It might be good to have designated spaces where Green Martians can practice tickling participating humans. As more and more of these spaces become available, it becomes more and more socially unacceptable for Green Martians to tickle humans elsewhere. Obviously, for this to work, there would need to be a sufficiently high number of humans willing to participate.
For me, a large part of minor annoyances is anticipating minor annoyances. Imagining myself as a human, I might get really sick of stung randomly throughout the day. It would be easier to deal with the occasional sting if they were constrained to certain times of the day or to certain environments. For example, I think it would be good to make a taboo against tickling at work. The blue martians can always tickle later, and the humans would be able to work without having to worry about getting stung.
Now imagining myself as a Green Martian, I feel like I would naturally feel bad about stinging humans, and try to avoid it for the most part. This anxiety would be significantly worse if the humans visibly disliked me for stinging them. But I would be desperate for someone who could help me become a Blue Martian. Learning the Blue Martian’s techniques would be very tempting… Something that might be a good alternative would be if there were humans working with the Blue Martians, finding ways to make the techniques more robust.
Also, studying the transformation process more carefully would probably be very helpful for everyone.
For me, a large part of minor annoyances is anticipating minor annoyances. Imagining myself as a human, I might get really sick of stung randomly throughout the day. It would be easier to deal with the occasional sting if they were constrained to certain times of the day or to certain environments. For example, I think it would be good to make a taboo against tickling at work. The blue martians can always tickle later, and the humans would be able to work without having to worry about getting stung.
So, one problem with this:
Suppose that there are such places, called Tickling Bars, where Martians can tickle humans who have come pretty much to be tickled. BUT. Even humans that go to Tickling Bars only want to be tickled by the largest green martians, because those tend to have the least stingy tentacles. And green martians recognize that there’s a limited amount of Tickling Bars, so the bigger ones tend to band together and make the smaller ones feel really uncomfortable. This means that smaller green Martians, who don’t have as much of a ‘pack’, are typically very unwelcome in Tickling Bars, and in fact the only place they ever SEE a human is at work.
They know that tickling at work is taboo, but where else are they supposed to go to tickle humans? The last time one tried a Tickle Bar, the human that he offered to tickle threatened to get the other martians to cut its tentacles off.
They know that tickling at work is taboo, but where else are they supposed to go to tickle humans? The last time one tried a Tickle Bar, the human that he offered to tickle threatened to get the other martians to cut its tentacles off.
No, it’s confused desperation. Note that confusing “confused desperation” for “aggrieved entitlement” is a good way to treat the disadvantaged as if they were oppressors, which is the opposite of helping.
Look, I’m going to pierce the metaphor for a minute, here.
I’m not talking about sex. I’m not owed sex, I get that. I’m also not owed compassion or companionship or friendliness. I get that.
You’re telling a member of a highly social species that he’s not owed any of the socially-approved and advertised paths to socialization or validation.
The word ‘desperation’ really jumped out at me here. I’m very sorry you feel desperate and lonely. I agree that it can be very hard to tell the difference between a straight guy who thinks he deserves a woman, and a straight guy who thinks he deserves to be loved, and that often people don’t work as hard as they should to distinguish between the two. (Often including, I must add, the guys themselves.)
But a lot of your descriptions of reality strike me as almost mythic. I don’t mean that they are supernatural or inconsistent with the reality I know; it’s just that they seem highly oriented towards an explanation of your world and its inevitability, rather than towards power over your world through predictive utility. You use evolutionary psychology, feminist dialectic, and PUA identity categories to ‘explain’ your desperation- but all without, it seems to me, gaining the ability to make different and better choices about it. Might as well say that you’re cursed by Zeus, yeah?
One of the really tricky parts of social interaction is that the agents are all as intellectually complex as you are. The space of all social interactions is truly, mind-bendingly, absurdly, ridiculously large. Myth is especially poisonous in such a situation, both because it will lead to a narrow subjective framing and because it will narrow your own contributions in turn. The problem is hard (and almost certainly uncomputable!), so you might find considerable value in the concession that even the best models have very little power to predict what a given person can contribute to social bonding, or what factors explain that capacity. Begin with curiosity, and a keen sense of your own ignorance, and you are more likely to discover interesting choices that can offer happiness.
Maybe the reason the post reminds you of myth is that it’s expressing a lack of agency. It’s a common feature there; generally the world is a place where awful things happen to you just because. The poster above is in a complex system where he feels he has no control, and the “whiff of aggrieved entitelment” response touches on that exact raw nerve.
I was halfway through an excessively heated response to you when I took a shower and came back to realize that it was a stupid idea. So I wrote this instead.
I have a genetic inability to gain pleasure from tickling and experimentation with Martians. In fact, to me, blue Martians sting almost as much as green ones. I was told for most of my life that even if I didn’t like it that I was morally required to put up with a Martian because at least /they/ got pleasure out of the deal. Which meant that if it was going to hurt anyway I may as well make a green Martian happy, even if I hated every minute of it.
Then I read about some humans who, like me, simply don’t have the receptors for the blue Martians’ chemicals. The people who told me this was possible told me, by analogy, that I didn’t have to give a damn about any Martians if I didn’t want to. That I could just tell all of them that I had that genetic defect and that this was a completely valid reason to make Martians not tickle me, regardless of color. Most of them understand. The ones that don’t, I try to keep to only seeing in public.
Then there are the ones that try to convince me that I’m making my genetic defect up. Those people are not always green Martians—they may even be humans—but they’re the kind of people who, as far as I am concerned, did a pretty good job of convincing me that I should shut up and get with the program. I don’t want that for myself anymore. I can do better.
I carry scars from this experience, though they are not even close to the majority of my total scarring. I am prone to interpreting remarks that humans should give green Martians a chance as remarks that I need to get with the program, climb into the mothership with the first Martian that will take me, and lie back and think of England. Which is probably not what you intend or what you want.
(In case it wasn’t clear, the genetic defect I refer to is asexuality, specifically aromantic asexuality. There are also closely related conditions where people get pleasure from tentacle tickling but not from experimentation, and vice versa.)
I was halfway through an excessively heated response to you
I think this is just as symptomatic of the greater problem as my own whining is.
The greater problem: Just because I need love, and companionship, and yes even sex, doesn’t mean you have to be the one to give it to me. There’s a large enough dating pool out there that, if I’m not deliberately attacked whenever I try to figure out what I’m doing, I’ll eventually figure this out and find someone interested in me.
And just because you want to be left alone and not bothered with all this romantic / sexual bullshit doesn’t mean I have to stop wanting, or acknowledging that it’s frustrating and painful to not get what I need. There’s enough stable, secure people out there that, if you’re not constantly harassed by pushy assholes, you’ll eventually find a good circle of friends that won’t bother you about that sort of shit.
But every time someone reacts with viciousness to someone else stating their needs, they undermine their assertion that those needs are not their responsibility.
Look, if someone is asexual, and aromantic, I’m flat-out not going to be interested in anything but friendship with them. The initial signals just won’t be there to get my attention. If they give off confusing signals (being extra-flirty, sexually provocative, etc. with me and then assert that they’re not interested in me), I’m going to express my confusion in various stages of escalation until I finally feel like I’m being duped and inform them that I can’t be friends with them. But at no point in this process does ‘stop doing what you want and put out for me’ come into it, and it’s sad that so much of the landscape is made up of that assumption.
Not All Women Are Like That. Not All Men Are Like That. Why is it that when sex and romance enter the picture, everyone doubles down on their need to stereotype instead of just paying attention to the damn environment?
Not owed any of the paths? No, I didn’t say that, and I wouldn’t go that far. I sensed aggrieved entitlement because of historical realities: because, yes, men have been the oppressors of women for thousands of years, and we’ve only recently started to abandon a paradigm where women’s availability for men was taken for granted and adopt a paradigm where women’s autonomy as agents with their own preferences and desires is acknowledged. Of course it’s going to be difficult for heterosexual men to control the Neolithic patriarch that still lives inside them, and one of the great mistakes of PUA ideology is that it draws from our ancestral past to foster outdated male behaviors of dominance and competition that do not fit anymore in modern society. That those behaviors do get some men laid is not evidence that they are acceptable behaviors; it’s evidence that not all women are the same. Gender equality is an embarrasingly late advance in human history, too recent to be part of our innate assumptions, and for the moment we have to patiently teach it to each generation. It’s going to take time for it to sink in and become another of our gut-level impulses. Until then, some men are still going to be clumsy, and of course that’s sad, because many of those socially inexpert men could make excellent partners, but when we speak of the suffering of lonely men, we need to remember that precisely the old male structures of dominance and competition are to blame for that. Sexism has hurt ethical men, but damaged all women: we can’t pretend they haven’t been owned, ignored, silenced, taken for granted, trespassed on, dehumanized, and neglected, both historically and still today, both openly and insidiously. With that in mind, you can’t seriously tell me that lonely men are the disadvantaged party here. Women already have enough on their plates trying to simply get an education, and go through their daily lives without being assaulted, and build professional careers where they’ll be paid fairly and taken seriously, and push governments everywhere to earn the basic right of controlling their own reproduction, and a myriad other things that need to be corrected in this society; and the last thing they need on top of all of that is being told that they’re being mean for having a set of preferences. Helping lonely men achieve emotional and sexual satisfaction is going to take much more than socialization workshops; we need to dismantle the entire alpha-male paradigm and make all forms of masculinity visible and acceptable, and we also need to acknowledge that even socially inexpert men enjoy the privilege of being expected to initiate and set the course of romantic interaction. The entire PUA ideology is built on that flawed expectation. That is the opposite of helping.
BOTH ARE TRUE. Let me explain what intersectionalism looks from my end:
Patriarchy has given 90% of men and 100% of women a raw deal. Look at Dr. Robert Sapolski’s work with baboon troops for an excellent model of this. The bullshit dominance hierarchy that is ingrained in our ancestry leaves all women and most men physically sick and emotionally damaged, all for the sake of putting a few violently aggressive jerks on top.
The women’s movement made a fatal mistake, of identifying the enemy with ‘maleness’ instead of ‘violent dominance’. It tore down structures that made men’s lives bearable at the expense of women’s, but instead of proposing and cultivating new, nurturing structures, the narrative seems to be “you’re on your own, that’s what you get for the thousands of years of oppressive dominance!”
And meanwhile millions of men in Western society, who are constantly bombarded with images telling them what is expected of them and texts telling them that they are horrible for following those expectations, and who aren’t stupid, are desperately clamouring for some way to add meaning and emotional significance to their lives.
PUA is offering them a toxic way to reclaim a paltry sliver of the meaning that the old dominance structure gave them.
Feminism can’t even offer them THAT. All feminism can do is blame them and shame them and villainise them when they look around and take the only deal that’s being offered.
And that’s TERRIBLE, because PUA is TERRIBLE. What’s worse, a lot of PUA is going about things in a VERY methodical, scientific way—which means that it often actually WORKS, and it finds out true things about men and women. But because it was PUA culture that discovered those facts, they are tainted by association with horrifically unethical goals and values, and so the feminist culture turns away from facts that it could be using to improve itself.
I am so totally, completely on board with equality, and negotiation, and mutual respect.
I want to live in your world.
I want to negotiate a place in your world.
I am very, very lucky, in that I have a much higher than normal sense of self-awareness and drive for introspection, so that I can explain all this to you in this way. Because I feel the same need that young PUA acolytes do, very keenly. And so when these conversations come up, my urge is to get your side to understand, because your side is in a position to offer compassion and to provide a non-terrible alternative.
It appears we have the same goals. Just a few remarks to make:
It’s always tricky to draw examples from the primate family. Chimpanzees are macho-ruled bullies; bonobos are female-ruled hippies. We are more malleable than we give ourselves credit for.
Feminism is not a single, monolithic block. There are several schools and subschools, and male-hating is the practice of just a few of them.
I’m not sure what you mean by “my side.” For the record, I’m a guy.
Yes, but the specific example given was of a particular baboon tribe. Seriously, read about it or watch some videos about it. Many of the conclusions he draws are endocrine-based, so they’re well preserved across the primate line. And his study showed some startling and promising things.
Also, this is the internet, where it doesn’t matter whether you’re a guy or not unless you say so or some asshole doxes you; barring edge cases, all that matters is the words you use.
And if the male-hating schools are doing the primary evangelizing, then who are people going to get exposed to? This is memetic warfare; what matters is who gets their message out, and what effect that message has. I’m by no means accusing you of the kind of depravity I’ve seen from some of the Social Justice movement, all I’m saying is that there’s people out there who are carrying your flag and using your language and claiming to be part of your movement, and if they get to someone before you do, you’re going to have a really difficult time distancing yourself from that depravity.
That alone doesn’t prove that civilization and science weren’t developed in a hypothetical parallel universe without patriarchy. It is an evidence, but I am not sure how strong.
Generally, if we have X everywhere, it is difficult to say whether all things that happened, happened because of X, despite X, or regardless of X. Things happening “because of” should happen with greater probability, or sooner, and things happening “despite” should happen with smaller probability, or later… but if we have X for millenia, even the “later” happens eventually.
In a similar way, I have seen people attributing to Christianity everything that happened in Europe since 0 AD. Is that fair or not? Sometimes we can use China as a control group. In case of patriarchy, we don’t have such “China”. (And no, very small indigenous tribes aren’t a good control group. There are differences in population size, access to resources, etc.)
Patriarchy has given 90% of men and 100% of women a raw deal. Look at Dr. Robert Sapolski’s work with baboon troops for an excellent model of this.
Are you talking about foragers or farmers? “Patriarchy” usually refers to the latter, but your description sounds more like the former (especially given that you’re mentioning baboons).
Foragers were probably equivalent to baboons, and farming made it much worse.
In a forager tribe, when the abuse became too horrible, there was an option to leave. Farming allowed this abuse to grow astronomically. A forager alpha male couldn’t make his tribe build him a pyramid.
Foragers were probably equivalent to baboons, and farming made it much worse.
Certain people claim that traditional farmer sexual norms (lifelong monogamous marriage where only the husband worked for money) were better than the forager ways that we’re reverting to, and it’s not totally obvious they’re wrong. (IMO neither is a Pareto improvement over the other, so which one is better depends on what you mean by “better”, and in any event farmers weren’t the same everywhere. And in many places the top 0.1% of farmers behaved like foragers anyway.)
When using phrases like ‘terrible places for omegas to live’, the should-universe is the only basis of comparison unless I want to just throw up my hands, give up my something to protect, and become a moral nihilist. I wouldn’t recommend it; I’ve tried it and it’s not very fun.
Certain neoreactionaries claim otherwise, and it’s not completely obvious to me that they’re wrong. (My position is that there are tradeoffs and neither system is a Pareto improvement over the other, so which one is better depends on what you mean by ‘better’.)
Dunno about emotionally damaged, but farmers were shorter than foragers in average until the 20th century, which is probably a decent proxy for physically sick.
Even as a Martian who stayed green until quite recently way into my twenties, I’d prefer a culture that assumes that no human is ever obligated to let any Martian tickle them if they don’t want to (unless they promised or something) rather than a culture that assumes that every Martian needs some human to tickle and skin colour should not matter. The latter gives Martians no incentive to put any effort into becoming blue,¹ nor any selection pressure for the next generation of Martians to be bluer. Also, wishing that green tickling were painless doesn’t make it so, so in the latter culture humans will still go out of the way to avoid being tickled by green Martians when they can get away with it, but can’t be overt about the reasons leaving the green Martians very confused and with no hint about what to do to change the situation. (And the quirk in Martians’ chromatic adaptation that means that each Martian will see their own skin as teal or azure no matter how brightly greenor deeply blue it is doesn’t quite help.) Reading that green Martians’ tentacles actually are painful to humans, as opposed to humans refusing to be tickled out of sheer wickedness towards green Martians, was very helpful to me.
BTW, right-wingers appear to endorse this argument (with a whiff of writing low-status Martians out of the moral calculus) when about economics but not when about sexuality for some reason.
I’m trying to imagine an evidence that would make me update to that position.
Probably something like a secret video from some super important political or economical international forum, when after the conference the male participants start debating about how frustrating it is that most of them can’t find a girlfriend, because women only care about sincerity and emotional closeness, and prefer a man who can spend enough time with them instead of having to travel around the planet to make more money or to change the world.
Thank you, this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping for. I don’t really have anything to add, I agree with essentially everything here. Can we can please keep the discussion at this level?
Some ideas:
It might be good to have designated spaces where Green Martians can practice tickling participating humans. As more and more of these spaces become available, it becomes more and more socially unacceptable for Green Martians to tickle humans elsewhere. Obviously, for this to work, there would need to be a sufficiently high number of humans willing to participate.
For me, a large part of minor annoyances is anticipating minor annoyances. Imagining myself as a human, I might get really sick of stung randomly throughout the day. It would be easier to deal with the occasional sting if they were constrained to certain times of the day or to certain environments. For example, I think it would be good to make a taboo against tickling at work. The blue martians can always tickle later, and the humans would be able to work without having to worry about getting stung.
Now imagining myself as a Green Martian, I feel like I would naturally feel bad about stinging humans, and try to avoid it for the most part. This anxiety would be significantly worse if the humans visibly disliked me for stinging them. But I would be desperate for someone who could help me become a Blue Martian. Learning the Blue Martian’s techniques would be very tempting… Something that might be a good alternative would be if there were humans working with the Blue Martians, finding ways to make the techniques more robust.
Also, studying the transformation process more carefully would probably be very helpful for everyone.
For some reason I found this very funny.
So, one problem with this:
Suppose that there are such places, called Tickling Bars, where Martians can tickle humans who have come pretty much to be tickled. BUT. Even humans that go to Tickling Bars only want to be tickled by the largest green martians, because those tend to have the least stingy tentacles. And green martians recognize that there’s a limited amount of Tickling Bars, so the bigger ones tend to band together and make the smaller ones feel really uncomfortable. This means that smaller green Martians, who don’t have as much of a ‘pack’, are typically very unwelcome in Tickling Bars, and in fact the only place they ever SEE a human is at work.
They know that tickling at work is taboo, but where else are they supposed to go to tickle humans? The last time one tried a Tickle Bar, the human that he offered to tickle threatened to get the other martians to cut its tentacles off.
Maybe they could try online tickling?
So … anyone from Usenet remember Terri DiSisto and get flashbacks at the words “online tickling”?
There is a whiff of aggrieved entitlement in that sentence.
No, it’s confused desperation. Note that confusing “confused desperation” for “aggrieved entitlement” is a good way to treat the disadvantaged as if they were oppressors, which is the opposite of helping.
Look, I’m going to pierce the metaphor for a minute, here.
I’m not talking about sex. I’m not owed sex, I get that. I’m also not owed compassion or companionship or friendliness. I get that.
You’re telling a member of a highly social species that he’s not owed any of the socially-approved and advertised paths to socialization or validation.
I get that.
Do you?
The word ‘desperation’ really jumped out at me here. I’m very sorry you feel desperate and lonely. I agree that it can be very hard to tell the difference between a straight guy who thinks he deserves a woman, and a straight guy who thinks he deserves to be loved, and that often people don’t work as hard as they should to distinguish between the two. (Often including, I must add, the guys themselves.)
But a lot of your descriptions of reality strike me as almost mythic. I don’t mean that they are supernatural or inconsistent with the reality I know; it’s just that they seem highly oriented towards an explanation of your world and its inevitability, rather than towards power over your world through predictive utility. You use evolutionary psychology, feminist dialectic, and PUA identity categories to ‘explain’ your desperation- but all without, it seems to me, gaining the ability to make different and better choices about it. Might as well say that you’re cursed by Zeus, yeah?
One of the really tricky parts of social interaction is that the agents are all as intellectually complex as you are. The space of all social interactions is truly, mind-bendingly, absurdly, ridiculously large. Myth is especially poisonous in such a situation, both because it will lead to a narrow subjective framing and because it will narrow your own contributions in turn. The problem is hard (and almost certainly uncomputable!), so you might find considerable value in the concession that even the best models have very little power to predict what a given person can contribute to social bonding, or what factors explain that capacity. Begin with curiosity, and a keen sense of your own ignorance, and you are more likely to discover interesting choices that can offer happiness.
Maybe the reason the post reminds you of myth is that it’s expressing a lack of agency. It’s a common feature there; generally the world is a place where awful things happen to you just because. The poster above is in a complex system where he feels he has no control, and the “whiff of aggrieved entitelment” response touches on that exact raw nerve.
I was halfway through an excessively heated response to you when I took a shower and came back to realize that it was a stupid idea. So I wrote this instead.
I have a genetic inability to gain pleasure from tickling and experimentation with Martians. In fact, to me, blue Martians sting almost as much as green ones. I was told for most of my life that even if I didn’t like it that I was morally required to put up with a Martian because at least /they/ got pleasure out of the deal. Which meant that if it was going to hurt anyway I may as well make a green Martian happy, even if I hated every minute of it.
Then I read about some humans who, like me, simply don’t have the receptors for the blue Martians’ chemicals. The people who told me this was possible told me, by analogy, that I didn’t have to give a damn about any Martians if I didn’t want to. That I could just tell all of them that I had that genetic defect and that this was a completely valid reason to make Martians not tickle me, regardless of color. Most of them understand. The ones that don’t, I try to keep to only seeing in public.
Then there are the ones that try to convince me that I’m making my genetic defect up. Those people are not always green Martians—they may even be humans—but they’re the kind of people who, as far as I am concerned, did a pretty good job of convincing me that I should shut up and get with the program. I don’t want that for myself anymore. I can do better.
I carry scars from this experience, though they are not even close to the majority of my total scarring. I am prone to interpreting remarks that humans should give green Martians a chance as remarks that I need to get with the program, climb into the mothership with the first Martian that will take me, and lie back and think of England. Which is probably not what you intend or what you want.
(In case it wasn’t clear, the genetic defect I refer to is asexuality, specifically aromantic asexuality. There are also closely related conditions where people get pleasure from tentacle tickling but not from experimentation, and vice versa.)
I think this is just as symptomatic of the greater problem as my own whining is.
The greater problem: Just because I need love, and companionship, and yes even sex, doesn’t mean you have to be the one to give it to me. There’s a large enough dating pool out there that, if I’m not deliberately attacked whenever I try to figure out what I’m doing, I’ll eventually figure this out and find someone interested in me.
And just because you want to be left alone and not bothered with all this romantic / sexual bullshit doesn’t mean I have to stop wanting, or acknowledging that it’s frustrating and painful to not get what I need. There’s enough stable, secure people out there that, if you’re not constantly harassed by pushy assholes, you’ll eventually find a good circle of friends that won’t bother you about that sort of shit.
But every time someone reacts with viciousness to someone else stating their needs, they undermine their assertion that those needs are not their responsibility.
Look, if someone is asexual, and aromantic, I’m flat-out not going to be interested in anything but friendship with them. The initial signals just won’t be there to get my attention. If they give off confusing signals (being extra-flirty, sexually provocative, etc. with me and then assert that they’re not interested in me), I’m going to express my confusion in various stages of escalation until I finally feel like I’m being duped and inform them that I can’t be friends with them. But at no point in this process does ‘stop doing what you want and put out for me’ come into it, and it’s sad that so much of the landscape is made up of that assumption.
Not All Women Are Like That. Not All Men Are Like That. Why is it that when sex and romance enter the picture, everyone doubles down on their need to stereotype instead of just paying attention to the damn environment?
Not owed any of the paths? No, I didn’t say that, and I wouldn’t go that far. I sensed aggrieved entitlement because of historical realities: because, yes, men have been the oppressors of women for thousands of years, and we’ve only recently started to abandon a paradigm where women’s availability for men was taken for granted and adopt a paradigm where women’s autonomy as agents with their own preferences and desires is acknowledged. Of course it’s going to be difficult for heterosexual men to control the Neolithic patriarch that still lives inside them, and one of the great mistakes of PUA ideology is that it draws from our ancestral past to foster outdated male behaviors of dominance and competition that do not fit anymore in modern society. That those behaviors do get some men laid is not evidence that they are acceptable behaviors; it’s evidence that not all women are the same. Gender equality is an embarrasingly late advance in human history, too recent to be part of our innate assumptions, and for the moment we have to patiently teach it to each generation. It’s going to take time for it to sink in and become another of our gut-level impulses. Until then, some men are still going to be clumsy, and of course that’s sad, because many of those socially inexpert men could make excellent partners, but when we speak of the suffering of lonely men, we need to remember that precisely the old male structures of dominance and competition are to blame for that. Sexism has hurt ethical men, but damaged all women: we can’t pretend they haven’t been owned, ignored, silenced, taken for granted, trespassed on, dehumanized, and neglected, both historically and still today, both openly and insidiously. With that in mind, you can’t seriously tell me that lonely men are the disadvantaged party here. Women already have enough on their plates trying to simply get an education, and go through their daily lives without being assaulted, and build professional careers where they’ll be paid fairly and taken seriously, and push governments everywhere to earn the basic right of controlling their own reproduction, and a myriad other things that need to be corrected in this society; and the last thing they need on top of all of that is being told that they’re being mean for having a set of preferences. Helping lonely men achieve emotional and sexual satisfaction is going to take much more than socialization workshops; we need to dismantle the entire alpha-male paradigm and make all forms of masculinity visible and acceptable, and we also need to acknowledge that even socially inexpert men enjoy the privilege of being expected to initiate and set the course of romantic interaction. The entire PUA ideology is built on that flawed expectation. That is the opposite of helping.
BOTH ARE TRUE. Let me explain what intersectionalism looks from my end:
Patriarchy has given 90% of men and 100% of women a raw deal. Look at Dr. Robert Sapolski’s work with baboon troops for an excellent model of this. The bullshit dominance hierarchy that is ingrained in our ancestry leaves all women and most men physically sick and emotionally damaged, all for the sake of putting a few violently aggressive jerks on top.
The women’s movement made a fatal mistake, of identifying the enemy with ‘maleness’ instead of ‘violent dominance’. It tore down structures that made men’s lives bearable at the expense of women’s, but instead of proposing and cultivating new, nurturing structures, the narrative seems to be “you’re on your own, that’s what you get for the thousands of years of oppressive dominance!”
And meanwhile millions of men in Western society, who are constantly bombarded with images telling them what is expected of them and texts telling them that they are horrible for following those expectations, and who aren’t stupid, are desperately clamouring for some way to add meaning and emotional significance to their lives.
PUA is offering them a toxic way to reclaim a paltry sliver of the meaning that the old dominance structure gave them.
Feminism can’t even offer them THAT. All feminism can do is blame them and shame them and villainise them when they look around and take the only deal that’s being offered.
And that’s TERRIBLE, because PUA is TERRIBLE. What’s worse, a lot of PUA is going about things in a VERY methodical, scientific way—which means that it often actually WORKS, and it finds out true things about men and women. But because it was PUA culture that discovered those facts, they are tainted by association with horrifically unethical goals and values, and so the feminist culture turns away from facts that it could be using to improve itself.
I am so totally, completely on board with equality, and negotiation, and mutual respect.
I want to live in your world.
I want to negotiate a place in your world.
I am very, very lucky, in that I have a much higher than normal sense of self-awareness and drive for introspection, so that I can explain all this to you in this way. Because I feel the same need that young PUA acolytes do, very keenly. And so when these conversations come up, my urge is to get your side to understand, because your side is in a position to offer compassion and to provide a non-terrible alternative.
It appears we have the same goals. Just a few remarks to make:
It’s always tricky to draw examples from the primate family. Chimpanzees are macho-ruled bullies; bonobos are female-ruled hippies. We are more malleable than we give ourselves credit for.
Feminism is not a single, monolithic block. There are several schools and subschools, and male-hating is the practice of just a few of them.
I’m not sure what you mean by “my side.” For the record, I’m a guy.
Yes, but the specific example given was of a particular baboon tribe. Seriously, read about it or watch some videos about it. Many of the conclusions he draws are endocrine-based, so they’re well preserved across the primate line. And his study showed some startling and promising things.
Also, this is the internet, where it doesn’t matter whether you’re a guy or not unless you say so or some asshole doxes you; barring edge cases, all that matters is the words you use.
And if the male-hating schools are doing the primary evangelizing, then who are people going to get exposed to? This is memetic warfare; what matters is who gets their message out, and what effect that message has. I’m by no means accusing you of the kind of depravity I’ve seen from some of the Social Justice movement, all I’m saying is that there’s people out there who are carrying your flag and using your language and claiming to be part of your movement, and if they get to someone before you do, you’re going to have a really difficult time distancing yourself from that depravity.
Would this be the same patriarchy that build civilization, developed science, etc.?
That alone doesn’t prove that civilization and science weren’t developed in a hypothetical parallel universe without patriarchy. It is an evidence, but I am not sure how strong.
Generally, if we have X everywhere, it is difficult to say whether all things that happened, happened because of X, despite X, or regardless of X. Things happening “because of” should happen with greater probability, or sooner, and things happening “despite” should happen with smaller probability, or later… but if we have X for millenia, even the “later” happens eventually.
In a similar way, I have seen people attributing to Christianity everything that happened in Europe since 0 AD. Is that fair or not? Sometimes we can use China as a control group. In case of patriarchy, we don’t have such “China”. (And no, very small indigenous tribes aren’t a good control group. There are differences in population size, access to resources, etc.)
They work as a control group if the lack of patriarchy contributed to these changes.
Are you talking about foragers or farmers? “Patriarchy” usually refers to the latter, but your description sounds more like the former (especially given that you’re mentioning baboons).
Foragers were probably equivalent to baboons, and farming made it much worse.
In a forager tribe, when the abuse became too horrible, there was an option to leave. Farming allowed this abuse to grow astronomically. A forager alpha male couldn’t make his tribe build him a pyramid.
Certain people claim that traditional farmer sexual norms (lifelong monogamous marriage where only the husband worked for money) were better than the forager ways that we’re reverting to, and it’s not totally obvious they’re wrong. (IMO neither is a Pareto improvement over the other, so which one is better depends on what you mean by “better”, and in any event farmers weren’t the same everywhere. And in many places the top 0.1% of farmers behaved like foragers anyway.)
This fits my observations and intuitions, as well.
Forager tribes are egalitarian in comparison with farmers. In an absolute sense they’re still pretty terrible places for omegas to live.
By “absolute” you seem to mean ‘relative to the should-universe’.
When using phrases like ‘terrible places for omegas to live’, the should-universe is the only basis of comparison unless I want to just throw up my hands, give up my something to protect, and become a moral nihilist. I wouldn’t recommend it; I’ve tried it and it’s not very fun.
Certain neoreactionaries claim otherwise, and it’s not completely obvious to me that they’re wrong. (My position is that there are tradeoffs and neither system is a Pareto improvement over the other, so which one is better depends on what you mean by ‘better’.)
Reality check: fail.
Dunno about emotionally damaged, but farmers were shorter than foragers in average until the 20th century, which is probably a decent proxy for physically sick.
There is a whiff of writing low-status Martians out of the moral calculus in that sentence.
Even as a Martian who stayed green until quite recently way into my twenties, I’d prefer a culture that assumes that no human is ever obligated to let any Martian tickle them if they don’t want to (unless they promised or something) rather than a culture that assumes that every Martian needs some human to tickle and skin colour should not matter. The latter gives Martians no incentive to put any effort into becoming blue,¹ nor any selection pressure for the next generation of Martians to be bluer. Also, wishing that green tickling were painless doesn’t make it so, so in the latter culture humans will still go out of the way to avoid being tickled by green Martians when they can get away with it, but can’t be overt about the reasons leaving the green Martians very confused and with no hint about what to do to change the situation. (And the quirk in Martians’ chromatic adaptation that means that each Martian will see their own skin as teal or azure no matter how brightly green or deeply blue it is doesn’t quite help.) Reading that green Martians’ tentacles actually are painful to humans, as opposed to humans refusing to be tickled out of sheer wickedness towards green Martians, was very helpful to me.
BTW, right-wingers appear to endorse this argument (with a whiff of writing low-status Martians out of the moral calculus) when about economics but not when about sexuality for some reason.
No, I’m writing off the entire status assumptions. Go to the chalkboard and write 100 times: Seduction. Is. Not. A. Status. Game.
I’m trying to imagine an evidence that would make me update to that position.
Probably something like a secret video from some super important political or economical international forum, when after the conference the male participants start debating about how frustrating it is that most of them can’t find a girlfriend, because women only care about sincerity and emotional closeness, and prefer a man who can spend enough time with them instead of having to travel around the planet to make more money or to change the world.
Thank you, this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping for. I don’t really have anything to add, I agree with essentially everything here. Can we can please keep the discussion at this level?