to kids I put in the True Nerd quadrant. And hell, from what I've seen bullying can equally be targeted at a star athlete for racial reasons or a valedictorian for jealousy reasons or anybody at all for no reason at all. Being bullied doesn't really tell you much about someone, especially absent the context of their school.
I offered that example for someone with neither athleticism nor intelligence because it's hard to think of a famous one off hand other than boo-light culture war examples; even Leo Bloom doesn't really fit, but the best I could think of in a minute. One of the problems of thinking about people at a population level is that that quadrant becomes practically invisible to us, we don't even think about them. The primary point of the loser quadrant is to demonstrate the idea that people might identify as nerds or jocks, while not actually being very athletic or very smart, it's just the best they've got to go with. A lot of kids with average-to-below-average intelligence latch onto the "bullied misunderstood brilliant nerd" narrative to salve their wounds, when in reality some of their bullies are smarter than they are. It's a sad, blackpilled fact of life.
What was your 'bullying' journey like and what do you think put you in the cross hairs?
I wouldn't say I was particularly bullied in middle/high school, I was more in the category of "ignored." I was known for being hyper bookish overly political and anti-war, I wore an m65 surplus army jacket to school every day and had long hair; the stereotypical middle school bullies mockingly nicknamed me "Weed Man," ironically I wouldn't touch the stuff until after I was married, but "Weed Man" beat the other nerds on the bus they nicknamed things like "Fucking Faggot" and "Shitbreath" right? Most of my isolation was, in retrospect, self-inflicted; I latched on to identities and narratives that required me to play the loner bookish nerd, if I were min-maxing another playthrough I would have skipped out on playing WoW or MTG or going to death metal concerts at dive bars in middle/high school and joined the football team instead when they didn't cut anyone, but at the time I sort-of thought joining the football team required you to be an asshole moron which I didn't want to be. I would figure it out at 18 or so, and from there my life has been much better. I was flat out bad at being a teenager.
I apologize if the use of the term "Loser" had negative or traumatic associations for your past. What term would you use to refer to people who really have nothing going for them?
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Notes -
More graphs and ways to think about identity vs distribution of attributes
I'm thinking about breasts, and I think you're missing a more important question than the gaussian distribution.
Shitty sketch graph
{In my limited experiences as a hetero male} Women identify their breasts as important or not important less by the size of their breasts than by their bodyweight. In this model, women prefer to be skinny, but if they can't reasonably say they are skinny it is better to be "curvy" with big tits than be a pudgeball. So a woman with small tits will still identify herself as curvy (emphasize her breasts) if she's fat, but a woman with large tits will identify as skinny even if she has large breasts. A woman with medium-sized breasts will emphasize or de-emphasize how nice they are based on her body weight, a mostly-unrelated variable.
Or consider, guys identifying as Jocks or as Nerds. Second shitty sketch graph
Guys to the upper left, more athletic than smart, identify as jocks; guys to the lower right of the line, smarter than they are athletic, identify as nerds. But the result is that many guys who identify as nerds aren't actually as smart as guys who identify as jocks. And many guys who identify as nerds are actually a lot stronger than guys who identify as jocks. Which attribute you identify with has less to do with what you have than with what you lack, it's the balance between the two that makes the difference.
So I think, to cite SA on themotte, the best way to figure out if someone identifies as something odd has to do with a need for a quirk to avoid being "basic." So maybe it's like skinny vs curvy, you'd rather be a manly man, but if you can't be manly you'd rather be nonbinary.
*The Jalen Hurts joke It's gonna get memed so bad when he starts losing games.
I think that's the default anti-woke explanation for this kind of behaviour, or as I said in the post itself: "The default explanation among the woke-sceptical is that such people are 'snowflakes': they want to be seen as special and unique, but are hampered in this goal by the critical defect of not actually possessing any special or unique traits. Hence, they dress up their perfectly ordinary traits using language which implies that they are far more unusual than they really are."
What I'm trying to get it with my post is that maybe people aren't just describing themselves as "ambivert", "non-binary" or "grey-asexual" because they don't want to be seen as "basic": perhaps some of the people describing themselves as such are legitimately (and understandably) confused about what the terms in question refer to.
There's been some recent discussion on this forum about how, prior to coming out, trans women tend not to be exemplars of "peak masculinity" (and vice versa for trans men), so identifying as trans could be thought of as a sort of "you can't fire me, I quit!" response when a person realises that they're losing a game which they were entered into against their will.
I don't dispute this hypothesis, and it certainly jibes with my experience of trans people I know personally. But I don't think this is necessarily true of non-binary people. As I said in the post, if you've been raised in an environment in which even banal and unremarkable instances of gender non-conformity are interpreted as red flags for gender dysphoria, you could be forgiven for believing that only "peak masculine" men are actually men (and vice versa). Whereas twenty years ago we would've said "Alice doesn't wear makeup and likes playing rugby, but she's still a woman - she's not a man, or something other than man or woman."
Or if you've consumed a great deal of porn (which almost exclusively depicts fictional characters with hypersexual/nymphomaniac sex drives), you might come away with the inaccurate impression that the average person is always rearing to go, and hence that your (perfectly normal) level of sex drive is below average - something intermediate between sexual and asexual, when in fact it's nothing of the kind. Hence "grey-asexual". It's the social-justice equivalent of men feeling inferior about the size of their perfectly average dicks because porn has given them a skewed impression of what the average dick looks like.
Sure, and I think that's a good point, some people will always take the rhetoric too seriously and break the kayfabe. But it's still downstream of feeling that X is something that needs to be labeled about oneself, or that Y is a valid axis on which to build one's identity. There's a lot of groundwork that goes into those assumptions.
It's sort of the Nietzsche-an idea of Achilles acting without thinking to satisfy his desires and labeling that the good, versus the slave morality of overthinking and labeling everything.
I think what you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, is that Gray-Asexuals aren't acting in bad faith when they do so, they legitimately think that label describes them. What I'm saying is that their need to label it is downstream of their attributes or lacks. I don't think there's anything consciously false about their cope, but it's still a cope. The need for an explanation for their own misery is at the root of their need to explain themselves and identify themselves.
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"Women so ugly I don't notice or know them"
Dangerously based
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I'm stepping into a tangent off the 2nd shitty sketch, but do you agree with the "middle school bullied kid = loser" paradigm ?
I'm sure plenty of Motte-folks got bullied through school. So did I. I have my reasonable theories on why it happened to me. But, I don't agree with the "loser" paradigm. In my school, losers were ignored, quickly formed their own group and then stopped interacting with the rest of the class.
What was your 'bullying' journey like and what do you think put you in the cross hairs?
I disagree Middle School Bullied kid is automatically a Loser under the definition I gave of a loser (low IQ, low athleticism). But sometimes he is, and sometimes he isn't; more often than not kids in the Loser quadrant but north of the 45* are bullies to kids I put in the True Nerd quadrant. And hell, from what I've seen bullying can equally be targeted at a star athlete for racial reasons or a valedictorian for jealousy reasons or anybody at all for no reason at all. Being bullied doesn't really tell you much about someone, especially absent the context of their school.
I offered that example for someone with neither athleticism nor intelligence because it's hard to think of a famous one off hand other than boo-light culture war examples; even Leo Bloom doesn't really fit, but the best I could think of in a minute. One of the problems of thinking about people at a population level is that that quadrant becomes practically invisible to us, we don't even think about them. The primary point of the loser quadrant is to demonstrate the idea that people might identify as nerds or jocks, while not actually being very athletic or very smart, it's just the best they've got to go with. A lot of kids with average-to-below-average intelligence latch onto the "bullied misunderstood brilliant nerd" narrative to salve their wounds, when in reality some of their bullies are smarter than they are. It's a sad, blackpilled fact of life.
I wouldn't say I was particularly bullied in middle/high school, I was more in the category of "ignored." I was known for being hyper bookish overly political and anti-war, I wore an m65 surplus army jacket to school every day and had long hair; the stereotypical middle school bullies mockingly nicknamed me "Weed Man," ironically I wouldn't touch the stuff until after I was married, but "Weed Man" beat the other nerds on the bus they nicknamed things like "Fucking Faggot" and "Shitbreath" right? Most of my isolation was, in retrospect, self-inflicted; I latched on to identities and narratives that required me to play the loner bookish nerd, if I were min-maxing another playthrough I would have skipped out on playing WoW or MTG or going to death metal concerts at dive bars in middle/high school and joined the football team instead when they didn't cut anyone, but at the time I sort-of thought joining the football team required you to be an asshole moron which I didn't want to be. I would figure it out at 18 or so, and from there my life has been much better. I was flat out bad at being a teenager.
I apologize if the use of the term "Loser" had negative or traumatic associations for your past. What term would you use to refer to people who really have nothing going for them?
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