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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   5546 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all? Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing, which I have heard legitimately compared to frontline infantry combat in its level of hardship. Therefore, what good is a man, in a relationship, if he is not willing and able to endure a hardship or challenge of similar difficulty? Chad compensates for this by being very good-looking and very determined; there is a good chance he would do well in a war, too. But for us mere mortals? Our existence is legitimized and our desire for romantic relationships stops being completely base, disgusting, and hypocritical when we have proven ourselves worthy through being conscientious, dedicated, and determined enough to suffer greatly for no damn reason - even, perhaps, to die for no good reason. The poets of the First World War, and the soldiers there, died pointlessly but admirably for a few inches of mud; they embodied all that is admirable about masculinity and lost their lives in the mud of Passchendaele and Verdun and the Somme.

Every man, now, needs to choose their own struggle. It's like Fight Club, except you expect and are prepared for - as much as anyone can be prepared for, which may not be much - entering what is essentially Hell on Earth and surviving it. Once you survive, you are now worthy: you have endured, you are willing to endure, therefore you now have business asking someone to endure a deep visceral biological disgust day after day to make you happy, and for the good of the next generation. And you, too, will suffer, or may suffer. Maybe it's a dangerous job, maybe it's your wife shooting you and putting you in the ICU, maybe it's figuring out how to deal with it when your wife becomes a raging alcoholic, maybe you really do get the life of domestic bliss. But probably not - you're not Chad, and as such you do not deserve domestic bliss, much as your wife is very likely to be deeply disgusted with you and chooses this as her least-bad option, making peace with her inability or unwillingness to be Stacy.

  • -16

I do think that hardship is necessary for men and that a lot of men are too soft these days. But I don't think it has to be arbitrary hardship.

There is still plenty of useful hardship to be found if you look for it, and perhaps the issue is that our modern societies do not make it clear that there is hardship. While circumstances like disease and war use to take a good chunk of the male population out, there was still some competition and finding a wife or a husband was something that was emphasized throughout people's education. If you are serious about finding a spouse, having children, then what are you doing about it? If you do not want to go below certain standards of attractiveness, sanity, personality, and your current geographical area is not providing an adequate supply of potential willing mates, then have you tried expanding the area?

If you are too poor to travel, then here's your hardship, make more money.

If you are afraid of linguistic and cultural barriers, then here's your hardship, figure out a way to tolerate different mores or find a combination that suits you.

If you are afraid that an apparently willing mate is attempting to scam you, then here's your hardship, learn to make yourself vulnerable, get ready to lose everything and bounce back...

Overcoming hardship only gets you more women if the side effect somehow increases the pool of mates or your attractiveness. For example war campaigns take (some) men to war-widows ("love you long time"), colonization to riches, artistic struggle to fame, industriousness to stability, etc... Ultimate survival hiking might make you more attractive to some women, but they're probably going to be quite crusty themselves. Is that what you're looking for?

Women do not undergo pregnancy for the greater good or the good of their tribe. It's all to benefit their own genes. They choose men to benefit their own genes, too. For men, step 1 is be good looking. Step 2 is be high status. Struggling is not high status. Effortless mastery is high status. So is getting other men to fight, suffer, struggle, and possibly die for you.

Would you describe yourself as an incel, or something close? I don't mean to pry, but your ideas about gender dynamics are a bit alien to me, and I want to understand where you're coming from.

Hmm. I'm a 28-year-old virgin, although I disagree wholeheartedly with the self-identified incels' descriptions of having been wronged. I cannot point to a single person or group of people that have wronged me. If I was forced to say, I might put the blame at the feet of social media or whatever was leading to atomization, but even that is a stretch. I think I am probably just roadkill on the superhighway of progress, dead critter 8,201,974. Nothing personal about it, any more than the Luddites' complaints in their time. It looks like there's a kind of quiet forest fire clearing out the dead wood and the people that would have maybe done OKish under an agrarian patriarchy but suck in modernity in one way or another. Hell, if I was a Luddite, I would not have been a very good weaver - perhaps a passable one, but not a great one.

I don't intend to come off as misogynistic and mean to make it very goddamn clear that I do not blame women for doing what they are doing; I would probably do the same in their shoes. If I was an equally unattractive woman I'd probably be a somewhat bitter and misanthropic feminist writing about how society enabled men to suck and how current systems weren't very well suited for women (or unattractive ones); there would probably have been traumatic experiences as autistic girls and women are very vulnerable to piece of shit predators.

As far as effortless mastery: the Hock may provide this. If you've looked death in the face, been exhausted hauling a sledload of gear through the Arctic mountains, etc. your desk job looks like a piece of cake and you don't really give a shit about a lot of things. So too, "effortless mastery" may be very effortful from the inside...Olympic athletes make it look easy but they're working their asses off while they're doing backflips, professional dancers collapse and gasp for air when they go backstage.

Women do not undergo pregnancy for the greater good or the good of their tribe. It's all to benefit their own genes.

I know some biologists really hate the idea of group level selection, but I don't see how you can declare the idea to be so obviously wrong with such confidence.

It's not my area of expertise, so I'm not going to debate it with you. These debates have all been had at length online already. I would just note that the genes that reach fixation in a species must do so by increasing their own prevalence (by helping themselves or their kin), not by making their group survive. If there are genes for helping the group and they die with the bearer, that doesn't do much good for those genes. Seems tautological to me, but if you want more detail, I defer to the experts.

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all?

If convicted felons can have romantic relationships that clearly indicates that moral worthiness is not a requirement for all romantic relationships.

Sometimes in marriage you have to endure suffering "till death due us part", but that is a special case where you voluntarily are taking a romantic relationship to a higher level. Even then there are socially acceptable reasons to end the suffering via divorce.

Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing

Many women in relationships do not ever have children. Men still enter relationships with women who are past child-bearing age.

Every man, now, needs to choose their own struggle.

No. You just need to live a lifestyle and have a personality that a single woman finds attractive and worthy of a relationship, and you have to initiate communication and make her aware of your attractive traits. The idea that you have to endure great suffering will be off-putting to most women. Based on other posts of yours here are some suggestions of things you could focus on:

  • Become a local activist on a subject you are passionate about. This will cause you to connect with like-minded people who will find your passion attractive.
  • Become a local expert on something and start a group where you are the leader sharing your expertise.
  • Join a mental health support group where talking about your struggles is seen as an admirable quality. Additional benefits include: getting advice/support from people that struggle with similar issues and gaining additional perspective that allows you to see your struggles as more tractable than what some of the other people in the group are facing.

Yes: moral worthiness is not necessary or sufficient for a romantic relationship.

Also you don't have to endure great suffering - just be visibly capable of doing so.

Barring cases where there is some impediment to clear thinking, the main judge of your moral worthiness to be in a romantic relationship should be the person entering into the relationship with you. It would be an odd situation if someone were attracted to you but you dared not talk to them because you weren't ready for war, and you may be ready for war and still be morally disgusting to women in other ways.

Sure. It's like being extremely tall and trying your hand at basketball. You don't need to be seven feet tall to play basketball for Duke and there are probably seven footers who don't make the team.

Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing, which I have heard legitimately compared to frontline infantry combat in its level of hardship

Is it still that hard? I'm sure it was that hard back before we had modern medicine. But I gotta say, my wife is an extremely pain averse person (she either feels pain about 5 times as much as I do, or she's kinda wimpy about it and doesn't cope with it well), but once she got that epidural, birth was not too bad. It became more like something that took some effort to do as opposed to something harrowing.

I've heard an American physician make this statement about his wife's experience of being a new mother. The man was a surgeon and no stranger to hard work and long hours.

Indeed, but the man was also talking about his wife's experience. It could be accurate but a married man myself, I can assure you he was heavily disincentivized to compare it to anything less heroic.

Yeah. I've also heard it said that war was to men what motherhood was to women. I agree with the sentiment but it's not Ancient Rome anymore and we can't really win glory and wealth by pillaging and looting fertile farmland and slaves. Thus each man chooses his own Hock.

I think it is roughly correct. Historically only fraction of males reproduced sometimes getting as low a number as 1:17 compared to women. On the other hand even if women reproduced, they had at times 30% chance of dying in childbirth in their lives. So on average we really are in relatively similar numbers of men who were not able to reproduce and women that died after (hopefully) reproducing - if their child was not the first one and stillborn.

There is the saying that only women really are "being" and valued for what they are - the potential of being the mother. The men are "doings" and their value derives from what they bring to the table. It roughly corresponds to rites of passage: women have it simple, they were historically considered adult as soon as they experienced their first menstruation. Males often had to undergo crazy rituals involving pain and risk of death.

Now of course we do live in a different society for some time now, but I do think that the evolution really did not catch up yet. The general attitudes are still the same as they were thousands of years ago.

A minor quibble, the study you reference doesn't mean that only one in 17 men reproduced, as if there were a handful of men with giant harems.

Imagine that you have small groups of related men descended from a single patriarch, plus their wives and children. These clans would go to war with other clans.

If clan A defeats clan B, then all the men in clan B are killed and the women taken as war brides.

When clan A starts running out of farmland due to population growth, it splits and the splinter group goes looking for territory elsewhere.

Rinse and repeat these two processes, and you end up with a situation where someone alive today has far fewer male ancestors than female ancestors, because neolithic women did not face the same selection pressures as neolithic men.

It's also worth noting that weird, painful initiation rituals don't just exist for young men (although they are mostly for young men).

Well since you asked, I think it's retarded. I also said that in more words the last 5 times you asked.

More effort than this, please.

I can't say I disagree, you have to work very hard and think with all your brains to be this flagrantly stupid.

This is unnecessarily antagonistic, don't do this please.

I don’t disagree with you, but, uh, it seems like responding to single issue posters should come with a bit of leeway when it’s the 5th time.

Gotcha, though I hope it's clear that I meant no malice by it. Poor bastard needs a father figure to give him a hug, or better yet, a hooker.

I'm more exasperated at his Eeyore impersonation than anything else.

We're both in the healthcare field: we both know that human beings can habituate to an awful lot of disgusting shit and deal with it with a smile.

So basically the Hock is an example of unusually refined stupidity. 99.99 percent pure reagent grade dumbass, not like the 80 percent pure stuff a peasant gets drunk on.

My brother in Christ, you invented the "Hock". You have every opportunity to think of something 10% as stupid.

What would you think - as a person and a future psychiatrist - of a man who attempted the Hock and lived to tell the tale? Would you admire his strength and resilience, while condemning his stupidity? Would you find it amusing? The Hock is at least a testament to hard work and...brainpower, even if possibly misguided and foolish.

I believe that the Hock provideth for all who attempt it, either through victory or death.

condemning his stupidity?

Yes. That about sums it up ngl

The idea I got is that /u/SkookumTree wants it to be stupid, because it's noble to do stupid shit or something.

Needless to repeat, I disagree. Doing retarded shit isn't noble, it's retarded. When women do become attracted to a man after he did something retarded, it's in spite of retardation - it's because it was also cool (the "Hock" isn't) or netted him value (the "Hock" doesn't) or was noble-noble not "retarded-noble" (the "Hock" is not).

By the way, /u/SkookumTree, before you show your idea to anyone else, please don't call it some cringy neologism that sounds like one of the worst terms PUAs coined because they thought it's gotta be original and catchy.

When women do become attracted to a man after he did something retarded, it's in spite of retardation

I do wonder. Perhaps the Hock is Jackass meets Into the Wild; however, was Johnny Knoxville more attractive for riding off rooftops in shopping carts? I would think a high-school sophomore might be more attractive to his peers for doing so. A grown adult? Maybe if he makes a bunch of money off of it or becomes notorious. Then again: consider the fate of Eugene, Oregon's Nutsack Man, a man who suffered brain damage in a motorcycle wreck and then spent several years riding his bike around Eugene, yelling "Eugene Transit can suck my sweaty NUTSACK! NUTSAAAAAAAACK!" He certainly gained notoriety, although I have no clue if anyone was attracted to our hero. I heard tell that he had a girlfriend at one point - and this while sleeping rough and screaming NUTSACK at passersby.

Also, the origin of the term "Hock" is simple: Hock participants are chucked or Hocked into the Alaskan wilderness. "Hock" is a slang term that can mean "to throw".

You're also telling me that a solo cross-country journey in temperatures as low as 40 below zero, on skis, with a homemade sled and a bunch of gear, isn't at all cool? Hell, there are other people who did things like this, solo or in groups, in the same terrain...Andrew Skurka isn't cool for his journey? Chris McCandless wasn't noble or heroic for his ultimately futile attempt...and would it have been different had McCandless survived his adventure to return to society? Jon Krakauer was just a dumbass for trying to use a couple of curtain rods from a hardware store to protect himself from crevasses during his 1977 solo climb of the Devil's Thumb?

Perhaps the Hock is polarizing; I will also contend that the Hock produces a change in the character and personality of he who survives. The point isn't to go on the Hock and tell everyone about it; I suspect that if you survived the Hock you wouldn't talk about it much except perhaps with people who had survived similar experiences, and then only at certain times. The point is to alter your character and become Hock hardened.

"Hock" is a slang term that can mean "to throw".

Not sure if this is part of your distilled stupidity strategy, but no it doesn't -- 'hock' is either part of a pig's (or other animal's, but usually a pig's) leg, or the act of spitting up phlegm.

The word you may be reaching for is "huck" -- which can also mean vomit, so maybe you are on the right track -- in that none of these things are attractive to women either.

I've heard "hock" being used in this sense. Apparently at least a few other people have. The Hock spawning a slang etymology debate is an unexpected outcome here...

You keep tossing out "the Hock" with no explanation like it's common cultural knowledge. Yet Google returns nothing.

What is it? Where are you getting it from?

The Hock is my own creation. I believe that the Hock purges the weakness out of people's character through adversity and challenge; a necessary component of the Hock is the risk of death.

"The Hock" is an idea he is enamored with, where young people get dropped into extremely hostile wilderness conditions, relying on their survival skills, persistence and general strength of character to make it back to civilization without freezing to death or otherwise getting themselves killed. He believes that surviving such a challenge will make one more interesting at parties/otherwise increase one's socio-sexual market value. Most of his posts lately seem to revolve around this subject in some way.

Ah, seems pretty novel.

He believes that surviving such a challenge will make one more interesting at parties/otherwise increase one's socio-sexual market value.

In some way, yes. Leaving aside any benefit that comes from surviving life and death struggle, consider what a person who boards the plane to embark on the Hock is like, compared to how he was a year ago:

He is more physically fit, having worked at strength training and aerobic conditioning.

He has carefully considered his selection of outdoor gear and equipment, building his planning and preparation skills.

He has made peace with his own mortality and considered deeply what was meaningful in his life.

So too: the Hock tests. Those who have garbage conscientiousness, or who are physically unfit, or who lack a certain relatively low level of intelligence...do not survive the Hock.

Therefore, I would argue that the median Hock survivor would be more attractive than average...or at least, this would be so if you simply rounded up a bunch of random people and offered a million bucks to those that survived, or just forced them to Hock but gave them time to train.

People who have been revived from an opioid overdose with Narcan have survived a life and death struggle. They too have often made peace with their own mortality. The fact that they survived does not make them more attractive, instead it makes them less attractive. It signals that they do not exercise good judgment and are unable to find a healthier way to cope with the problems in their life.

I feel like surviving the Hock will not have the attractiveness increasing benefits you are predicting. Instead, people will question why you feel the need to engage in such risky behavior with such a minimal payoff. If they deduce that your participation in the Hock was due to your inability to find healthy solutions to the struggles in your life then they may question what crazy thing you will do next time you face a struggle.

Instead of the Hock you would get more benefit from the socially acceptable forms of extreme fitness like: Ironman, CrossFit, triathlons, etc. They have the added benefit of having existing social structures where people can help you train and provide motivation. Technically, they are life and death struggles since people have died while participating in them.

But. If you OD AND THEN GET CLEAN you might have perspective and wisdom and maybe be more attractive. I think it would definitely hold true if heroin dealers only sold to those that had first climbed a mountain or run a marathon in a decent time or something. Have to have done at least one Feat to buy dope. A clean former mountain climber might be okay.

Is the Hock addictive?

You keep posting the same thing. The fact is, there are many happy couples with very below-average looks. The wife of an ugly man is not, on average, 'deeply disgusted' with him. (I'm not sure what effect this has on e.g. cheating, any observations will be very confounded by the association of unattractiveness with other things).

You're a decent writer, you seem capable of having interesting ideas. Do you have anything else you might be moved to write about? Why not try that? Maybe just vignettes from your life like george_e_hale, maybe some interesting technicality from your job, perhaps a commentary on ancient philosophy. Just anything else.

Unattractiveness isn't just physical. And it isn't always the case... it's just a good deal more likely that an incapable chump has a partner that is disgusted by them.

Its almost entirely physical.

Consider Elliot Rodger.

Imagine if he was 6'2". With the same personality.

Is our hero now average?

He wasn’t ugly even at his height, his own manifesto makes clear that the reason for his loneliness was that he never spoke to women his age and so never created or found the possibility of dating one.

Yeah, agreed.

EDIT: I do think that he would probably have been better off had he attempted and survived the Hock. He at least would grok that he needed to work for things, confronted his own mortality, learned that Nature doesn't give a rat's ass about Daddy's money, and become physically fit and determined. Military service might have been even better - especially if he saw combat and got back in one piece and able to hold down a job. These things only work well if they're more or less freely chosen...I don't know how well drafting this dude for Vietnam or something would have worked out.

Disagreed, unless your definition of physical is very literal.

Rather abstracted to unattractive/gross behavioral tendencies plus or minus mental illnesses like schizophrenia and...pretty much every invisible disability to boot. Pretty conceivable that you might look pretty decent on the outside but be garbage on the inside. Case in point: Elliot Rodger. I don't think he'd have done that much better if he was 6' tall, either.

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all?

I think it's a bizarre concept. It's not even masochism--the masochist presumably at least takes some pleasure, sensual or otherwise, from the punishment and degradation. What you're describing here seems to be somewhere in and among original sin, serious self-loathing, and a deathwish.

It's also not entirely clear to me that once one passes this what you're describing as Hell on Earth, that to be in this same person 's presence romantically would be to endure a "deep visceral biological disgust."

much as your wife is very likely to be deeply disgusted with you

That seems like a big assumption.

It's Skookum, that's just one of his axioms. It seems that his goal is to create a pill so black that light cannot bounce off it at all, and then force himself to swallow it. Why? I cannot tell.

It does conflate the life of the average man with that of the unattractive one, and ignores the role of habituation to disgust that people experience.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I love this poem, and I've just noticed that Owen rhymes "drowning" with "drowning". Seriously, Wilfred?

I wanted to excuse it with the line break, but it really has to be paired with the preceding stanza. And then you’ve got the 12-line conclusion. Maybe there’s some printing artistic license involved…it’s impossible to tell from the manuscript.

This is one of my favorite poems. I like and admire the aesthetic of these men, who sacrificed so much for so little. In the end it is one of the reasons why I like the Hock and believe in its transformative power: the Hock, freely and willingly chosen, purges weakness from the soul. Sometimes the body dies, too much weakness entrapped within it. Everyone chooses their own Hock - or not.

Hock my balls.

If you really believed these men were noble, you would listen when they told you that you were buying in to a lie. Really listen, instead of mining their words for what you already believed.

They may well be some overlap between “necessary” and “dulce et decorum”. Trench warfare ain’t it.

It is meaningless. These men believed that what they were doing was glorious, but instead they got ground into paste in the trenches for a few inches of mud. I contend that freely and willingly entering this Hell is itself noble, admirable, pointless, and perhaps idiotic.

I contend that freely and willingly entering this Hell is itself noble, admirable, pointless, and perhaps idiotic.

What about the soldiers who were drafted?

As I understand it people were quite enthusiastic about it for the most part. Draftees that were ambivalent or worse were just unfortunate people in a terrible situation. The Hock is best if done willingly and freely.

I think it's dumb.

I think suffering as a human emotion is an over rated experience.

I dislike that shared group suffering is a consistent cheat code for unlocking group cohesion. I was always suspicious of groups that employed this method to bond their underlings.

Certain levels of suffering and pain are my personal proof that a good god does not exist, and never existed with any amount of power over this universe. The suffering present by default in nature is horrific and often purposeless.

Worshipping suffering bring to mind goths that would cut themselves in highschool. Lauding it as a method for social cohesion makes me think that the person is bad at normal human connection and is looking for a cheat code.

So basically the Hock is a cheat code cooked up by a lonely probably-autistic man looking to trade out the pain of loneliness for that of physical suffering, ideally shared.

On the goths: those fuckers formed strong as hell bonds due to the shared intensity of their experiences - arguments with parents, occasional psych unit stays, running away from home to escape said psych unit stays. The bonds lasted a while after high school but five or so years later they frayed after they got the money for sleeve tattoos and decent therapy and grew apart.

But: does this dumbness have a political slant to it at all? If it does, what quadrant is it in politically?

So basically the Hock is a cheat code cooked up by a lonely probably-autistic man looking to trade out the pain of loneliness for that of physical suffering, ideally shared.

I don't think the trade will be successful, they will wind up with both the suffering and the loneliness.

Men don't come back from combat and war and feel that they are no longer alone. They come back missing the level of camaraderie they had. Many of those same men went in relatively fine too.

But: does this dumbness have a political slant to it at all? If it does, what quadrant is it in politically?

No, plenty of things don't have a political slant. If it does have one it is probably an artifact of demographics. Whichever quadrant young men are in is going to be where this is at.

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all?

What I think? I think you made your own personal religion worshipping suffering for its own sake as holiest thing ever, and try to preach it here, with little success so far. Do not let it dissuade you, keep up the good work.

Does this homebrew religion have a political slant? If it does, where is it on the political quadrant?

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