star wars queens are democratically elected and term limited
Not sure if rap lyrics or extremely concise explanation of Madonna-Whre.
star wars queens are democratically elected and term limited
Not sure if rap lyrics or extremely concise explanation of Madonna-Whre.
SSC’s latest seems like a classic case of letting gender politics obfuscate power and class issues that cut across gender.
He quotes some PUA:
Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value dudes hording all the pussy.
And then he uses both his intuitive experience and his LW survey data to show that men and women in polyamory date about the same number of people. There’s at least no clear cut numerical advantage to men. My experience also agrees.
But what if we neuter that sentence, and look at it again:
Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value people dudes hording all the dates.
Which is to say, charismatic and confident people of either gender, dating a lot of people, and awkward and introverted people of both genders dating no one, only one person, or being a hanger on in a larger polycule that doesn’t get a lot of attention from the partner regardless.
That sounds… less implausible. It doesn’t exactly match my observed experience, but it’s not super far from it either. I’ve certainly seen in nerdy groups a Queen Bee that is dating half the men, in a way that seems parallel to the alpha-males that PUA’s fear/worship.
It’s not at all clear that this is bad. This seems just as likely to be the result of “some people want more partners, and are more socially outgoing to find them, while some people want less or are less willing to put themselves out there to meet them,” which would be fine. Or it could be this high-value thing. (I detest rat-tumb’s focus on high-status-males as the evil beneficiary of social engineering, which seems both empirically and ontologically unsound, but from a capitalist-critical perspective, “liberalizing trade regimes” often means “the rich people get more stuff and poor people somehow have less.”)
But, I’m also not going to be surprised by the subjective perspective of people low on the social totem pole. Before, they had hope in this pigeon-hole thing, where each person could get at most one partner, so eventually the people as attractive as them would realize their best chance for a life long relationship was with fellow low-class dates like themselves. It was a bad model, but I’m aware people believed in it. Now they worry no one will be left waiting for them, and they’ll be entirely alone forever. So there’s some people who seem to be having a lot of sex (stealing their jouissance) and they aren’t reaping the benefits.
The answers they come up with are usually dumb, but they are at least seeing/feeling a thing.
Bambam honey darling kun, and also @slatestarscratchpad friend,
I love weird nerds but weird nerds aren’t a representative sample for the behavior of typical relationship norms.
A better example for normies applying this would be all the other countries, territories and communities where polygamy is practiced, as well as communities within the US where one man will have 11 kids by 8 different women.
No full poly until Tranhumanism makes it possible to ‘defect’ from both your sex and sexual orientation, pls.
Anonymous asked:
Dearest Anon-kun,
My representation is a bit more dire than how I actually interpret the situation, in part because it’s intended as a counter-balance to mainstream feminism, which strips women of their agency and refuses to critically examine their role in the social dynamics which create these situations.
“Women are powerless” is really quite deeply normalized almost everywhere! It’s very insidious.
Comments regarding even cishet neurotypical women should be regarded as generalizations that do not uniformly apply to the population, and many subgroups don’t necessarily fit them. Additionally, low-status women also exist. In fact, women that don’t fit this mold are more common in my subcultures!
Additionally,
1) I have a reasonable shot at making it to the Transhuman era.
2) I have a close relationship to my ex WRT expressed vulnerability & female companionship, though not sexually.
3) Have you observed the number of self-identified “traps” and other such individuals among the Alt Right? I believe this represents a sign of an impending Male Gender Meltdown, the consequences of which are hard to predict. Overall, I do think progress is being made, as indicated by the appearance of multiple male gender movements.
Also,
All my exes are bisexual (and therefore have no set reason to behave in a certain pattern of attraction), and this blog will continue to not disclose my sex/gender.
Kind Regards,
Miti
P.S. If you are secretly the tumblr user known as BA, this blog hopes for your swift recovery regardless of whether that is low in probability. If you are secretly tumblr user RO, this blog hopes for an increase in your available useful energy.
Wonder Woman strikes a blow against the patriarchy by having the male lead be only 4 years older than the female lead instead of 40 years older.
MRAs might see it as a victory against “female hypergamy” when the woman is actually older and slightly wealthier. Not sure how to be woke in that case.
Oh, this one is obvious. By the laws of vague internet liberal feminism, any activity can be transmuted into female empowerment if it’s done by a woman. Easy! Next question, please.
Let’s get down to business
- capitalism stifles human flourishing
to defeat
- war is the problem not the solution
the Huns
- an oppressed group of impoverished herders
Did they send me daughters
- misogyny
when I asked for sons
- male privilege
You’re the saddest bunch I ever met
- trivialising depression
But you can bet before we’re through
- encouraging gambling
Mister I’ll make a man out of you
- sexism, misogyny, transmisogyny, I literally can’t even
MRAs should like Mulan over the other Disney movies, since it depicts masculinity in a more complete and nuanced way. Therefore, Mulan is Problematic.
@the-grey-tribe RE: No Reblog post: Feminism collectively never actually overcame male hyperagency. It has been incomplete since the day it was born.
tagging myself i’m also “memeplex” used completely unironically
we can’t say memeplex now? what do you think Patriarchy even is
My Little Discourse: Patriarchy is Magic
The road to ending “slut shaming” of women probably goes through the town of “destroy the norm of giving men status for being sexually successful, and of treating male virgins as disgusting losers”.
I say this because I think some of the desire to enforce sex norms on women relates to the nature of sexual access as a status good for men.
If a low-partner man gets into a relationship with a high-partner woman, he is considered lower status for it, under multiple frameworks. Under a “promiscuous women are low-value” framework, it lowers his value by suggesting he had to ‘settle’ for a woman other men could extract sex from but didn’t consider worthy of commitment. Under a “anyone having a high partner count means they are high-value” framework, it suggests that the woman is higher value than he is (which is risky if men are judged more on status than women are), and that the way for him to raise his value is to have lots of meaningless sex with lots of people.
If a low-partner man and a high-partner man are in the same community, the low-partner man is lower status than the high-partner man is, since masculinity is contingent on success, and success with women is counted as one category of success. (In fact, one of the socially damaging aspects of virginity / lower partner count is that it is considered “unmasculine”.)
This creates a strong motivation for status war. If low-partner men can attack promiscuity in women, they can create a situation where women have partner counts closer to their own. Failing that, they can lower the status of such women so that they’re at least not higher status than themselves.
Unless their sexual success is decoupled from their social status, men will always have a motivation to wage status war through “slut shaming”.
The way to alter the status of high-partner men is not through straight men themselves, since their value in this respect is conferred by women. (Low-partner men are already low status, so they have less social power to alter these very norms.) It’s through the actions of women.
One way to do this is for women to start treating promiscuous men the way promiscuous women were treated in the past. If women started treating high-partner men like hot potatoes that are disgusting, low-status (like male virgins are now), and aren’t worthy of sex (not just commitment, as getting a woman to commit isn’t considered special), it would radically alter the status dynamic in male communities.
Another possibility is if commitment from women somehow became more difficult to get, and thus was considered special and more valuable than sex, but it’s unclear under what conditions this would emerge as a stable equilibrium. Current conditions don’t favor it or any obvious paths to it. The traditional norm is the opposite - women trade sex to get commitment. If this could be changed, it would increase the status of a man the woman finally ‘settled’ for. (It appears to be true in the opposite direction currently.)
Another way to do it is to treat low-partner and high-partner men the same in a very noticeable way so that men will start internalizing that being high-partner isn’t the same as getting the “approval from women” they need to prove their masculinity and raise their status. This doesn’t mean in fields unrelated to sex. The status comes from sex, so they have to be treated as equally sexually desirable, perhaps even the virgins.
All of these courses of action have their own problems. Depending on the balance of nature vs nurture, some or all of them may not even be feasible. They may do secondary damage. They may just not be enjoyable to a lot of people.
Anonymous asked:
enoughtohold answered:
Hey anon, I’m so sorry that that’s a fear you’ve had to live with. I know that trans people are at greater risk of violence and suicide, and I’ve heard people say many times that the life expectancy of trans people (or trans women, or trans women of color, depending on who you ask) is anywhere from 23 to 35. Your ask troubled me, so I’ve dug deep looking for solid evidence of any of these, and I don’t believe that these statistics are true.
A trans woman, Helen, looked into the “23 years” claim and traced it back to someone’s notes on two workshops at a 2007 conference, which stated that trans people’s life expectancy is “believed to be around 23” (emphasis mine) but cites no actual source. This claim has been presented as fact in many news articles since then, but as far as I can tell, no one seems to know where this figure came from.
Another claim is often sourced to an Argentine psychologist quoted in this NPR article:
Psychologist Graciela Balestra, who works closely with the transgender community, says it’s an especially vulnerable population.
“Transgender people have an average life expectancy of about 30 to 32 years,” Balestra says. “They don’t live any longer; I think that statistic alone says so much.”
But again, the article gives no source for this figure.
I found an article claiming that a 2014 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) “concludes the average life expectancy of trans people in the Western Hemisphere is between 30-35 years.” However, when I tracked down the report, An Overview of Violence Against LGBTI Persons (pdf), its only reference to this is (emphasis mine): “[T]he IACHR has received information that the life expectancy of trans women in the Americas is between 30 and 35 years of age.” Again, this is no source.
Someone said on my post that these statistics may have come from the NCTE/NGLTF report Injustice at Every Turn (pdf), but I can’t find any reference to any such claim in the report.
Thinking about these claims, they seem unlikely for some basic reasons. Consider that we simply don’t have a long enough span of data on trans people, and that what data we do have is extremely limited because we can’t always know who is trans and who isn’t. Consider also that, although obviously the murder rates for trans people are extremely high, the number of deaths of 20-something trans people would have to be ENORMOUS to offset the existence of older trans people and bring the average down to 30. Especially since, unlike with racial groups for example, the data on trans people would likely include almost no childhood deaths, simply because it would be much more difficult (and in many cases impossible) to identify these children as trans. And since we know that trans women of color are extremely disproportionately affected by violence, statistics that include white people and/or trans men would be especially unlikely to be so low.
And as to your specific situation anon, again given that trans women of color are most at risk, I don’t think we have reason to believe that being non-binary specifically puts a person at anywhere near this level of increased risk of dying young.
I don’t say any of this to question anyone’s experiences or to deny the state of emergency that trans women face with regard to violence. That is very real. But I think it can be harmful, even dangerous to trans people to spread claims like this around, especially without evidence. Expecting to die by 30 would take an extreme emotional toll on anyone, and trans people deserve better.
But don’t take my word for it: FORGE, a national transgender anti-violence organization that works with trans survivors of sexual assault, wrote the following in its 2016 publication “First Do No Harm: 8 Tips for Addressing Violence Against Transgender and Gender Non-Binary People” (pdf) (I have moved two footnotes into the main text and provided links to some endnote sources; italicized emphasis is theirs while bold is mine.):
Promote Hope for the Future
It certainly is not the same as a murder, but publicizing a low “life expectancy” rate for transwomen of color is another way to steal away their future, a “crime” that has been committed repeatedly by trans, LGBQ, and mainstream press. Think about the people you know or have heard of who have been diagnosed with a fatal illness and given a short time to live: how many of them have enrolled in college, undertaken lengthy training for a new occupation, had a new child, or tried to establish a new non-profit? A few do, certainly, but many more focus on their bucket list, arrange for their good-byes, or simply give up entirely, essentially relinquishing whatever time they have left to depression and regrets. When we tell transwomen of color they cannot expect to live very long, we rob them of hope. We rob them of any motivation to invest in themselves, their relationships, and their communities. We rob them, in short, of their lives even while they are still living. (This statement in no way negates the need to systemically work to improve and increase the life expectancy of trans people through working to end transphobia, racism, poverty, pervasive violence, and health and healthcare inequities, and more.)
One trans woman of color was trying to come to grips with an estimated lifespan figure more than ten years shorter than the one that has been published most often. (We are not repeating any of the (incorrect) estimated lifetime figures that are circulating, to avoid even inadvertent reinforcement.) Faced with the report of yet another attack on another trans woman, she wrote:
These days, I look at the latest reports of stabbed, shot, beaten trans women, search myself for tears, and I cannot find a thing. I want to mourn and rage. I want to honor all of our sisters — the hundreds each year who are ripped, namelessly and without fanfare, from this life — who are taken so young before their time. But the grief and anger — even empathy — do not come. I don’t feel anything but numbness and fatigue, and somewhere far below that, fear.
The terrible irony of the life expectancy “fact” is that it is based on an impossibility. The only ways to determine a given population’s life expectancy are to: examine decades or more of death certificates or census data containing the information being studied, or follow a specific set of individuals for around 100 years and record every single death. There is not and never has been a census of transgender people. Our death certificates do not mark us as transgender. There has been no 100-year-long study of a representative group of trans people. So where are the estimated lifespan figures coming from?
FORGE tracked the most commonly-cited figure back to what was most likely the 2014 Philadelphia Transgender Health Conference, where a workshop presenter gave the figure and explained she had calculated it by averaging the age of death for all of those listed on the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) website. This means the figure is actually the average age of those trans people who were both murdered and came to the attention of someone who added them to the TDOR list. Interestingly, this average is very close to the average age of everyone who is murdered in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics. [I’m not seeing an average age given in the cited source but you can see on page 5 of this Bureau of Justice Statistics report (pdf) that the average age of homicide victims in the U.S. was between 30 and 35 from 1980 to 2008.]
But not everyone is murdered.
Despite how many there may appear to be, only a tiny, tiny fraction of transpeople are killed by other people. Most of us, transwomen of color included, live average lifespans and die of the most common U.S. killers — heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and unintentional injuries (accidents).
Please don’t add to fear and hopelessness by spreading inaccurate and profoundly disempowering data.
Since I can’t respond to everyone directly, I’m @ing some people who’ve brought this up on my post and may be interested: (urls removed after posting for their privacy). I appreciate your thoughtfulness in bringing this to my attention. If you or anyone else has a source on any of these figures that can provide specific methodology, I’d be very grateful to see that.
In closing, here are some resources that provide a more hopeful view of trans aging. They are well known but I hope they will be helpful to someone.
dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.
I think we’re more than prepared to concede masculinity to the opposition. What redeeming qualities does it have? Everything I’ve seen masculinity be is aggression, envy, or pride, all of which are, uh, mortal sins.
…are you joking?
Or have you just already defined masculinity as everything you hate?
If it turns out that a significant number of straight women actually like masculine men and haven’t been brainwashed into it, what is your plan?
How can a male build a healthy self-identity if to be male is nothing more than to be a flawed woman?
the posts that push back against men who enforce strict gender roles typically end up reinforcing those same roles by using them as weapons (”insecure in your masculinity, what are you, gay?”) and also by the implicit assumption that men are stronger and can take a rhetorical beating, whereas similar rhetoric aimed at the women who work to enforce strict gender roles would seem much less acceptable to the writer.
Also they don’t even realize the irony, which shows how deeply drenched they are in male hyperagency.
