but in this year of our lord 2k17 I’m actually genuinely uncertain as to whether describing Japan’s schoolgirl obsession as “kinda messed up” counts as woke or reactionary.
Publicly, woke so they won’t decide to Normalize Schoolgirlhoodphilia or something just to spite reactionaries. Privately? Reactionary.
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.
New research, published in October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that despite size discrepancy, there’s no functional difference between men’s and women’s brains. “Male” brains and “female” brains simply don’t exist. In fact, there’s significant overlap.
This study had 1400 people in it… Remember that sample size matters. remember this when someone tries to rebuke this with a study that has 80 participants. Be as scientifically literate as possible so that we can debunk this nonsense one step at a time.
ALSO FOLLOW-UP.
I’m just gonna post the abstract of the paper (link) because there is no way in hell anyone should trust mic.com to get this right:
Whereas a categorical difference in the genitals has always been acknowledged, the question of how far these categories extend into human biology is still not resolved. Documented sex/gender differences in the brain are often taken as support of a sexually dimorphic view of human brains (“female brain” or “male brain”). However, such a distinction would be possible only if sex/gender differences in brain features were highly dimorphic (i.e., little overlap between the forms of these features in males and females) and internally consistent (i.e., a brain has only “male” or only “female” features). Here, analysis of MRIs of more than 1,400 human brains from four datasets reveals extensive overlap between the distributions of females and males for all gray matter, white matter, and connections assessed. Moreover, analyses of internal consistency reveal that brains with features that are consistently at one end of the “maleness-femaleness” continuum are rare. Rather, most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males, some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both females and males. Our findings are robust across sample, age, type of MRI, and method of analysis. These findings are corroborated by a similar analysis of personality traits, attitudes, interests, and behaviors of more than 5,500 individuals, which reveals that internal consistency is extremely rare. Our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.
Rather, most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males, some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both females and males.
Statistical distributions, neither neurological uniformity nor essentialism.
What do you think the odds are of least one congressman in the next few years coming out and saying they think the Earth is flat and that NASA’s been lying to us? Realistically, 10, 12%?
Like, the head of an MRA reddit got outed as an elected rep, you’re acting like these people don’t already control NASA funding
Redpill, not MRA
Remember when an article was published saying that “MRAs” were in a frothing rage over Mad Max: Fury Road, but actually it was RoK, a site that explicitly thinks MRAs are all losers?
At this point, I’m very close to thinking the misinformation is deliberate.
@obiternihili And I lean towards that, and am asking for examples indirectly
The new masculinities are out there being formed right now in the vast chasms of the net, but many are too liquid now and not yet crystalized.
Some are pulling from the future, where gender is more dissolved than it is now, and mixing outwards transgressions with confidence.
Others pull elements from the past without taking the whole thing. Some degree of sexual promiscuity has always been present in human society, but not always with the same rules, social punishments, and social status.
I don’t think new stable equilibria will be fully identifiable for a while.
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.
Women who are egalitarian in the workplace and towards friends might still have very traditional expectations when it comes to sex and dating.
When it comes to actually having sex and relationships that include two people having sex with each other exclusively, sex differences and gender roles are more salient than in any other context.
Women who have traditional expectations from men they’re dating usually don’t communicate these expectations to men they’re not dating.
Is any of this controversial?
Hypothesis: any statement featuring the word “gender” is controversial, including this one.
Counterexample to hypothesis: “’Gender’ is a word in the English language.”
More seriously: What about the lesbians? :D
About the lesbians: I have no clue. I have never been one, or dated one. I’m a man. (full disclosure: Previous blog persona of a male robot was a joke. Am actually flesh and blood guy.)
That said: I have talked to lesbians and bi women about this IRL.
Why, it’s almost enough to make one want someone of a differing neurotype.
@the-grey-tribe RE: No Reblog post: Feminism collectively never actually overcame male hyperagency. It has been incomplete since the day it was born.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
