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Notes -
Absolutely loved Eighth Grade, and agree that it's a great opportunity to see the perspective of a modern young woman.
I think both genders collaborated on this group project. I don't want anyone to be punished, but we have the rock of consequences and the hard place of changing tastes. Brand was able to sleep with 1,000 women not despite his reputation but because of it.
How do we make his sexual personality repugnant to women instead of attractive? That seems insanely difficult. Very intelligent people - male or female - tend to pick potato chip partners over celery on a consistent basis.
My hope would be that at least some fraction of his partners derived some pleasure from this, but given the description of what he considered fun sex I'm not sure that's the case. I also struggle to find where a starfucker would cash in on their status beyond maybe getting lucky and being invited to various parties and stuff afterward. It's difficult to steelman.
Honestly I think like a lot of things socially shaming and thus lowering the status of bad actors would do a lot to fix things. If he was socially shamed as a cad, a bore, and so on, women wouldn’t want to be around him because that behavior would make him low status. And he wouldn’t be openly sleeping with thousands or even hundreds of women because he’d lose status not only with women but with other men.
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