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Notes -
As promised here is:
A breakdown of the Daniel Greene-Naomi King sexual misconduct scandal
A fascinating case study in social media hysteria and gender relations. I said I'd post this Saturday but the situation kept developing since then so I waited a bit, though it appears mostly resolved in the court of public opinion by now. I did my best to be thorough but there were lots of detailed claims made by both parties involved and I couldn't be bothered to outline all of them, so let me know if there's anything important I've missed that should be added to this post. I did link archives of all relevant videos if you want to examine them yourself. You can also just skip to the end for my funny summary of the events.
First, the facts in the order they were presented to the public, without my analysis:
Daniel Greene is a Youtuber who mostly covers fantasy novels. He had 580k subscribers before his recent scandal broke last, and now sits at 521k (since I started writing this it has climbed back up to 529k). His videos regularly got 40k-120k views, he's interviewed best-selling authors like Brandon Sanderson and Joe Abercrombie, and I've heard his convention panels are regularly packed. He's published 3 novels himself and is working on a fourth. His discord sever was very active and had 17k users. He has been dating his gf Kayla Torrison since 2021 and they were engaged last September.
Naomi King is a self-described Actor, musician, author, and (as she revealed in a since-removed video this past Saturday) Vancouver sugar baby. The two had not publicly associated before this scandal broke.
In 2017, someone on Tumblr accused Greene of rape. This was mentioned in his Discord server in 2021, which he denied by saying he wasn't in the area at the time, and the incident wasn't brought up again.
On June 19th, 2023, Naomi King posted a video to YouTube where she mentions an unnamed friend took advantage of her in Vegas. She implies she had agreed to some sex acts with the friend but they went too far. She also implies that the friend had suggested they would have a relationship but they did not deliver on this after they hooked up, and that she considers this sexual assault.
In the 2-3 weeks after this, Greene took a "mental health break" from YouTube, and also froze his server. He returned on July 7th with his usual posting schedule and unfroze his server.
On February 10th, 2025 King posted a video on YouTube where she accused Daniel Greene of rape, and revealed that his lawyers had sent her a Cease and Desist letter threatening to have her social media taken down after her June 2023 video. I've shared an archive as she's since removed videos from her channel regarding the incident. Some of the text of the letter is in the video, but much is redacted. It inexplicably describes Greene as a "medical professional". Prior to the encounter that prompted this, she shared an 8-page letter with Green about the nature of their relationship which she heavily implied was platonic. She goes on to explain that he had tried talking her into having an affair with him and that she had turned him down. He had confessed, in DMs shown in the video, that "I will probably always be a cheater". But the two agreed he would visit her in Vegas where he would "spoil her like a friend" and he would spend the night with her. It was 4/20 so she had been taking 40mg edibles all day and according to her he was sober. He then allegedly forced his penis inside of her without lube, knowing she couldn't self-lubricate, and came on her "batok", which she describes as a sacred Filipino tattoo. The next morning, the two got breakfast and he paid for her tattoo, and upon getting her alone again, proceeded to allegedly sexually assault her again. After this, she sent his then girlfriend, now fiance (they are still not married as many people discussing this have claimed) a video about what happened and she responded calling them both "disgusting". The video ends with her having a panic attack and mentioning she has reported the incident to the Vegas police.
Greene was immediately condemned by many of his closest friends. Fellow Booktuber Merphy Napier made a post where she stated the claims were convincing and urged people to donate to RAINN, a charity for victims of domestic abuse. Jackson Dickert, who has <7k subscribers but hosted a mock interview show called Between Two Perns that featured guests as famous as Brandon Sanderson and Terry Brooks, posted a video where he tearfully claims he believes King and wants nothing to do with Daniel, who he had a close working relationship with. Greene's own Discord server erupted with users condemning him. There were a few dissenting voices saying people should wait to hear his side of the story, the mods banned nearly all of them for "fencesitting" or misgendering King, who someone mentioned uses they/them pronouns. They also asked people to donate to Naomi's paypal account to help pay for therapy and legal fees.
On Feb 12th, Greene posted a short video where he, very clearly reading off a lawyer-prepared script, admitted to having an affair with King but that it was fully consensual and had ample evidence to prove as much. He ends saying he'll be suing King for defamation.
On Feb 15th, King uploaded a 3rd video on the situation which, were it not preserved in an archive, is almost unbelievable. In it, she confesses to being a sugar baby (adding context to why Greene offered to "spoil her as a friend"), shares the lyrics to 3 songs she had written about him wondering if he would eventually choose her over his then-girlfriend, confesses she did sleep next to him fully naked, then proceeds to mockingly reenact the sexual assault that days prior she couldn't even discuss without crying. She admits she "did not say no" but that she did try to talk him out of sex before the 2nd alleged SA incident, where she performed oral sex on him and he came on her face while moaning he "thinks about this every time I fuck my own girlfriend". Then she admits they hung out the next day before they both flew home. She reached out to his gf Kayla and told her about what happened in a video where she tearfully confesses that she didn't want any of it and Greene and pressured her into it. The video also mentions that he had also taken edibles, contradicting her earlier statement that he was totally sober. She adds that the man mentioned in her first video was in fact Greene and that she was in contact with another woman he had sexually assaulted, which made her realize this was a pattern of behavior on his part that she had to call out.
The response to this 3rd video of King's was overwhelmingly negative towards her. The comments have likely been lost so you'll have to take my word that almost all were some version of "you're crazy and just exposed yourself" or "I believe you but this video looks REALLY bad for you, please get a therapist and a lawyer". Comparing the comments on the the first and final /r/Fantasy threads on the situation shows a similar effect. There is a MASSIVE shift in sentiment between the threads.
On February 17th, King posted a video titled I am SO SORRY. Oh my god.. It's mostly incoherent. She apologizes profusely to Daniel and Kayla for causing drama and says "I never said he raped me." This is a lie, whether she used the word rape or not she clearly said he forced his penis inside her. She adds, "I don't like this version of myself and am gonna fix it". King had uploaded an earlier version of the video that ends with the full text of the 8-page letter she had sent Greene before their affair, which she has since edited out and I cannot find.
Greene then posted a video titled Proving Naomi King Lied With Her Own Words. It delivers on its title and features Greene, his now-fiance, and his college roommate. Greene had edited the video to demonstrate how King contradicted herself in her own words, and added context to her claims. He points out that she had also given him edibles (she claims they hadn't kicked in yet by the time they had sex, but of course there's no way for her to be certain of this), and that she had specifically said she was taking 40mg of edibles at lunchtime and they only had sex at around midnight. In addition, the video she had sent Greene's gf Kayla has absolutely no mention of sexual assault according to Kayle itself, just King confessing to a consensual affair. King even mentions that she was cheated on 10 years ago, and hates herself for enabling Greene to do the same to Kayla. Texts King had sent Greene which were included in her OWN video included "Last night I said I wanted to do more BECAUSE you said you liked it" and "It seems only you are allowed to express any sort of lust". Greene then identifies the other woman who accused him of sexual assault as Madison, and his college roommate confirmed she had visited Greene in their apartment a year after the supposed rape occured and was completely cordial. He ends by asking all the creators who condemned him to issue a correction to their audiences.
On February 18th, King posted another video (which I can't find an archive of, will edit the post if I do) where she shares a phone call she had with another woman who accused Daniel of "sexual assault" in college and includes details of him just frankly being bad at sex. But worth noting she had sex with him on 4 separate occasions, despite describing even the 2nd occasion as sexual assault.
Greene then gave all his Discord mods an ultimatum to either apologize and remain or step down, and all but one stepped down. Most creators who weighed in on the issue prematurely have since issued apologies.
My scattered thoughts and analyses:
1- When it comes to SA allegations, people are still shockingly naive. Nearly 11 years after Mattress Girl's performance art and 8 since the start of #MeToo, the public still has no idea how to respond to claims of sexual assault. It doesn't surprise me at all that someone like King would accuse someone of Greene of rape, what's shocking is the alacrity with which some of his closest collaborators and the vast majority of people who viewed King's first video believed her. Since she largely exposed herself as a liar, people have been saying things like "ah his fake friends just had to get the cloutbucks from condemning him immediately, huh?" But this is an insufficient explanation for what happened. Obviously having to admit they were wrong and plugged the PayPal information of a known fraud is hugely embarrassing for them and so they wouldn't have done so if they didn't completely believe King's accounts. Anyone with even moderately sound epistemics on the issue should know that, while sexual assault is very common and supposedly only 5% of accusations are false (assuming that statistic I've heard thrown around is even true), a women who presents like King does is not >95% likely to be telling the truth. I'm going to editorialize a bit by pointing this out but: women have thousands of "icks" and "red flags" they'll list about men. There are entire social media trends built around this idea. He drives a Tesla? Likes Fight Club? Likes the Infinite Jest? Listens to Joe Rogan? Red flags, each one. I'm not even sure those are necessarily bad choices of interests to look out for. But men look for <10 in women and Naomi King seems to have most of them. She has a LOT of tattoos (including a full sleeve and almost completely covered back), multiple ear piercings including guages, shows signs of BPD, does sex work, is an actor, describes herself as nonbinary, and films her own panic attacks and crying on camera. These are all, based on what I've observed, correlated with being mentally unstable. I sort of assumed most of this was common knowledge. So what's going on here? I think part of it is that something deep in the human psyche says "when a woman cries, you have to protect her". Richard Hanania said it best.. Even other women, despite having likely experienced the way some women use crying to manipulate, were quick to jump to her defense. I also think a lot of men just don't fuck that much. Or married their high school sweatheart and haven't really experienced the dating/hookup scene. Even my limited experience helped my identify the traits I mentioned as being correlated with a) being good in bed and b) mental illness. My more sexually experienced friend also adds "is Filipina and is a nurse to the list" and King is Filipina or just very immersed in the culture (though I can't confirm the accuracy of these stereotypes). Now granted we are talking about the type of man who likes to read Malazan Book Of The Fallen. But there's gotta be a few certified GuysWhoFuck in that group right? Greene is certainly one of them. Or am I unfairly generalizing here and actually these traits aren't associated with mental illness and it's just a coincidence this one person happened to have all of them?
But that's just the surface-level observations about King, there's also her story itself which is extremely questionable even from her first two videos (the ones that, taken together, kicked off this whole scandal Greene is dealing with). Is it not extremely odd behavior to, as a single woman, share a bed with a man in a relationship who had tried pressuring you into fucking him for two years if you weren't actually planning on fucking him? Obviously the fact that she was willing to do this suggests she wanted it to happen, right? I did see one other person point this out and they were met with "wow I can't believe you're going with the 'she was wearing a short skirt so she was asking it' " defense and "I've shared beds with tons of people without raping them". As if what was described isn't orders of magnitude more suggestive than wearing a short skirt and that sharing beds with platonic same-sex friends is the same as opposite-sex friends who tried talking you into an affair. People really just think in memes. There's this idea that some men in the more patriarchal days of old would say things like "she was wearing a short skirt so she was asking for it" so people think anytime anyone remotely questions a woman's narrative it has to be shoehorned into this "wearing a short skirt so she was asking for it" meme and is therefore misguided.
And there's also the shocking naivety about drugs. Even now there are people saying things like "even if she verbally consented, it doesn't count because she was high". This is not a consistent standard anyone can uphold. Especially considering they had both taken edibles. Many couples get high and bone on a weekly basis, are we expected to believe either member can retroactively, at any point, point to one of those sessions and say “actually I was high so I couldn’t consent”? This is a ludicrous standard. There is a ton of middle ground between roofie-ing someone’s drink and raping their unconscious body and two people getting high and hooking up. Marijuana use is pretty common among Americans at 17% and surely plenty of people are having sex while high considering what an intense aphrodisiac it is ( there's even an Arctic Monkeys song about it) , and yet no almost no one is willing to push back on this?
2- Are narratives this easy to manipulate?
I wish I had posted my predictions about this story to a commitment scheme because I easily knew that these allegations were false and were the result of "the girl who didn't get picked" lashing out against "the guy that got away" even after her first two videos. It seems most people missed this. But this reminded me of Gell-Mann Amnesia. I only noticed the prevailing narrative was false because I bothered to spend a few minutes looking into the claims since I was interested in the particular Zoomer fantasy subculture. I don't have the time or willpower to do this for every claim/narrative I hear in the media (I still don't know much of anything about even the Neil Gaiman scandal), and yet I definitely internalize some of them.
Much was made of the fact that Greene sent a Cease and Desist letter in response to a video that didn't name him, many considered this immediately damning to his case. But I can't imagine why. King's video clearly provides a) a clear description of a person (a man King had played therapist for for three years who spent a few days with her in Vegas and b) a claim about what that person did (sexual assault). Obviously Greene would recognize the description matched him but that he hadn't sexually assaulted her. Even if he was innocent (as we now have very good reason to believe he is), he sent the C&D to avoid exactly the scenario that transpired. If people can't be trusted to see the truth about a simple love triangle while the evidence in right in front of them, how can they possibly be expected to come to the right consensus about claims in history, science, philosophy, and politics? We are almost all swimming in delusional narratives that we've internalized, fed to us by people with horrendous epistemics or bad actors trying to control the narratives themselves.
3- Men really aren't built for monogamy, huh?
A while ago I got into a debate with some people. I claimed, and thought it was uncontroversial, that monogamy is not most men's ideal relationship arrangement. Of course, neither is full polyamory (which involves knowing your girl is banging other men), but most men would love a relationship where their woman is exclusive to them while they can sleep with other women on the side. I was met with unanimous shock and disagreement. That "I just didn't respect women if I felt this" or accusations that I'm typical minding. But I suspect most men actually do agree with me, and the ones who claim otherwise fall into a two categories 1) Men who are sour graping. That is, they know they couldn't pull off an arrangement like this (which tbf is most men, including me) so pretend they wouldn't want it anyway. 2) Ones who "want" it instinctively but are opposed for religious reasons 3) The few who actually just disagree. Cases like Greene's seem to vindicate me. His girlfriend, Kayla, is an attractive woman (happy to cite my sources) who speaks Korean. Most men, in theory, would be happy to score even a 1st date with a woman like her. And yet he couldn't help but risk his relationship by cheating on her with a clearly unstable sex worker? This is very common pattern among famous/successful men. Maybe all it takes is the knowledge that they can repent and get away with it (she agreed to marry him following all this, after all). But clearly the impulse already had to be there. I remember some Motters experiencing envy at Gaiman's escapades when they were revealed to the press (I still don't know the details of them like I mentioned), so are we dispositionally different than the male population at large or just more honest?
4- This whole story is just funny
While I sympathize with Daniel's fiance, who had her partner's affair needlessly exposed and scrutinized by the internet, I can't help but admit the whole situation is otherwise hilarious. If some conservative culture war provocateur gave me this summary of a screenplay he was writing: Charming yet somewhat awkward and mildly woke YouTube fantasy nerd with a model girlfriend uses Black Lives Matter to slide into the DMs of a mentally unstable sex worker with full-body tattoos and guages. She talks him into cheating on his gf, partially by mentioning that as he is a bisexual man, it's normal for him to want to experience a relationship with a non-binary person such as herself despite the fact that she clearly presents as a woman. Despite all evidence that this was a jealous woman lashing out against the man who didn't ultimately pick her, the entire internet sides with her and plugs her paypal link because she's pretty and cries on camera. His close associate is an effeminate man named Jackson Dickert who has curly hair, and wears a beanie and clear-rimmed glasses. This man had been in consideration to take over parts of Daniel's channel from him, but upon being made aware of the deranged woman's accusations, immediately threw him under the bus without bothering to hear his side of the story. In Dickert's video he tearfully confesses he spent most of yesterday crying before calling his mommy who advised him to "act with integrity". He says he wants nothing to do with Daniel and urges his followers to start spaces for women (and trans and nonbinary folx ofc) to discuss fantasy without the presence of predatory men, concluding that "men who abuse women control the flow of information" (seemingly forgetting this entire scandal was kicked off by a much less successful woman posting a video on YouTube who was uncritically accepted by almost everyone).
My response would probably be: Dude, this is all way too on the nose. Everyone in this story is a caricature of what The Babylon Bee thinks progressives and woke young people are like. No one actually uses Black Lives Matter as a pickup line. And "Jackson DICKert"? I know Marvel got away with "Dr. Doom" but that was a comic book movie, bro.
And yet that's exactly what happened. Life imitates meme. Shakespeare couldn't have written a more entertaining drama.
Tagging @Pynewacket @YoungAchamian @rincer_of_wind @Fruck @malcontent who all wanted a breakdown of this.
"Me and this other very unusual guy who sleeps with people who have all the qualities of poisonous tree frog have this preference therefore everyone probably does" is not a compelling argument. There's like three layers of selection going on here. I don't think you're really steel manning the opposing view here which is more complex than "I wouldn't even want to have consequence free sex with beautiful women that my wife actively approved of and made our bound closer", which is a very spherical cow way to look at human relationships. I don't think that kind of relationship actually exists, or if it does it would either require a wife that I wouldn't want as a partner or for me to not care about hurting my wife.
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One of the worsts parts of the extremism of wokeism (and #MeToo is the best example of this) is the way it enables people with mental health problems (especially Borderline Personality Disorder) to engage in the worst parts of their mental illness totally unopposed.
It's not good for them, it's not good for their victims, and it's not good for society.
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For reference I a) consider myself in this category, b) do consider myself somewhat of an outlier in this regard.
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I'm sorry but I find the idea of someone going "but I speak Korean" in response to being cheated on inordinately funny for some reason.
Maybe if she could read manga instead of manhwa she would have avoided this!
IME many women find multilingualism extremely attractive- perhaps the writer of that line is female? The male equivalent might be something like 'former professional chef'(if you know what chefs are actually like just pretend you don't- the point is evidence of good cooking) or whatever.
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I did think that was pretty funny as well; unless either Daniel Greene or the OP speaks Korean this seems more like fun trivia than a strong reason not to cheat.
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=bzUeYf5R4zo
It's pleasing to read the comments and see people aren't buying the apologies. 1500 downvotes so far.
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Lawyers use templates. Sometimes they don't proofread well enough or strip out all of the stuff from previous versions.
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I understand that this is notable. I don’t understand why. This is just two mentally ill people creating drama after a hookup. It’s absurd but, in the words of my father- this is just stupid people doing stupid things.
I don’t know any wokes IRL. I have no idea if they’re generally like this. But it seems like weak evidence either way.
I do, and in my (small-sample) experience the woke tends to scale with general neuroticism and social dysfunction. The people I know who have their lives together, even when they have very, very progressive object-level beliefs don't behave in stereotypical "woke" ways or create nearly as much drama (though they are much more likely to indulge the drama of others).
I'm willing to believe this but what is the distinction you're drawing between 'woke' and 'very progressive'? To my mind anyone who unironically believes transwomen are women is woke.
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Odd, literally the first time I even heard of Infinite Jest, it was a talking point of the Perfect Organism in his demented efforts to become maximally appealing to college-educated women. Since 2020, has Infinite Jest become badwrong, along with Teslas?
Freddie deBoer has a fun article about the recent vogue for hating on Infinite Jest, its author and the people who've read it.
Wait, it's hip to hate Infinite Jest now? I think I might need to start liking it...
It was certainly hip to hate on Infinite Jest on Twitter at the time of writing (pre-Elon takeover).
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Kind of. David Foster Wallace is considered "dude lit" (which is bad) and he was a complicated genius dude who didn't fit neatly into any ideological box but was not visibly pro-feminist, which means promoting him as an Important Writer is bad. Plus reading a complicated and notoriously difficult 1000-page novel is very male-coded (thus, bad). Basically, it appeals to the sort of nerdy, intellectual dude who might not be woke - hence, a "red flag "
(Disclaimer: I have not read Infinite Jest. I read one of DFW's other books and just didn't like it much.)
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I'm happy that a Borderline vaguely associated with the geek scene got dragged into the light and meticulously proven as (mostly) a liar where everyone can see. These monsters are real.
I feel bad for the fiance. Everyone else's suffering in this is just funny.
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...so this entire saga has taken place over the course of one singular week?
They really speedran this one, huh.
Eh, some controversies really do only take a week to play out, I don't think this one is particularly unique.
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I did do some digging on this in the Mattress Girl era.
The low single digit "false report" number (3-8%) is using a strict definition of false report. In this definition only police reports that have substantial evidence to show they are false are counted. It only includes reports that are wholly fabricated, e.g. someone accuses another that was not even in the same state at the time. The studies finding very low numbers exclude unsubstantiated accusations, as well as sometimes excluding partial recantations and baseless accusations. Respectively defined as cases where there is insufficient evidence to show a crime occurred, a case where the criminal aspect of the incident is recanted but material aspects of the case did occur, and cases where the reporter views the incident as assault but does not meet the legal definition of a crime. So assuming a police report was actually filed in this case, it would probably fall into the partial recantation category and would not "count" in the most strict measurements of false report.
The most extreme 3% is a lower bound on the prevalence of false police reports. It says nothing about the true number, the upper bound, or the lower bound on all accusations. Police reports making up only a fraction of total assault accusations. The "discredited" 40+% numbers you might see quoted in parts of the internet use the detectives opinion on the case. The detectives opinion does not match the strict definition of false report, so these conflicting numbers are typically excluded form meta and review papers. Those papers are (in some sense) right to say the methodology of the 40+% studies are flawed. My main objection is that they are flawed in precisely the same way as the 3% papers. You do not have a ground truth to base your estimate on. If you had some easy high certainty method of determining if a report was true or false—there wouldn't be any fear of a false accusations and there wouldn't be any fear of not being believed as a victim.
Scott did a deep dive on this topic years ago.
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I'd add too many / alot of rings, bracelets or other jewelry. Excessively decorated or painted nails.
I think all / most women are some sort of crazy, it's a matter of finding the sort of crazy you can live with / manage.
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Plate-spinning + soft harems = promiscuity, as preferred by promiscuous men
Serial monogamy = promiscuity, as preferred by promiscuous women
Society generally considers the former promiscuity but not the latter. It's important in cases such as this to keep this in mind.
Society (not some extreme progressive niche) definitely considers the latter promiscuity.
No, it doesn't. Society thinks of relationships like jobs; it is perfectly acceptable to hop around looking for a better deal as long as you give two weeks notice before you actually start. Even marriages work like this now, though the divorce might take a little longer than two weeks.
Doesn't matter how long you were with your old partner and how much you promised to love them forever, you can just wake up one morning and say "I just don't feel that way anymore" and as long as you wait a whole week out of respect for the heartbroken it is totally kosher to start a sexual relationship with someone else.
It is now totally normal for a girl to have a high school boyfriend who she breaks up with when she goes to college, a college boyfriend or two who she breaks up with when she graduates and relocates for work, and another boyfriend or three before she is ready to settle down in her late twenties to early thirties. Toss in a handful of hookups and you are expected to be OK with a woman having half a dozen sexual partners before you marry her.
I hate it.
What experience do you base this on? Because it's certainly not true in any bubble I've ever been in
There is no source I can cite for something like this; all I can do is report what I see with my own eyes.
Well, if you say everyone you know has relationships like that, I guess I'll believe you, but that sounds sad and tragic to me. Maybe you are not surrounding yourself with the best examples. I mean, certainly breakups happen and some of them are shitty and people can be heartless, but it is not my experience that most people are that casual and callous. (Except the part about sexual histories. Having to accept that you probably won't be marrying a virgin - yeah, that part is true. Live with it or take the shahada, I guess.)
I have seriously considered doing this, but the fact that Islam is polygamous plus the fact that I would be starting out as a random outsider with no social capital to speak of gives me pause. I would probably just end up as one of those surplus males that are forced to fuck dancing boys for lack of women, which is not what I want.
Rather, I want white sharia.
You can join one of many existing fundamentalist Christian groups. Almost all of them have a better gender ratio than the motte and accept converts. If you live in a major city in the US, there’s almost certainly several to choose from within driving distance.
But I’m guessing you don’t want to do this, because in practice you don’t actually like the society you desire. You might not like the actual gender role of a patriarchal man(which comes with responsibilities). You probably don’t want the policing of young men. These things are loadbearing for the social model.
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What would that look like, exactly? I know it's Dread Jim's obsession, but that sort of social control is unlikely to happen without an onerous religious regime that would place additional restrictions on you that you probably wouldn't like; it won't just be "You get to choose a young hottie wife who isn't allowed to say no to you."
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Yeah, I mean the sexual revolution has significant downsides and was probably a bad idea. Both men and women now have more sexual partners over the course of a lifetime than they did a hundred years ago; it is entirely reasonable to consider this socially deleterious - I do! But it’s also not some special treatment for women, promiscuity is now more accepted for both sexes than it was back then and the architects of the sexual revolution (and most of its biggest fans) were all men, so take it up with them.
Eh, men in 1900 who visited brothels or rode the town bike(so to speak) were often not stigmatized for it in mainstream society, although deflowering a virgin was.
They certainly were stigmatized for it as a vice, opposition to it was a huge thing in Victorian England. Small-l liberal instincts merely meant (and still mean) it wasn’t a crime.
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Except that men's form of promiscuity is different from women's form of promiscuity.
The male form of promiscuity is the harem, where a man has sex with multiple girls at the same time and they don't have sex with anyone else. Even trying to propose this to your girlfriend would get you derided as having a One Penis Policy.
More likely, a man would have to cheat on his girlfriend to practice promiscuity, something which is universally condemned for it's dishonesty. By contrast, a woman can be completely honest about her dealings and still end up promiscuous by simply having those feelings change, and have society back her up. A man can't.
Women now have more sexual partners over the course of a lifetime than they did a hundred years ago; men have bifurcated into incels who have zero sexual partners and Chads who have tons of sexual partners. Focusing on the Chads is classic apex fallacy.
Uh, what? In practice men cheat more often and are forgiven by their girlfriends/wives more often when they cheat.
No one talks like this.
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How true is this actually though? Is it average amount of sex partners? Because i can definetlry think of some sub-cultures 100 years ago who probably have orders of magnitude more sex partners than people today.
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The "non self-lubricating" part made me wonder if Naomi King was a post-op transwoman.
I think this is just normal variability. There are different vices and everyone has its own weak spot. There's no queue of businessmen willing to offer me multi-million bribes if I bend the law in their favor. There's also no queue of attractive women half my age willing to debase themselves for my amusement. But if there were, I am reasonably sure I wouldn't succumb to the first sin, simply because I feel that wielding lawful power righteously (fuck, I sound like a YA novel blurb) is a much greater reward, but I am not quite sure about a stunning female college student not being very particular about the origin and destination of various organic substances as long as it's me ordering her around. Thankfully, the only women hitting on me are at least my age and they are both less attractive than my wife and not obviously sexually adventurous, so my marriage vows are safe.
All these (mildly) famous people ending up in compromising situations are some or all of the following:
I am sure there are people who are sufficiently monogamous that if they came home one day and their wife said, "there's a hot naked 18yo girl in the bedroom waiting for you, here's her notarized consent form. If you don't like this one, I'll get you another. If you think this is a trap, here's a notarized postnup agreement signed by me," they would sincerely tell her that while they enjoy the attention, she is the only woman they need in their life. But we don't get to hear spicy news about them. Well, maybe when they get arrested with literal suitcases of cash.
Sidenote: no longer sufficient in many cases.
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Anecdata of 1 but when I have really strong chemistry with a woman, I don't have eyes for any other. As in not interested.
When I don't have it - I could see situations in which it will be very tempting and what the hell.
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It really is amazing how many issues both very online men and women could avoid by not getting involved with clearly unstable, messy, mentally by ill people.
At my last job I sat next to and was good friends with our team secretary, who was an avid reader of the British tabloid celeb sections and various gossip magazines / websites. One thing you quickly realized is that most of the women the soccer players and reality TV stars cheated with were much uglier than their wives and girlfriends, often objectively ugly, even. Sexiness isn’t really the point, male sexuality isn’t picky; many men seem to care about relative looks (say, a 7 vs a 10) only because having a hotter girlfriend makes them feel better and confers upon them more status and value as a man, when it comes to sex alone their standards are minimal at best, it’s mainly about convenience.
Of course monogamy is ‘unnatural’, it is literally a social institution, it is man-made. Humans pair bond in a way, but we aren’t naturally monogamous (like some birds? idk I’m not a bird scientist); if we were then so many of the institutions that stringently regulate and try to contain sexual exclusivity, from the niqab to marriage, would be unnecessary. Monogamy is a social contract. Even women are naturally less monogamous than is often socially assumed, women are just less horny.
But that something is an institution rather than natural doesn’t make it a bad idea, and monogamy was invented in many societies independently likely because it helps maintain social stability, because you don’t want a lot of unmarried, unmoored men floating around who can’t get laid.
It is almost always possible to predict whether a woman will stay or not. Usually it has nothing to do with the man’s status and surprisingly little to do with money (for example, Eric Schmidt’s long suffering wife could divorce him for many billions easily, but chooses to stay with him). Rather it has to do with a certain attitude or temperament toward other women.
This is hard to explain, but there are women who have more of a competitive, spiteful relationship with other women (especially but far from exclusively in relation to men), and those who are less likely to see them as the enemy. This is poorly explained, the reality is much more complex, but I find it hard to put it into words except in as much as I hope that gestures toward what I mean. The former go through female friends very quickly, with frequent drama and fighting, the latter have close women friends for many years. In the modern west, the former have more male friends, the latter fewer, although I think this dynamic far precedes most women having any male friends at all. I think there are subtle differences in sexuality too, but I’m less sure of these. Phrases like ‘not like other girls’ or ‘girl’s girl’ gesture toward these types, but mostly are just insults or excuses to call other women whores, which is of course one of the great pleasures of life.
But to go back to the point, it’s paradoxically the former type - the woman whose relationship with women is more adversarial, who is often more headstrong, has more male friends, is more competitive, who is more likely to stay with a cheating man. She is the person who can frame staying as ‘winning’ over the other woman (as in this case), as keeping the hot commodity. I suspect she is more likely to have tattoos. The woman who is less competitive, has more close female friends, fewer male ones, is more likely to listen to the former and break up with her cheating man, possibly has a more romantic view of affection that isn’t primarily framed in terms of competition with other women.
(Interestingly, the not-a-girl’s-girl, more competitive, more male friends type is often less likely to cheat herself, because the shame of her man finding out and leaving her scares her more than anything.)
The Coolidge effect is an incredibly powerful force. As at least one commenter pointed out before me, if you're looking to get your rocks off, having an affair (thereby exposing yourself to scandal, divorce, losing half of your assets, child support payments etc.) is vastly less "convenient" than just having sex with your wife.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I'm wondering if there might be some kind of perceptual component to the Coolidge effect. That is, it's not merely that sexual novelty is an important component of the male sex drive, but that the male brain so wants us to "be fruitful and multiply" that our brains are wired in such a way that they will literally make women appear more attractive to us than they "really" are prior to us having sex with them. La petite mort/post-nut clarity seems to be such a universal male experience, there must be something to it. (Probably the timescale is longer for women, which is why the end of limerence seems to come after weeks or months rather than minutes/hours.)
I don't know how you'd get this past an IRB board, but it'd be fascinating to do a study like this. Get a bunch of men and women who don't know each other in a speed-dating event. The men are asked to rate women's attractiveness on a scale of 1-10 (we could couple this with objective data like hooking them up to a heart rate monitor, measuring how damp their palms are, penile tumescence etc.). Some of the men will have sex with some of the women. Then, at least a day after their first sexual encounter, ask the men to rate the attractiveness of the women they've had sex with on a scale of 1-10. I would predict that the average rating would shift down by about a point, corresponding with decreased physiological excitement.
It's kind of creepy to think that, if I find a woman attractive, I might be partly hallucinating that.
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It's about many things but if it was mainly about convenience men would just fuck their wives. It's about variety and enthusiasm.
This assumes their wives acquiesce to sex whenever they want, which is surely untrue in many cases.
No, it assumes most wives acquiesce to sex a reasonable amount and that sexlessness doesn't occur ex nihilo. Men who are attracted to their wives have sex with their wives.
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How prevalent male infidelity really is? I assume most men do fuck their wives, for as long as the wives are convenient about it.
Among the popular elite who get the opportunity to engage in infidelity with enthusiasitc young attractive women? Practically universal.
I mean it’s a tabloid story every time these people do it, so I’m sure ‘practically universal’ is overstating it.
Might vary by type of celebrity too. The tabloids seem to report that many WAGs just know that it's the cost of doing business, with maybe the expectation that the athlete is discreet. Does the same apply to relatively equal status actors ?
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No, there emphatically isn't. There is a tabloid story when someone makes a stink or something egregious happens. The tabloids also make up stories because reality isn't very interesting.
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Old British political joke. "There are only a dozen women* uglier than Hilary Clinton. Do you know how much effort it must have taken for Bill to cheat on her with all of them?"
* Pre-menopausal and not visibly deformed is kind of assumed here.
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I think people interpreted my words as me being anti-monogamy. That’s not the case, I like the benefits of monogamy. I consider it a worthwhile sacrifice like going to the gym for better long-term health is. Also on a societal level it’s clearly the best arrangement. Fertility rates would plummet without it.
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Just because you have urges doesnt mean following them is your ideal relationship arrangement. Look at various gay subcultures as an example of what happens when this urge faces no resistance. I wouldnt want to end up like that. You can attribute this to some psychoanalysis of me, but ~everyone thinks something like this with food and obesity and you propably accept its straightforward there.
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I think if you're counting SJ as a religion, you should mention it, and if you're not, you're omitting it (both subscription to it and lying from the fear of it).
Also, I'm pretty sure 3 =/= 2.
Uh, doesn't SJ emphatically not believe that monogamy is better? What with all the poly and 'ethical nonmonogamy' those people seem into?
If you check the full context...
...he's talking about the specific polygyny/harem setup. SJ hates that as a manifestation of patriarchy, hence the reactions he got. Yes, it is also hated by MRAs and secular conservatives, but they hate it for a different reason (specifically, that widespread polygyny leaves a large chunk of men Forever Alone, which MRAs hate in and of itself and secular conservativves notice is a recipe for civil strife).
I will also note that while SJ is not in theory opposed to polyamory-proper, it does tend to attract suspicion that it's a cover for harems or harem-like situations.
Edit: Really, pretty much the only modern ideology that finds it laudable is the more Nietzschean parts of the alt-right (including BAPism). Even most forms of liberalism only tolerate it.
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Good and accurate write up. Love me some motte journalism.
I already mentioned this in my last post, but the moral of the story is to have a stronger cultural immune response against bpd chicks and guys who are "sensitive" and "on a mental health journey". These people should be trusted much less in general and around each other than they are in these communities, no matter how much therapy speak they use.
Also you and other people on here have completely the wrong take on monogamy. Arguing that the temptation to cheat and men's desire for sexual novelty means men shouldnt be monogamous is asenine. Monogamy has many benefits that go well beyond sexual gratification. Its a very pornbrained attitude to life.
Your also conveniently leaving out the fact that daniel and naomi by all accounts had awful sex that they felt immedialtely regretful terrible about.
Acting like monogamy is some sort of shackle that inhibits mens innate drives is wrong. Monogamy serves to put long term interest above short term male impulses. Some men have a much harder time fighting this, and those people probably are in some ways incapable of being fully monogamous. Sucks to be them. This is linked with all sorts of mental disorders.
Edit: Most Humans are naturally serial monogamists. I concede that 30 year+ marriages are probably much less sexually long term fullfilling than switching partners every 5 years past 45.
Hey, there's a zoomer trend we should talk about. Every zoomer always describes any sex they had as awful. They were terrible, their partner was terrible, it was just generally miserable and sticky and depressing. What's that about? I assumed it was memetic drift from not bragging about having sex, or that maybe the loss of the sacred aspect of sex has made it all seem very vulgar.
Maybe hookups just suck, sex without commitment is a bad thing and people are reacting honestly?
For men? Really? I think they're slightly suboptimal in the sense that you don't exactly know what you can "get away with" but it doesn't seem like most men dislike them
There is a fair amount of social pressure to behave otherwise. Or was a decade ago. Maybe said zoomer trend is said social pressure collapsing for one reason or another?
Sorry I'm not quite parsing what you're saying here, do you mean Zoomer men pretend to hate casual sex?
No. Let me restate said hypothesis:
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Yes, people are wired not to hit and quit ingroup members. Even men. Imagine your friend’s hot sister or something.
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I've found that my very first time with anyone tends to suck; the good first-time sex I've had still wasn't as technically good as the 3rd+ times with that same person. Maybe zoomers never fuck anyone twice, so they never find this out?
I mean hookup culture, mathematically, seems to be the same few people hooking up with each other- I’m guessing lots of these are repeat hookups with the same person.
Human sexuality is meant to either have actual relationships with members of the same tribe, or rapey encounters with the outgroup. Hookups are neither and they leave their participants feeling gross and unsatisfied.
I can easily imagine a case where both
a) the majority of hookups are with repeat partners
b) the majority of people having hookups are with a new partner.
Example: a small clique of 11 people who all hooked up with all the other 10 3x times each (55x3->165 total hookups), and a larger group of 20 people who each had one hookup apiece.
Total number of hookups: 55x3 + 10, or 165.
Total number of first-time hookups: 55+10, or 65.
% of hookups with repeat partners: ~61%
Median number of hookup partners: 1
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Men, women, how many of each? I can confirm n = 1 described sex this way and "not being ready", which I was actually kind of shocked to hear him say given who I learned he was.
Meanwhile, the ones that probably should be having lots of sex (and are guaranteed to have better sex when they do just because of the way they are) are too afraid or depressed to make that attempt.
And this is supposed to change things, somehow? If you're going to treat sex the way you'd treat any other more standard aspect of the relationship, it seems logical that the way you treat the other aspects of your relationship is going to dominate the way you have sex. If you're shit at relationships, you're probably going to be shit at transactional sex.
We had free love in the 1960s and 70s because fucking everything was free- men were the same, but the modern/ancient existential dread of "tfw no hymen" just wasn't there, so there must have been some other thing going on to make that possible.
This seems to be describing a type of people who don't see sex (or the things and desires that lead to sex) as a general extension of intimacy more broadly.
I truly do not understand these people.
Maybe the stakes for that are higher, maybe the people worthy of that kind of intimacy are fewer and farther between, and maybe some to lots of people merely see sex as transactional as an inherent property of either modern relationships or relationships in general (where marriages are treated, or viewed by one or both participants, as an exclusive prostitution agreement- which is biologically predictable, as men and women are different).
Perhaps in that case the feeling one is "owed" an orgasm dominates, where if that doesn't happen the sex was a failure; contrast fooling around.
Speaking of which... "fooling around" is very looked down on as a concept by zoomers: you're either Very Adult and Having Sex(tm), or you're in child mode and thinking about sex in "fooling around" mode is a massive problem because Sex + Child = Pedo. Which is how you get communities full of teenagers calling each other pedophiles about being attracted to fellow 16-year-olds (something I've also seen zoomers do in person).
And I actually do blame the porn (or perhaps more saliently, society's reaction to it back in the '80s), and the pretenses about the Holy Age Gate of Sex, for that one. Even without that paradigm, at 25-30 you're out of the stage of life where you can afford to take sex less seriously (both because relative poverty, but also because of a lack of time- if you're orgasmmaxxing, why would you bother with an inexperienced partner?).
Before the start of my current relationship, I deflowered two women in 2022 in casual relationships. I won't lie - it was quite the turn-on.
I think being able to provide/appreciate the "virgin experience" is an underrated part of relationships (and creates certain anxieties in people who don't understand that -> simultaneously overvalue and undervalue virginity, in the sense that it's very important to be one, but whether you otherwise act like one is irrelevant).
It's also not really an itch that video porn in particular, being spherical-cow-in-vacuum sexuality, can scratch beyond just saying magic words (and is an underservable market for exactly the reasons one might feel you'd have to lie about/downplay wanting to do that specifically).
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How do you know they were telling the truth 👀
I don't, of course. IIRC the first one bled a little, consistent with a broken hymen (although that's not the only thing that can cause one to bleed during sex, obviously). The second claimed I was her first kiss in addition to first sex, and her behaviour certainly seemed consistent with that claim. But you're right: I don't know for sure and I never will.
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This, in isolation, cracked me up.
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I'm a zoomer and I do not endorse this message. I brag about the great sex I have all the time. Likewise, I used to have bad sex, which I used to humblebrag about. Maybe what you're seeing is younger people having less sex and less experience with sex.
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There is a related trend in pop music made by female Zoomers (or at least performed by them) wherein there’s this surprisingly huge corpus of songs about how bad guys are at sex and how women are better off pleasuring themselves. (I’m happy to provide multiple examples if people insist on it.) The tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is that these songs are being written by (((Them))) as intentional propaganda warfare to stoke division and mistrust between the sexes. Assuming that’s mostly or entirely untrue, though, it does reveal a very concerning element of young people’s consciousness.
And to be clear, I don’t think this began with Zoomers, although I think it’s gotten worse under them. Personally, I have a ton of neuroses about sex that I picked up as a result of being exposed to all of the (frankly, quite vindictive) complaints about men’s sexual performance by Millennial female comedians and cultural commentators. It makes it very hard to simply lose oneself in the moment sexually if one constantly has a voice in the back of the head saying, “What if she’s actually hating this right now? And she’s going to tell her friends or social media followers how bad it was later?” I don’t know how Zoomer men are supposed to function if this cultural norm is exacerbated further.
Four years ago, I was going out with this girl for a few weeks. It was a fairly casual relationship on both ends, and I was already considering breaking it off with her, as I was starting to notice some red flags not wholly dissimilar from certain of the ones that Mr. Greene in the OP would have been wiser to heed. One night we were at a party, we'd both taken ecstasy (although I don't believe we'd come up yet) and she abruptly asked me if I wanted to be her boyfriend. I did my best to let her down gently and told her that I didn't, but she became extremely upset and burst into tears. I tried to calm her down, but she was inconsolable and stormed off in a rage. Later that night she sent me a nasty message concluding with "I rated our sex 6/10 it's barely a pass."
I didn't rise to the bait - what could be gained from it? Obviously I didn't believe it was true (I mean, I would say that, wouldn't I): if I'm so crap in bed, why were you throwing yourself at me, why did you ask me to be your boyfriend? But even if it was true, the fact that she was bringing it up all of a sudden like this was such a transparently childish, spiteful thing to do that it immediately vindicated my decision not to pursue a serious committed relationship with her.
Frankly, I think this thing of "oh whatever, he was crap in bed anyway" is just the distaff counterpart to that thing where a guy asks a girl out via text, she turns him down, and he immediately replies "lol whatever bitch you ugly anyway". If she's ugly anyway, why did you ask her out, you dork? The sour grapes are particularly ripe at this time of year.
Yeah, the hoe maddening was indeed just sour grapes.
Her personal brand of Wonderfulness should be more than enough for any man to want to commit and give her Princess Treatment, so it must be @Folamh3 who’s the asshole for not recognising it, especially since he’s already smashed.
Male and female sexuality are supposed to be the same and evolutionary psychology is just a misogynistic redpill myth, yet women’s actions and reactions regularly reinforce the notion that, all else equal, casual sex is a W for the man and an L for the woman. You already banged her; you won, any ex post insults from her are just coping and seething.
On the bright side, at least she hasn’t retroactively accused you of rape. Plus, this is Bayesian reassurance that you’re reasonably well endowed, or else she would had called your dick small (more easily disproved to any potential third parties in text-screenshot court) instead of mid in bed (less easily disproved to any potential third parties in text-screenshot court).
It’s amusing—despite women supposedly being men’s equal in mental strength, emotional resilience, seriousness as adults—how normalised it is that young women will just have random crying fits and temper tantrums befitting a toddler. Not only is it normalised, they’re coddled for doing and enabled to do so.
If a girl bursts into tears in front of a guy at a party and storms off, he’s TA for having done something to upset her. If a guy bursts into tears in front of a girl at a party and storms off, he’s TA for being a psychopathic manchild who can’t control himself, psychologically (and likely physically) abusive.
You know I thought about tagging you in the post but I figured the content would summon you to the replies like the bat signal anyway
@Sloot, Gotham needs you.
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I'm flattered that you'd think of me (whoever you might be, as I don't recognize your username), but I'd be a suboptimal Person of Bat Involvement. I tend to comment relatively seldomly and belatedly (life, unfortunately, happens).
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Bro you've got me cracking up laughing in work.
I wasn't too concerned about it: no sexual partner (and I've had more than my fair share) has ever even suggested that I have a small penis. But still nice to know.
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It’s literally hormonal, men in middle age who have low t often get weepy before being prescribed hormones, so do mtf after being on them. I would reserve judgment until you get old and experience it for yourself.
There are anecdotes about middle-aged or older low-T men being supposedly somewhat weepier than they were in their youth as their testosterone decreases, but there's also the stereotype of men being increasingly stoic as they get older.
To the extent such anecdotes about middle-aged or older men are present with regard to the occasional weeping (if such weeping exists at all), they're nowhere to the frequency or severity of the recurring crying fits and temper tantrums of young women, even and/or especially by the own admission of young women.
You've but proposed a biological basis behind why young women shouldn't be taken seriously, although one that's not original.
When it comes to MtF, there's been at least one 4chan-adjacent copypasta to the tune of:
> some men declare they're actually women
> start acting like histrionic, childish retards obsessed with make-up and clothing
> what do they mean by this?
It does not appear to me the attestations of MtF would alleviate any alleged judgment cast upon young women. If anything, it'd be the opposite.
As you well know, mtf trains are far more likely to be obsessed with 4x strategy games and computer programming than they are with actually feminine interests.
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If you're claiming that random crying fits are caused by hormones, it just seems to me that you're just saying that the part at the beginning of that paragraph:
is actually not true, for a biological reason.
Maybe, but powerful men are disproportionately older and so more likely to have that same weepiness resulting from lower t.
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Listen, sonny, those heartstring-tugging commercials pack a wallop when you've dealt with the subject matter like serious illness, having a parent with dementia, etc. $REASONS. Kindly remove yourself from my lawn! Now if you'll excuse me, that cloud over there is asking for a piece of my mind...
Mumbles under his breath about how nickels used to be called bees
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Considering pop music is written by swedes, obviously not.
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Taylor Swift is neither Jewish nor a Zoomer, but you're correct: every single one of her songs is about exactly this. And she's been Top 40 for over a decade, so you turn on the radio (yeah, implying zoomers use radio, but this is true on random streaming sites) and you'll usually hear one within the hour.
Alternately: "cuntry music".
Which is kind of interesting, considering the traditional standard is that women are generally more embarrassed by bad sex than men, where men would be more likely than women to be extra proud of the fact it happened in the first place. But then again, this is the age of competitive simping (whether the above is correlated or causative, I couldn't say), so the fact the man couldn't satisfy the woman is the more salient point.
They throw literal bags of money at "woman who doesn't hate you"-as-a-service products. Unfortunately for real women, technology makes this easy to scale. And that's ignoring the AIs.
Pop country is more likely to be about finding happiness in a committed relationship regardless of the gender of the singer. That is a fully generalizable statement and does not need a baseline to compare to, btw.
‘Outlaw country’ and ‘red dirt’ music usually have a male singer who might be singing a breakup song, but never about bad sex, and is still more likely to be singing about a committed relationship(in this case usually explicitly marriage), although non-relationship topics are also more common than breakup songs.
I’m not sure what you’re exactly referring to here.
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This is not even a remotely accurate characterization of her lyrical content.
If you're tied up about it specifically needing to be about the sex act itself, sure.
That doesn't not make every Taylor Swift song the PG-rated version of that.
The specific claim was "men are bad at sex and women are better off pleasuring themselves", so that seems pretty constrained to the sex act itself. Broadening it to "general dissatisfaction with men" seems like goalpost-moving.
Yeah, I have no idea why that expectation would be related at all to the collective consciousness or male willingness to unironically commit to a woman considering most of the popular media is all about celebrating women doing literally this.
If sex and relationships had nothing to do with each other, maybe.
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No, she literally has a ton of songs that are not about break-ups, not about disappointment or angst about a former partner, etc. This idea that all of her songs are breakup songs is nothing but a meme, assisted by the fact that she’s, well, had a lot of breakups in her personal life. It’s not hard to look up her lyrics, though, and a large chunk of them are actually something close to the polar opposite of what you’re suggesting.
what you're naturally going to converge on if you turn on any random Spotify playlist. It's not so much a meme as it is what actually gets played; I have no problem admitting that not all country songs are some variation of the guy's wife/dog/truck leaving him, but it's most of what actually makes it onto the airwaves.
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I didn't argue this. In hindsight I should have said "preferred" arrangement instead of "ideal". I do think monogamy is the best arrangement for a man in the long run, and definitely for civilization at large.
I find "pornbrained" is generally a bad-faith, loaded word used to demonize aspects of male sexuality that have existed forever. I can only see it being accurately applied to an obsession with very niche fetishes. Ironically I think Christian conservatives are the most likely to agree that men are not disposed towards monogamy and that's why we need religious institutions to enforce it. I remember Christian apologist William Lane Craig being asked about free will and the interviewer gave an example like "what if a man says 'I'm genetically predisoposed towards wanting to sleep with every beautiful woman I see so I can't be held liable for the sin of adultery'" and Craig's response was "I think most men are, but that's not an excuse for sin".
The church is where the people who know they are sick go. Thus it is understandable that they might tend to over-emphasize certain ways of dealing with what made/makes them sick in the first place- thus "porn-brained" (and complaints [generally more made by women and the old] about "hardcore" pornography, as opposed to anything that isn't missionary, read exactly the same way to me).
The problem with this sin is that by addressing it in this way, the Church is [popularly, as well as in matter of fact] no longer in any position to indict people who are smart enough to realize (1) what cheating is, (2) why that would hurt your wife, (3) why that's bad. Ain't exactly rocket science, though I'm aware of some men who genuinely aren't self-conscious enough to know that, or tell the difference between the acceptable and unacceptable ways to hurt one's wife (because some of them need to be done as tactical considerations or as negotiating tactics when husband and wife interests aren't aligned- which, I will point out, is how cheating is generally couched).
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In this context, porn brained alludes to the porn watching habit of trying to find the right video that will be even hotter than the one before, always chasing the highest high. It's putting too much value on this highest high. This can be followed by a huge low (Guilt after cheating), or can never be found at all. It's a fantasy I think many cheaters and Poly people chase.
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A lot of Americans are fat. do you think their environment (cars, desk jobs, unlimited cheap candy and ice cream) might have something to do with that? Do you roll your eyes at "healthy at any size"?
Yes to all of the above, but the urge to consume sugar, salt, and fat was always there. Nobody accuses anyone who thinks ice cream is tastier than salad of being DairyQueenbrained. We rightfully discourage actually overindulging the urge because it has health/appearance consequences.
I view "porn-brained" the same way. Men have a remarkably strong sex drive, always have and likely always will. We currently have an environment that supercharges that drive to woeful effect, and some people like it that way and think it should be the norm forever, because they confuse single-factor, short-term gratification with Eudemonia.
In that case, I think the term "porn-brained" is misleading, as it implies that men behave a certain way because of excessive porn consumption.
Urge to consume sugar, salt and fat is natural, cultural oversupply doesn't just make people fat and unhealthy, it makes people who think being fat and unhealthy is a good thing.
Urge to mate as much as possible with a variety of women is always there, cultural oversupply inflates this drive out of proportion, and some people think the overinflated drive is the natural state and a good thing.
In this matter, I speak from personal experience.
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Then we’re only disagreeing on semantics. I’ve only heard “pornbrained” used by feminists and sex-negative Christians to label most men’s natural preferences for youth, beauty, and variety as a modern aberration of the Natural Order. But you and @rincer_of_wind are clearly using it differently.
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These are not mutually incompatible claims.
No they're not. Not even half of marriages end in divorce and thats with the people divorcing often doing so multiple times.
It may well be that long marriages are less sexually fulfilling but that doesn't mean they're not fulfilling the needs of the people involved. Sex is hardly the only need and it's something that generally becomes less important as people age.
This figure necessarily is significantly lagging.
Do you have e.g. actuarial-table-style divorce data within the past five years? I'd love to see it if so - all I can find is raw rates which don't say much on their own.
Divorce rates have been trending down since the nineties, why would you expect that trend to reverse?
An addendum: I see many plausible pushes to underreport divorce stats, and very few plausible pushes to overreport divorce stats. And one common approach to misleading with statistics is precisely to publish (only) the subset of the statistical measures which agree with the outcome you want.
Hence: Do you have e.g. actuarial-table-style divorce data within the past five years?
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Marriage rates have also been trending down, and divorces tend to be frontloaded, i.e. higher rates earlier in a marriage.
All of this combines to make it absolutely possible that simultaneously:
a) Raw divorce rates per 1000 people per year have dropped.
b) People who marry young are more likely to get divorced.
This is the "raw rates which don't say much on their own" I mention in my prior comment.
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I probably shoud have rephrased it as "ONLY some sort of shackle". We have no disagreement.
Maybe. Its not as clear cut though. There's probably a convincing case that for >65 year olds polyamory/lemon parties is the optimal happiness strategy. They just aren't bothered enough to try.
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I disagree. These people made the right move (to preserve their livelihoods as subculture-embedded personalities) even if they could see through Naomi’s crocodile tears as clearly as you could. As you noted, any hesitation in coming out totally on her side results in getting mobbed for ‘fencesitting’ and failing to ‘believe all women’. The attitude in play is “I’d rather be occasionally wrong than be a chud”. Any egg-on-face embarrassment they suffer will be massively outweighed by the advantage of having burnished their credentials as a reliable ally. That there are some bad actors in that alliance does not make the perception of unshaken loyalty to the ideology any less valuable.
The fact that all but one of Daniel’s mods quit despite being proven wrong is a succinct demonstration of this. The important thing is not to be right - the important thing is to be reliably on the side of the Believe All Women narrative. Indeed, doing so in defiance of all evidence gains you MORE subcultural cred, not less. That Daniel proved that his version of events was right doesn’t exonerate him - if anything, it condemns him more, as now he is an enemy of Believe All Women by showing it to be a falliable heuristic. His mods and associates corrrctly recognise that they must disassociate lest they be (accurately) accused of consorting with the enemy.
Incredibly, just after I read this I saw a tweet with 200 likes chastising fellow left-genre-fiction-tuber ManCarryingThing for his apology just... saying this out loud.
https://x.com/RhuladSengar/status/1891629671789330513
Of course I jokingly mention Malazan Book of the Fallen in my post as the type of thing a sexless dork would read and this person’s bio is:
He/Him | Fiction enjoyer | anime, manga, movies and books | Malazan Book of the Fallen #1 series
Can people try not to confirm every stereotype this week? For the record I read the first three books and was somewhat entertained but turned off by the frivolous use of literal God-tier magic.
Be careful, I think the overlap between people who read MBotF and Motteposters/Rationalists is pretty high. I greatly enjoyed the series, definitely in my top 5. Definitely not some sexless dork. MBotF itself isn't particularly progressive, though the most recent Witness books had some cringe immigrant/refugee moments. I think this is far more explainable by influencers being highly fake; people who seek out fame are not normal. Clout chasers like the above are seeking to exploit their niche and in this case their only skill is being able to read/enjoy dense literature.
I think this maps cleany to the progressive impulse to want to be special, the pronouns, the celebration of different lived experiences. It all tracks that some nerd desiring to me special/famous, uses their love of deep fantasy to be different and then, because they are immersed in the the zoomer zeitgeist, then tries to become some niche influencer.
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I couldn't disagree more, whatever "progressive brownie points" you'll get from "believing a victim" do not outweigh having to apologize for asking your followers to donate to a hysterical person that accused your friend when you couldn't even be bothered to wait for that friend's response. In a video that will live on your channel forever as a reminder of your foolishness. Even right after the accusations were made they should have calculated that they could get almost as many progressive brownie points if King produced more evidence or Greene was silent for 10 days (which is borderline an admission of guilt). They would not have jumped to condemn him if they didn't believe the allegations.
I feel like your model of the situation can’t explain why Daniel’s discord mods resigned en masse even after the truth came out (so there was no way they still did believe the allegations). What is your explanation for their behaviour, if you think the parties in this situation were choosing sides based on what they believed to be true (rather than what they believed to be expeditious)?
Oh that's easy. 1) Discord mods are huge outliers in the population, they're disproportionately very progressive, chronically unemployed, and get off on petty displays of authoritarianism 2) Unlike the YouTubers who only made short statements, they had spent a full week dragging Greene's name through the mud and banning anyone who says "let's wait for his side of the story". Having to apologize after that and draw the ire of the people being unbanned is much more humiliating for them.
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I'm certainly in 3. I think most men are, too. I barely have the time or interest to put up with/keep track of one woman at a time. I'll also take monogamy (and an IUD) over condoms and a harem. If I ever blow anything up for the cause, spare me the 72 virgins - I'll take one moderately slutty broad who know what the fuck she's doing and hates texting.
Do they? He's so far from a typical guy. I have an enormous amount of trouble understanding how anyone's response to any of this is "ah yes, let's post about my legal troubles on Youtube." I may be old.
Isn't having children with the harem women part of having a harem?
In general, sure, but that wasn't my impression of how the word was being used, which was more like "brothel." I suppose in the hypothetical where it's my exclusive use harem, but I still don't have to interact with them, there's no STD concern. And while we're at it, let's stipulate that they each have a dozen IUDs.
I would still not want them, given the alternative of something monogamous. They sound exhausting. I like the feeling of winning on my own merits that comes with sleeping with someone I "earned" rather than bought.
Given all of the stipulations here, we've moved so far from "men want to cheat/have lots of casual partners" that I think it's pretty irrelevant. And, so implausible as to be even more irrelevant, in the same way as "if science could perfectly grow new bodies and move over minds, and adjust for the lack of growing up as that gender, and retcon others' memories, then surely you'd agree trans women are women."
Uh, do you know what a concubine was? That's not a trick question by the way- lots of people actually literally don't know.
Concubinage varied from culture to culture but typically referred to a relationship very similar to marriage, but in which the woman got a worse deal often due to having a lower social status. Most cultures, unless they suppress this tendency, will develop some form of this over time- cohabitation and sugar babies in the modern US fills the same niche- and it was a committed relationship. And throughout history you tend to see kings having multiple concubines(mistresses being the same thing in practice), but you don't see kings brothel hopping that often.
Well, now I do. I suppose if I'd thought about it harder, I could have defined harem/concubine/brothel correctly, but mea culpa.
I still don't want one.
Well said, and a decent metaphor for fighting reality on a number of fronts I suspect.
By the way- harem doesn’t mean what you think it does either. It refers to the woman’s part of a large household- in other words, it’s a reference to gender segregation and not to the sexual satisfaction of a single man. Historical harems housed a large number of women which were not involved sexually with the man who owned the house.
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Weren't harems typically exclusive to a man?
The relationship between the man and his concubine in his harem is different than a man seeing a prostitute in a brothel.
Children with concubines in a harem seems desired historically some men haveing hundreds of children with hundreds of concubines.
If your successful enough to have a harem with many concubines, you have earned it, even if you've bought some at the slave market. Presumably this level of success is also helpful in supporting the hundreds of children you produce with the concubines. The concubines may be motivated to have your children as it raises their status as well.
Yeah. As mentioned in another thread, I got my whorecabulary a bit mixed up.
If I could do it over, I'd s/harem/bunch 'o fuckbuddies/
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I doubt any men who own a harem are going to agree that theirs is not a true harem because they do not aim to have children.
If you want my opinion, then if you want lots of sex, have sex; if you want lots of children, have children. In the era of IVF, there is little need to mix the two once you've hit the "harem" scale. Musk got the right idea with his sperm bank sugar mamas.
I find the seperation creepier than having lots of children with concubines in a harem.
The seperation of sex and reproduction I think is in part responsible for some of the current year dysfunction.
How far do you go with this? Condoms and the pill are bad?
Just the tip.
Yes, oral contraceptives were introduced in 1960 combined with the following 'sexual liberation' has produced an increase in any number of negative outcomes.
Condoms have a longer history, I appreciate their use as a tool of war to protect troops from venereal disease.
Ok, hard mode- do you condemn sodomy?
Do you mean immorality in general, beatiality, homosexual anal sex, or something else?
I'd likely condemn sodomy.
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Responsible for much of the current year difference from The Way It Was Always Done, perhaps. I see no reason to believe the dysfunction comes from some law of nature, rather than us being unadapted, for now, to the differences.
It's not the way it was always done. Many pre-Christian societies managed fertility and reproduction differently.
You may now perceive pre-sexual revolution way of doing things as the way it was always done but this was new social technology at a point in the past.
Abandoning this and hoping that the current year dysfunction resolves as we 'adapt' seems more like wishful thinking than a strategy.
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My sense is that if men had access to a harem, in the sense pool of women you could freely fuck but not otherwise have to interact with in any meaningful way, they would be pretty down for it. Separate-palace-managed-by-eunuchs type of setup. The trouble comes with have to deal (intimately) with >1 woman in any capacity outside of this.
Most surprising thing in this story is Greene's fiance still marrying the guy. I don't expect this is the first, or last wild ride he's going to take her on...
I suspect part of the confusion downthread is a clarification of the statement.
With confusion based around mental estimates of the proportion of the population that falls into said categories.
As for me personally:
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I'd rather not even talk to the cashier. I definitely don't want to fuck the hypothetical harem (given the alternative option of a ~zero-effort monogamous casual arrangement, or, even better, a high-effort monogamous serious one).
But "fuck" is a whole lot of interacting with a stranger. (don't) Fuck that.
Out of curiosity are you over 30? I can't imagine any man 15-30 endorsing this attitude, to be honest.
Over 30. Was way more sex negative before. Pre-Lesswrong me would respond to such a comment ... either as if personally attacked, or by glibly retorting "At least someone agrees I am not a man."
...
At least someone agrees I am not a man. ::P
(I italicized "someone"! That makes it different!)
I think this has become known as asexuality,, among psychiatrists. Mostly because SJ pushed it hard in response to the strictness those of your view insist upon its functional universality.
FWIW, I have lots and lots of notes and posts and maybe some IM conversations from the 00s and early 10s, if you want verification of my mindset at the time. But TLDR, Dr. K's description of asexuality describes me more or less to a t.
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Yes. Mid 30s.
I see, any chance that you from 10 years ago would say something drastically different?
I'm approaching 30s myself. Compared to a peak of around 5 years ago, I can already feel a material change in libido and how much it affects, although i find it difficult to disentangle whether it's my libido that is shifting or the effects of being in a LTR.
As it stands, if I wasn't in an LTR I would pass up exactly 0% of effort and consequence-free sex opportunities, if those existed. I will know in 5 to 10 years, if the libido changes become more pronounced.
Hm, maybe a little different, but not drastically. Even in college, when I was sleeping with a few people, I always had a favorite/tended to break things off with all but one/want something serious. It's not that I was low libido, and while it's probably lower now I wouldn't at all say low/below average (for mid 30s). I think I'm just wired more monogamously than you.
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This definitely changes as you get into your 30s. Throw in a long term live-in woman? Then maybe add a kid or two? Yeah, your libidos gonna take heavy hits and the harem cravings go way down (but never to zero)
It’s honestly kind of nice though. I remember my libido being so strong it made me depressed, like being extremely hungry but never getting enough food, while constantly seeing delicious food everywhere you couldn’t ever eat. So glad to leave that behind me.
As a counterpoint, I'm in my thirties and my libido is not weaker one bit, I'm still surrounded by delicacies while starving. What changed is that my looks cratered and my misogyny skyrocketed, so I don't spend even a moment in a free-form interaction with the opposite sex now.
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I think you heavily overestimate the amount of (mental) effort required to fuck the harem in this hypothetical. I don't like to talk to the cashier either and I can envision having to talk to the harem girls even less than I have to talk to the cashier.
Perhaps the fundamental difference then in our viewpoints is I think the mental effort that goes into fucking someone is actually a lot of the fun. Knowing how to press each other's buttons in bed, the comfort of familiar company. So by the time you've removed that from the hypothetical, I no longer consider the activity really all that worth doing. Don't get me wrong, if it were the only thing on offer, I would take it with a big old smile on my face. But it's hot dogs when I'd rather slow cook ribs.
But as long as you have learned to cook ribs, how hard can it really be to learn a few more recipes? As long as you have the general knowledge down, so to speak, I don't think it would be that much harder to keep up with two casual hookups' preferences than one, or three rather than two.
Not hard to learn, just don't wanna. (And, I've, uh, learned a number of recipes over the years, just because I move etc.)
To continue overextending the metaphor, I actually have the same preference with food: I'm good at cooking a range of recipes, but mostly eat Soylent and put a small number of things in the air fryer.
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The number of potential conflicts between N people grows as O(n^2).
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He's a YouTuber, it wasn't just legal trouble it was to protect his image which had been tarnished, losing 60k subscribers out of 580k is massive.
Casual sex is very low-effort. Actually dating multiple women might be a nightmare but if all but one only want you for sex?
Well yes infidelity is not "typical", but the subset of men who cheat is a subset of the ones who can which is a subset of the ones who are tempted.
The set of men who cheat is a subset of the set of men who don't attempt to cheat? I think this one got away from you.
Oh yeah that train of thought ran off the rails, edited
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Legal trouble is way more important than your image! I'd rather lose my job than end up in jail because I said the wrong thing on youtube.
A lawyer definitely signed off on the whole video. Greene would have known there's ~0% chance of him going to jail, but he was already losing sponsorships, subscribers, and publishers. His brand IS his job. Clearly the right move I think.
Interesting. Do you think it helps his legal case to post the video, or that he's just so clearly legally safe that it's worth optimizing for his job?
Or that the lawyer was just doing damage control by telling him how to do the video? Lawyers will (although not always) advise you on how to do the stupid thing you want to do the least stupidly if you tell them to.
The latter, 99% sure. The former, don't know enough about law to say for sure but I expect yes.
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I think @lagrangian 's point is that sex in a monogamous relationship even lower effort/better so why bother with the casual. Especially if there is a non-zero chance you end up in the OP situation
Right. Hard to beat a recurring calendar event.
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Yeah I don’t think this would dissuade me. Sex with the same woman, even if I really like her, feels like eating my favorite meal for dinner every day. It’s always good but at some point I might just start craving a simple Chinese takeout for novelty’s sake.
From an evo-psych perspective this also makes perfect sense: sex with another woman is almost always a positive expected fitness value-add.
I think that this might just come down to how wired one is for novelty. Eating my favorite meal for dinner every day sounds fucking awesome to me. Maybe I would get sick of it at some point, I've never tried. But it's difficult to imagine I would.
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