Oceans Yet to Burn — argumate: Against all reason I’m fascinated by...

argumate

Against all reason I’m fascinated by the friendzone discourse, seriously.

It’s closely related to something you hear less about: the bonezone, which despite its name is not opposite the friendzone, but rather adjacent to it, not far from relationship town; someone’s really gotta diagram this stuff out.

“I can’t believe they put me in the friendzone!”

This complaint can have layers of meaning, but it starts with disappointment. The speaker was hoping to make it to relationship town, or maybe just a quick visit to the bonezone, but instead ended up in the friendzone, where they’ve already been many times before. It’s identical to a similar complaint that is also very common, although typically not in these words:

“I can’t believe they put me in the bonezone!”

The speaker was dreaming of relationship town, or perhaps a long stay in the friendzone, and had a rude awakening to find themselves here instead. Logic suggests a third complaint which you also may have heard:

“I can’t believe they want to take me to relationship town!”

The implications of this one are obvious.

But why does disappointment over mismatched expectations around friendship, sex, and relationships, attract so much heated debate?

The first wrinkle is that disappointment can turn to angry accusations. They led you on! They were deliberately ambiguous about the destination! They have ulterior motives!

While miscommunication is regrettable and sad, deliberately deceptive conduct can be infuriating; no one wants to have their time wasted and their emotions toyed with by someone who isn’t being honest with them.

But this is self-evident, why would it attract debate? Unless…

mitigatedchaos

Consider: dating and relationships often run on subtext in which actually revealing your hand is a huge turn-off, unless you’re dating some kind of nerd or other unusually direct person.

gender politics

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slatestarcodex.com

Polyamory Is Not Polygyny

[Content warning: polyamory, brief quote of weird Heartiste stuff] The objections I hear to polyamory tend to separate into two narratives sharing a common thread. The first narrative is supposedly…

bambamramfan

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.

mitigatedchaos

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.

gender politics

Anonymous asked:

Can you read all your posts under “gender politics” tag and truthfully say that you want to live when the life is like that? I couldn't.

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.

gender politics

Sex Shaming & Status War

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.

gender politics flagpost

There are only two genderS: GAMERS and NORMIES

GET OVER IT SNOWFLAKeS

shtpost gender politics dont take this seriously

blackblocberniebros

argumate

dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.

blackblocberniebros

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.

mitigatedchaos

…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?

Source: argumate gender politics

the-grey-tribe

voximperatoris voximperatoris

The idea that there are no innate differences between men and women is really freaking weird! At least it’s internally consistent as a TERF narrative.

But it’s especially weird when I hear it out of the mouths of transgender people. There are no differences between men and women—but I’m really a woman!

argumate

honestly it would be better if everything Bad about men/women was innately biological, because it’s trivial to manufacture hormone supplements compared with trying to shift culture.

argumate

mautlyn said: can’t tell whether or not you agree with OP but like there are extensive studies showing that there are no brain differences between males & females

which is weird, because at least some people I know taking hormones report changes they’ve personally experienced.

but “no brain differences” is doing a lot of work in that sentence; if taken literally it would suggest that men and women are indistinguishable statistically, which is far from the truth (eg. why do men take more risks if their brains are no different to women?)

nicdevera

why do men take more risks if their brains are no different to women?

Cultural conditioning. I remember when people said “Men dominate at chess, that’s just biology, man.” Then Laszlo Polgar raised 3 female chess Grandmasters.

argumate

cultural condition implies resulting brain is different to women, is my point.

mitigatedchaos

Did I not just reblog a link to a study in which each brain is unique and yet there are statistical distributions in structure which are overlapping but not uniform? Plus a lack differences in physical layout may not correspond to a lack of difference from the effect of hormones! “We are all neurologically the same” is liberal blank-slate wishful thinking, and, from progressive news outlets, a deliberate misrepresentation.

I know previously “but there may be differences” has been used to defend unjustified policy, the problem is that just because it was used to defend unjustified policy doesn’t mean it is false.

Source: voxette-vk gender politics

roguetelemetry

Source: profeminist gender politics

argumate

People of Neurotypicality

mitigatedchaos

Neurotypical-Exclusive Radical Feminists (NERFs)

gender politics shtpost

obiternihili

argumate

dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.

blackblocberniebros

mitigatedchaos

…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?

obiternihili

In that last line, being male and being a Man™ are different things. You can be male or female and you can be you by having your own goddamn identity and thinking for yourself instead of bullying the sick weak nerdy kid into it for not conforming to some arbitrary set of interests

like I might disagree with bbb on this because being a real man to me is just being an adult. But being a Man™ or even the subset of Men™, the dudebro - is giving up defining my own identity and giving up making maturity, not interests or the way I express myself, the performative element.

dudebro was pretty much always meant to refer the kinds of people we think of as stereotypical frat boys anyways. Dumbasses who don’t give a shit about consent or abuse or anything like that except fucking people ±over. That’s not being a man. That’s being garbage.

And if a lot of women are attracted to abuse, why? And are we sure? Are we sure underlying factors aren’t distorting the really important values?

And like if definitions differ definitions differ. Get over it. The line beginning with “Or” is not actually a point however smugly it’s phrased.

mitigatedchaos

Have you considered that maybe it’s your conception of masculinity which is very narrow and culturally limited, here?

There is more than one way to be masculine and exploring and normalizing new masculinities could be very helpful (and still attractive to cishet women and thus not self-erasing on the long-term). Conceding masculinity to the opposition is a terrible idea.

obiternihili

I fail to see something better that convinces me to change it.

But it sounds like you’re widening the definition past the point of coherence, in which case we’re in the same camp but different labels.

mitigatedchaos

I’m not widening it past coherence.

There are multiple paths which are congruent with the male gendered trait cluster and are compatible with cishet sexuality. Dudebroism in its original meaning and not a generic misandrist or outgroup insult is only one of them. We can take the same colors and paint a different image.

It only appears incoherent if you already pre-define masculinity as only the “dudebro” version, which is a terrible idea if your goal is better men that are willing to work with your movement.

Of course, men themselves will have to build these new identities mostly. Feminism cannot do so for them. But you don’t want them to think Feminism is incompatible with them being masculine. Remember the post I was responding to said masculinity was seen to be only of sins and just fine to let the opposition monopolize.

Source: argumate gender politics

ranma-official

theonion:
“SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass....

Source: theonion queue

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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