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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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It slides neatly into the memeplex of "men bad," since a (false) story can be told that it's primarily men who police women's bodies and create fatphobia.

For comparison, you'd expect incels' "heightism" to merit at least as much concern as fatphobia, but there's, unsurprisingly, little embrace of it as a cause among the woke.

I agree. The lack of concern for heightism should be enough to convince anyone that wokism is a hammer of the strong not a shield of the weak. Short men face extreme discrimination and there is nary a peep from the woke about the issue.

In modern society, short men are like the Cagots of the Middle Ages, who were hated and considered unclean for no other reason than an accident of their birth. Worse, the hatred of short men today is actively cheered by most women.

There's a recent commercial where a woman is watching a football game during a wedding. When the minister says "are there any objections", she says (watching the game) "he's so clearly short". This is played for laughs. Imagine she had said "he's so clearly black" instead.

Like how being a woman, or not being fat both also mean you live longer?

Women also live longer than men, but that doesn't seem to heavily impact feminist theory.

In modern society, short men are like the Cagots of the Middle Ages, who were hated and considered unclean for no other reason than an accident of their birth.

Surely this is an extremely hyperbolic comparison. Per Wikipedia, Cagots were legally "typically required to live in separate quarters", "not allowed to enter taverns or use public fountains", "buried in cemeteries separate from non-Cagots, with reports of riots occurring if bishops tried to have the bodies moved to non-Cagot cemeteries", "allowed to enter a church only by a special door", "compelled to wear a distinctive dress to which, in some places, was attached the foot of a goose", "prohibited from selling food or wine, touching food in the market, working with livestock, or entering mills", and so on, and so on, and so on.

On the other hand, short men in the modern day... have difficulties getting dates and are made fun of in pop culture?

have difficulties getting dates and are made fun of in pop culture?

I think if you add the parent comment to yours and divide by two you'd get the truth. So a little hyperbole for humor is par for the course here.

As a tall dude, the way short men are treated is beyond "difficulty getting dates". I know men whose SMV would quadruple with another 6" in height. Everything requiring effort and personal quality comes second to a chick standing on her tippy toes to kiss.

I understand it's correlated with dick size but the female height fetish has never been not fucked up.

Even if short men could literally not get a partner ever, this would not take them half the way to the situation of Cagots according to most people's value function (though I have certainly seen a tendency in incel communities to obsess about female acknowledgement/attention to the point that it displaces anything else, and they can truthfully say that they consider deficiency in it worse than the previously listed set of abuses; this seems to me to be pathological).

Moreover, I do not think it is in fact true, unless one is so short as to be disfigured; among all my acquaintances I can not point to a single single guy whose singleness appears to primarily be due to them being short, though there may be nontrivial indirect causality (along the lines of shortness contributing to lower SMV, which contributes to negative experiences, which contribute to personality flaws). I know of two long-term couples where despite the odds the guy is significantly shorter than the girl (and in neither of the two cases does he have any overwhelming compensatory advantages like being rich or famous). Being so short that there are no girls shorter than you at all, for a guy, at any rate would be very rare.

You could argue that the "short->unattractive personality->no dates" pipeline is just "short->no dates" with a technical extra step, but it's not like there aren't plenty of other initial causes that end in "unattractive personality->no dates" for men all the time. Among the people I knew, "got into the wrong kind of anime early on" depressed performance more than "is short"; and while you could argue that getting in the wrong kind of anime is fixable in a way being short isn't, in this case we are talking about either effect being mediated through personality (you can't unwatch Love Live! any more than you can gain height), which in either case is likely fixable, even if you need to get electroconvulsive therapy or something in the toughest cases.

I can tell that subconsciously I'm much more dismissive of men 5" shorter than me, than men around my own height.

Note, this does not apply to short men who are visibly jacked. Take the dwarf pill. Clangeddin be with you.

It applies less: I knew short guys that were competing in physique bodybuilding competitions. It didn't help them much with women; their partners were invariably morbidly obese.

Being jacked puts a damper, but it doesn't negate the effect altogether (in terms of direction).

You're going with "short people just have bad personalities"? On point for this group, I suppose.

Another interesting variation on "if you can't get dates, you have a bad personality".

It's proxies all the way down.

"Short people who can't get a partner just have bad personalities" (or, I guess, something else wrong with them, but this wasn't obviously the case for any I knew).

If Love Live! is the wrong type of anime, what’s the right type?

(Incidentally I think there are quite a few female LL fans, to the point of reaching parity or even exceeding male fans in some demographics.)

Among the Zoomers that I TAed in grad school, being on point with the JoJo memes seemed to have a decidedly positive effect on getting laid, and I think mainstream stuff like AoT is also at the very least neutral. I even grew up inhaling sekaikei manic pixie magical girlfriend chuuni wanks and the only identifiable adverse effect it's had on my dating life was that it made me worse at processing breakups. Eliezer is a self-proclaimed F/SN fan and he's managed to found a whole BDSM sex cult.

What about mecha anime?

The worst thing possible for short men would be being accepted into the pantheon of oppression. That's not to say they don't face unfair discrimination; they do (source: I'm a 5'3" guy). But getting caught in the black hole of victim ideology is far worse than having to work a bit harder than the average person.

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