The women entering biology statistics does make me a bit uncomfortable because it seems like it’s the classic jobs process for women where jobs are considered less prestigious as women enter them. I can draw the parallel between the wet lab component and other work that became traditionally female, like cooking or textile work.
That’s going to be a constant danger if the reactionary idea about (cis/het/blah) women wanting men who are higher status than they are is even one quarter true.
There are only two genders: human and transhuman.
Interestingly, informal men’s spaces seem to go for “a lack of people that we’ll be attracted to and/or that are off limits”, which tend to be inclusive of all men, plus less desirable women, Kinsey-6 lesbians, and women that are already taken and will remain so for the foreseeable future, so long as said women have masculine enough personalities to fit in.
I have it on good authority that not wanting me is an act of oppression.
If only Eliot Rodgers had waited a few years…
I’m sorry, but unlike me, he was a member of [OTHER GROUP] and I am a member of [CORRECT GROUP], therefore for him to want anyone is an act of oppression.
(Although more seriously that guy was fucked up. Don’t huff Incelthought, kids. You’ll go mad and blind.)
Didn’t the incels actually tell him off? At least some manosphere people did, asI recall.
Someone did. He was unsurprisingly accused of being an MRA or something along those lines, but of course all the MRAs thought he was nuts. There was some other group, but I don’t think it was incels.
I have it on good authority that not wanting me is an act of oppression.
If only Eliot Rodgers had waited a few years…
I’m sorry, but unlike me, he was a member of [OTHER GROUP] and I am a member of [CORRECT GROUP], therefore for him to want anyone is an act of oppression.
(Although more seriously that guy was fucked up. Don’t huff Incelthought, kids. You’ll go mad and blind.)
Okay guys, I’ve solved the gender discourse. You can go home now.
I was asked once “Why do you even want to have a girlfriend? What do you want to do with her? What do you want her to do?“
I replied “You know, the usual. You know?“
The guy who asked had a deep point to make, but I know he could not have answered this himself to his own satisfaction.
“Redundancy,” I answered. “Two mammals are more likely to reach task completion than one, as their failures are unlikely to overlap, significantly boosting performance as compared to one mammal.”
“The real girlfriend is the girlfriend that was inside you all along,” I answered. He rolled his eyes at my pre-mocking of his deep point.
“Vulnerability,” I answered. “Relationships are a cycle of mutually-increasing vulnerability, something that is dangerous in this world, and intimate physical contact builds bonding and trust, in addition to creating mutual vulnerability.” He was silent for a moment, but then opened his his mouth. “Well, *Actually” he says…
There’s a lot of… dialogue about monogamy vs polyamory these days, in our cosmopolitan little bubble. No one wants to tell others which lifestyle you should choose so I wouldn’t call it a debate, but there’s a great deal of defending “how your lifestyle works, and why you’re happy with it” that can’t save itself from becoming discourse about the two main options.
This happens enough that we fail to recognize that no, polyamory just won. We all live in its world now.
Or more accurately, we all live free of monogamous ideology now.
Case in point. I have a friend, and she’s monogamously committed to her boyfriend. Sure, she hangs out with a lot of other boys. She even visits them by herself, and crashes in their bed. She’s generous with hugs and other mild displays of physical affection to men. And she kind of pines after some specific men, wishing for greater emotional attachment. This isn’t even hidden, it’s all openly acknowledged. But, this is the definition of monogamy she and her SO have worked out.
The reaction of people from her social circle, the people from our general social bubble is “fine. Whatever works for the two of you. If that’s what you call monogamy, I have no reason to disagree with you.” There’s no call for us to try to strictly define what monogamy should mean for them.
Let me assure you, this is not how it would work under monogamous ideology. In a society where monogamy was the reigning lifestyle choice, it includes a specific definition of monogamy, and “being too touchy with other men” would definitely violate that. Even with her partner’s consent, she would be found guilty of breaking social taboos. (Which is basically how her non-cosmopolitan co-workers react.)
But none of us (which I assume includes most of my readers) give a fuck. Call yourself polyamorous, monogamish, what the fuck ever. As long as you both are happy what business is it of mine? And that is the true spirit of polyamory - anarchism towards society wide definitions of romantic relationships.
You might individually choose to snuggle with just one person, and hopefully can get that special person to agree. But it’s very different when that’s a private agreement between two people (one which can be altered at any time they want), than when it’s an arrangement coded and enforced by the whole social world. And we just don’t have that in liberal cosmopolitania any more.
After all, one of the main benefits of monogamy was that you don’t have to negotiate shit. You’re together, you’re just dating each other, these are the default rules, and for people who don’t want to process and explicitly lay out their preferences, this is a lot easier. But that’s gone now - any couple does have to figure out whether they are poly or mono, and even if they are mono, where they feel those boundaries lie, because ain’t no one else doing that regulating for them.
I am… really really troubled by the idea that “monogamous ideology” exists. Or that if you don’t have a bad ideology, you have “poly ideology,” even if you have said “FUCK OFF, I’M NOT POLY” more than once.
Anti-poly ideology exists, yes.
But monogamy can mean anything from “I am attracted to one person at a time” to “I want three girlfriends but think God must hate me” to “more just sounds like a brain-breaking logistical nightmarish time suck, I’m good” to “you know, in practice I only ever dated one person at a time.”
The idea that that adds up to an ideology is why I… feel perhaps more suspicious than I should of loud poly people.
I don’t date one person at a time to spite people who don’t. I do it because I don’t like sensory overload.
I feel you did not read this post.
The point is not “be monogamous or be polyamorous.”
The point is that ideology is a society wide phenomenon, and it is not located solely in the individual.
Under monogamous ideology, not only were most people monogamous (at least publicly), but what monogamy meant and enforcement of following this code was a public matter.
If you live in a bubble where polyamory is accepted now, then you also live in a bubble where no one is defining monogamy for you. You can make up the definition of monogamy to fit your relationship. It can include “cuddling other people is ok but no sex”, or hell, it can include “having sex with other people is okay but we still call it monogamy because we want to” and no one is really going to criticize you for that.
Guess what. This freedom is new. It’s a result of living under polyamory, which exists outside just the individual.
(It’s also a burden. It means when you start dating someone, you need to clarify whether your relationship is poly or mono, and if it’s mono what those boundaries are. You can no longer just assume the default rules. Some people understandably loathe this.)
Transitioning from “the rules of my romantic relationship are defined by the social structure around me” to “I get to / must choose the rules” is a big step. But it’s a culture-wide step, and can’t exist solely on the individual level, anymore than “I decide to have private property” is a decision solely by the individual. Both need the social structures that support them.
There’s no escaping this. It’s not saying “polyamory is an ideology yay”, but rather “your society is going to have an ideology about how much freedom people can expect in defining their relationships.” This has always been true, and will be true in the future.
You can say “FUCK OFF I’M NOT POLY” all you want, but I bet if your partner cheats on you none of your friends are going to immediately tell you (at least, as compared to how likely they were to under monogamy), because that’s now your business and not theirs to enforce. This is the anarchy I am talking about.
(And obviously, the current polyamory acceptance only exists in a few very specific bubbles, and monogamous ideology holds sway in most of America and the world still.)
I can and will tell anyone if I find their partner cheating. I can and will ostracize people from my social groups for cheating. I can and will abandon anyone that knows if my partner is cheating and fails to inform me. Fuck the ideology. I’m physically instantiating my own reality, whether they want me to or not.
The people behind this shift have no idea what it is that they’re unleashing.
Also, it’s surprising that the fact that as many as one in five women may have a condition which results in elevated androgen levels almost never comes up in the gender discourse. Like, here we are debating about whether hormones have an impact on cognition and development, and if so, what that might be, and meanwhile the distribution of androgens is not uniform within women as a sex!
“men and women have statistically different preferences” is a statement universally acknowledged and incredibly controversial at the same time
probably the dissonance is resolved by carefully distinguishing actual men and women (who have statistically differing preferences due to existing in this fallen world and being shaped and moulded by society into the twisted creations that we see all around us) and the Platonic ideal of men and women, who are equal in every way and have identical preferences and behaviour at a statistical level.
admission time: I think that some of the gender forbidden shadowspeech is probably true for a sizeable chunk, once you’ve removed the lesbians, the gays, the bisexuals, transgender individuals, queers, asexuals, autistics, adhders, those with PCOS… basically anyone who has a good reason that they might differ from main plan. (as many as 1/5th of women may have PCOS for instance - not a trivial number)
