ITT: Social Justice #4

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1. What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?

Most of my discourse norms are not, I think, specific to the pro-SJ side of things? I mean, “on the subject of systemic oppression, listen to those it targets more carefully, as those it benefits are likely to be biased” seems to be SJ-specific or at least far more common among pro-SJ folk, but “don’t insist on ~debating~ people who actually didn’t sign up for a debate at all and don’t want to participate” and “don’t mock children if you’re an adult” are some rules I’d hope people would follow no matter what they believed about the existence of privilege or whatnot.

2. What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?

The propositions “there is systemic inequality based on exploiting certain demographics for the benefit of not-those-demographics” and “that first proposition is a bad thing” (yes, apparently there are people who dispute that part specifically) seem to match reality as I have observed it. I know I can’t just believe things immutably, so there must be something that would convince me that the whole thing is wrong, but I’m having trouble actually imagining it. I guess if, somehow, I was shown that all the inequality I had observed in my life was closer to the total than the average? I’ll admit that’s a really high bar, but I’m having trouble even making up a smaller piece of evidence that would actually convince me it was all wrong. It’s not really one belief, after all, so much as a big web of connected beliefs.

3. Explain Gamergate.

… Okay, confession time. I read “the Zoe post” that started it all. Yet I have absolutely no idea what the connection is between that and the “ethics in game journalism”, “make companies stop pandering to SJW”, “video game censorship is basically the devil”, “beware dyed hair” movement Gamergate is now. I mean, the original post explicitly says he thinks Zoe didn’t trade sex for reviews of Depression Quest, and names her SJ-ness as a positive quality. And censorship didn’t even come up. … I hope the dyed hair thing is just an in-joke. I don’t get the whole thing, really, but I know it’s all very shouty and vitriolic, so I just stay the hell away.

ITT: Social Justice #3

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NOTE: People have speculated that both of the previous posts were written by Scott Alexander. Sadly, Scott is not participating in the Intellectual Turing Test, and thus no posts are written by him.

1. What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?

I err on the side of not commenting on issues I don’t think I could make a good contribution to, and when I make a serious contribution, as opposed to venting or telling jokes, I try to do it in a calm and charitable manner. Both of these things have to do with my non-confrontational personality, and do not necessarily generalize to everyone. I’m not even sure how productive the task of trying to come up with a fully general set of abstract “norms” for “discourse” is. It really depends on whether you think you or some interlocutor will change their minds during the course of discussion, whether you think your audience will, how sensitive your interlocutors and audience are, how sensitive you want to portray yourself as being, etc.

2. What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?

I believe that there is a recurring pattern, which plays out in a lot of different ways, where some group of people has power over another and social structures are set up to advantage the powerful and disadvantage the less powerful, and I believe that a society . I believe this because the idea of oppressive power structures seems like the best way to model both things I’ve observed in my own life as an autistic trans woman and things I’ve heard of from others who experience other forms of oppression, as well as statistical disparities in life outcomes between different groups of people. If someone proposes a better model which is radically different to the point where someone following it would no longer be grouped into the category of “social justice”, and it is shown that it more parsimoniously explains what I’ve heard and seen, I’ll believe it. Conversely, if a large body of strong statistical evidence were presented that these patterns do not exist, along with a plausible reason why they would appear to exist in spite of this, I would definitely reconsider my position. Finally, if someone found some way of convincing me that explicitly striving for a more just society, with respect to various systems of oppression, is counterproductive, naturally I would stop advocating for social justice ideas.

3. Explain Gamergate.

Okay, without looking anything up, Eron Gjoni makes a post about his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn who cheated on him and did to him what some people have recognized as abuse, though he didn’t call it abuse in the post. That’s about to become irrelevant really fast. So after gathering dust for a bit, the post gets posted to 4chan or something and people start harassing Quinn, hanging onto one kind of misogynist line in the “Zoepost” where, when he finds out she slept with five other men, references the fast food chain “five guys burgers and fries”. They also latch on to the fact that she slept with a gaming journalist once, which, while it probably didn’t influence the reviews of her games much, was viewed as an example of corruption in the games journalism industry. So Gaming Youtuber Anita Sarkeesian also becomes a target of harassment because she, uhh, makes videos slowly?, a lot of people support the newly-christened #gamergate movement because they have grievences about ethics in gaming journalism, completely forgetting Gjoni and Quinn. A lot of female game people become targets, feminists take notice and defend them, now people who don’t even care that much about game reviews are supporting #gamergate because they oppose the feminist backlash against it, and feminists have a backlash against that, and the whole thing escalates until it gets taken as emblematic of online harrassment in general and Quinn and Sarkeesian speak before the UN about it.

ITT: Social Justice #2

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1. What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?

Frankly, I think a lot of good discourse is just not being an asshole. Most people, if told they’re doing something that’s making other people uncomfortable, will knock it off—most of the time.

But some people fail to apply that rule if the thing that’s making other people uncomfortable involves their own privilege. Then, they’ll talk over the complaint, insist it was “no big deal”, or nitpick the complaint until the other person gives up from exhaustion. Much of the time, the counter arguments (if they go beyond “it’s no big deal because I said so”) amount to hearing about a friend’s house getting robbed and telling your friend, “Are you sure your house was robbed? Or do you mean to say it was burgled? Because there’s a difference you know. Legally speaking, the difference is that…”

Of course, the reason people act this way is because so much oppression is due to unconscious biases, so most people don’t realize it when they’re being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or ableist. So part of good discourse is working to become aware of your own unconscious biases and correcting for them. This is something that privileged people can’t expect members of oppressed classes to do for them, it’s something the privileged need to do for themselves by spending lots of time listening to other people’s experiences of oppression—and I mean actually listening, not just waiting for the first excuse to dismiss everything they’re being told.

Sometimes people balk at this because they misunderstand that’s being asked. An analogy I like to use—and I wish I could remember who came up with it—is for privileged people to imagine they’re on a job internship. If you’re an intern, obviously you’re going to spend lots of time listening and asking questions, and you’re not going to presume you have the expertise to tell the company’s full-time employees everything they’re doing wrong. In discussions of oppression, it’s people who’ve experienced oppression their whole lives who are the experts on their own oppression. So shut up and listen to what they have to say.

2. What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?

Uh, because the evidence of society’s oppressive power structures is literally everywhere? I don’t want to invoke Donald Trump lightly here, because whether or not he wins, the mere fact that his presidential campaign has gotten this far has already had direct consequences, particularly for women and people of color, in terms of normalizing bigotry. So I don’t want to say that his campaign has been a good thing, or that it will have been a good thing even if he loses. But I do think there’s a silver lining here in that given nearly half the country is willing to vote for this guy, it’s now impossible to deny that bigotry and oppression are still major problems that need to be combated. Not to mention the fact that main reason I can say “nearly half” is because of rich old white dudes who are fine with racism and misogyny, as long as it’s polite racism and misogyny, but faint at the thought of anyone being crass about it.

Speaking of the current election, there’s also no shortage of examples to prove that oppressive attitudes are rampant among “progressives” as well, but 2016 also conveniently gave us an especially easy-to-use example of this in the Bernie Bro phenomenon. So really 2016 is the year in which everybody stopped having any excuses.

As for what would change my mind—I don’t know, waking up from the Matrix and Morpheus telling me, “oh, by the way, for some reason the machines decided to create an alternate 21st century where racism and sexism continued existing after 1970, which is when they were completely eradicated in real-world history.” I’m not being sarcastic, I think that may actually be more plausible than imagining we discover an elaborate conspiracy to manufacture evidence of ongoing oppression. I mean, it’s easy to make fun of MRAs for ranting about the secret feminist conspiracy that’s supposed to be controlling the world—but how else do you explain away all the evidence of sexism in the modern world (not to mention all the other *-isms that still exist).

3. Explain Gamergate.

Gamergate is an internet harassment campaign that started out targeting women in the video game industry and appears to have expanded to anyone who the Gamergaters perceive as a threat to their fragile male egos (including some men, but the Gamergaters seem to find women especially threatening). Actually, I’m not sure I can explain all of it, like I can recite the “it’s about ethics in game journalism” narrative almost by heart by now, and in a sense it’s a coherent narrative, it just bears no relationship to any of the documented facts. Like, we have screenshots from the chatroom where the harassment campaign was originally organized! There are links to them on Wikipedia! So I know what happened but I’m totally confused about who the Gamergaters think they’re fooling. Not that I’m surprised by the misogyny—but you’d think eventually they’d come up with a new hashtag and agree to pretend it has nothing to do with the old one?

ITT: Social Justice #1

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It’s our first submission to the Intellectual Turing Test! (Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is? Click here!) Please read, then vote at the end of the post. Feel free to speculate in the comment section about this person’s identity!

1. What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?

I tend to mostly shut up and let others speak. This is because I am privileged in several ways, but also because I am a shy person and I don’t feel a lot of need to make myself heard all the time.

Of course everyone should use the same meta-norms of discourse. People are, in the abstract, equal: in the original position, everyone should have the same ability to affect the conversation. To suggest otherwise would be to create privilege. But meta-norms are not norms, and our (actual, real-world) norms should take account of existing privilege to achieve the meta-norm. People with privilege are inherently “louder” and should be working towards equalizing the conversation, which is to say, they need to step back, listen more, and let others lead.

2. What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?

I am a liberal. I believe in human rights, which are the same for everyone because we are all equal. Everyone has the right to have a decent life. I also believe that every person can and must define what a decent life is for themself; nobody else can do that. And everyone else needs to create the space necessary for that, pay attention, and respect our choices.

What would convince me that people don’t have rights? Nothing, because that is a normative statement. People should have rights because we’re equally people.

3. Explain Gamergate.

Gamergate is a conflict about the content of games and the culture surrounding games. Should games contain so much graphic violence and misogyny as they do? How does such content affect our thinking? Questions like these are totally valid questions, which are being studied by a number of social scientists and others. A small but increasing set of game developers are trying to use such criticism to improve their games and make them more inclusive.

The conflict is also about women in gaming, and the gaming identity. Gaming is a very cismale dominated culture. Why aren’t there more women and LGBT gamers and game designers? What are games, gamers and/or game companies doing that causes this problem? Shouldn’t games allow the player the freedom to choose her identity, including race, sex, and sexual preference?

Some conservative gamers feel threatened by such inquiry, and they have banded together to try to prevent game magazines and game companies from paying attention to it. In addition, because of the controversy many other internet trolls have jumped in. They use many tactics, primarily anonymous threats but also consumer pressure, in the attempt to silence criticism. Their behavior has been particularly egregious towards women on the anti-Gamergate side.

Some Questions for FTMs, Answered

So I was recently reading this blog post. I am not, technically speaking, an FTM, because I am not heading in a manward direction, but if there’s one thing we know about my blog it’s that I love answering questions, so I am guessing I am in the intended group anyway

  1. Please explain in your own words what a “man” is and what a “woman” is.

Many people distinguish between “sex” and “gender”. Sex is the biological fact. In that sense, a man is a person with a testosterone-dominant hormone system, a beard, XY chromosomes, a penis, testes, and so on and so forth, while a woman is a person with an estrogen-dominant hormone system, breasts, XX chromosomes, a vagina, ovaries, and so on and so forth. These are clusters, of course, and not everyone fits neatly into one category or the other. For instance, many cisgender dyadic women have facial hair, while many cisgender dyadic men have breasts; many people have had their ovaries or testes removed, for various reasons; about one percent of the population is intersex; and trans people often undergo medical procedures that allow us to have some (but not all) of the traits of our preferred sex.

Gender is the social fact. You are a man if people agree you are a man, in much the same sense that cowrie shells or cigarettes are money if people agree that they are money. A cigarette that is agreed upon to be money is treated in a certain way (for instance, one may gamble with it, or a non-smoker may accept cigarettes in exchange for valuable items like hooch), while a cigarette that is not agreed upon to be money is not treated in those ways. Similarly, a person who is agreed upon to be a man is treated in a certain way (for instance, that person may be referred to with the pronoun ‘he’ or not sexually harassed on street corners), while a person who is agreed upon to not be a man is not treated that way.

Many people have decided that the compassionate way to classify people into genders is based on self-identification: that is, they consider people who want to be women to be women, people who want to be men to be men, and special snowflakes like myself to be special snowflakes. I generally support this plan; it seems sensible and humane, and involves significantly less telling everyone in the whole entire world about my genitals. However, it makes the whole men-are-people-who-are-agreed-upon-to-be-men business somewhat difficult to talk about and leads to recursive definitions. But “a man is a person who identifies as a man” is actually a meaningful statement; it says “I will treat people who identify as men the way I treat men.”

2. What is wrong with having breasts, ovaries, a vagina, a clitoris, and a period?

I don’t want them, and also I am a transhumanist and thus believe in my sacred right to alter my own personal body as I damn well please.

A. Many women find it uncomfortable having a period and having the equipment that can carry a pregnancy because this comes with lots of difficulties (being responsible for preventing pregnancy, being targeted for sexual abuse, cramping and bleeding, etc) What is the difference between you being uncomfortable with having female parts and the discomfort that most other women experience? Is it a matter of degree or is it a qualitatively different feeling?

I think that a lot of the difference is between instrumental values and terminal values. Many people dislike having a uterus as an instrumental value: that is, they don’t like it because they don’t like sexual abuse, pain, the side effects of birth control, and ruining their underwear. If having a uterus did not mean pain, sexual abuse, birth control side effects, and a large underwear replacement budget, and instead meant that you got ten thousand dollars every month and a free pony, they would be much more in favor of having a uterus.

On the other hand, many trans people dislike having a uterus as a terminal value: that is, they don’t like it just because they don’t like it. This might sound kind of arbitrary, but in fact everyone has terminal values: many people like justice, or being happy, or the welfare and success of their children, or chocolate, just because they like justice, or being happy, or the welfare and success of their children, or chocolate. For many trans people, if they were in the No Pain Or Sexual Abuse, Ten Thousand Dollars A Month and A Free Pony situation, they would go “wow, this is a super-nice pony, but I still don’t want to have a uterus.”

(To be clear, I’m a transhumanist, and I support anyone who wants to remove their uterus having a right to do so, whether it is a terminal or instrumental value for them.)

B. Have you ever talked with other women about their discomfort and have you found similarities and differences?

Yes. Some women have far stronger discomfort with their female sex than I do, and I consider it a tremendous injustice that it is much more difficult for a tokophobe to get a hysterectomy than a trans person.

Some women experience gender dysphoria but choose to continue to identify as women, and I respect that decision. Gender is a very personal thing and I would never presume to know what is right for someone else.

Most women are occasionally upset by the awful things associated with having a female reproductive system. Many women enjoy one-upping each other about how awful their reproductive systems are (“yeah, well, one time I had a blood clot the size of my HAND”). Many women I know consider the female reproductive system to be fascinating on a scientific level, and it’s amazing how we can build a person inside of us (I agree). Some women have this whole I Am A Mother Goddess Producer Of New Life thing going on, which I respect as long as they don’t characterize me as a mother goddess. (This opinion is shared by many cis women.) The vast majority of women do not want a hysterectomy.

People who are not gender dysphoric often do not place a terminal value on having a particular sex, and sometimes are deeply confused by the concept that one can place a terminal value on having a particular sex. However, many people who are not gender dysphoric do place a terminal value on continuing to have the sex they currently have.

3. If you could choose how other people treat you, while staying in the body you were born in, would you still need to transition? Let’s say everyone was willing to treat you “as a guy” even without taking testosterone. Would you still need to take it then?

Yes. Last time I checked, social acceptance did not give one the ability to have erections.

4. What does it mean to be treated like a guy? And for that matter, what does it mean to be treated like a woman?

There’s this thing called “patriarchy”. I understand that, as a radical feminist, you might have heard of it.

People treat men differently from women. Men are assumed to be incompetent at changing diapers and soothing boo-boos. Women get fewer parts in TV shows and movies. Men are more heavily criticized for being wimpy. Women are expected to sacrifice their careers for their children. These differences shape people’s lives.

Now, a lot of trans people’s preference to be trans is a terminal value, which is to say that they value being treated as men or women or nonbinary people just because they do, and not because of any benefits they would receive from being a man or woman or nonbinary person. (Being a nonbinary person does not get you benefits. It mostly just increases the number of tedious conversations you have to have about how difficult your pronouns are.) I admit this is a ridiculous preference, but nevertheless I have it. Sometimes people do want ridiculous things.

5. What does it mean to “feel like a boy/man”? Do you think it’s really possible for a female human to know what it feels like to have a male body? Or is it more like you believe your mind or personality are male? If this is the case, then please move on to question (6).

Here’s the deal: describe ‘happy’ to a person who has never experienced happiness and is skeptical of the existence of the emotion, without reference to things that cause you to be happy or the consequences of your happiness, in such a way that you manage to convince them that you’re not lying or making it up. Since you’re asking me to do it, it’s no doubt quite easy. Once you’ve done that, I will gladly explain to you what it feels like to be nonbinary.

6. What exactly is a “male mind” or a “male brain” or a “male personality”? Please describe.

A male mind/brain/personality is one which is attached to a man. In some contexts, this term may be used to discuss brain differences that exist in people of different sexes or the personality differences (a product of socialization and/or biology) that exist in people of different genders. In other contexts, “male brain” may be used as metonymy for gender dysphoria or gender identity. In still other contexts, this term may be used to discuss the theory that trans people are neurologically intersex, that is, that the reason people are trans is that our brains are similar to cis people of our identified gender, at least in some ways. It is uncontroversial that trans people’s brains are similar in some ways to those of cis people of our assigned gender; in this theory, a trans man does not have a typical male brain, he has a brain somewhere between the typical brains of cis men and cis women. While some evidence is suggestive, nobody knows what causes people to experience gender dysphoria or whether the neurological intersex theory will pan out in the long term. Of course, taking hormones causes neurological changes as well, which may cause cis people’s brains to be different from trans people’s of the same assigned sex.

7. What exactly is uncomfortable about hearing female pronouns? What do these pronouns mean to you?

Human cognition involves a lot of categorization. You know how when you look at a table, you think of it as a table, and when you look at a book, you think of it as a book, and when you look at a lamp, you think of it as a lamp? Most people classify others as male or female in a similar way, often as soon as they look at them. I strongly prefer to be classified as nonbinary. Of course, most people don’t have control over their instinctive classification system: if I say “it is very important that you think of this lamp as a table”, you might be able to refer to it as a table, but you’ll still instinctively classify it as a lamp. But I think I can at least ask people not to rub my face in their classification of me, given that it causes me a great deal of pain. So what being referred to by female pronouns means to me is that a person is deliberately choosing to disrespect my preferences, which is rude, and which means I don’t feel super-motivated to spend much more time with them.

Of course, there are exceptions. I have friends who, for reasons of deeply held principles, use female pronouns for me, and as long as they clear that with me ahead of time I don’t mind. And many people screw up my pronouns, and as long as it is an accident it’s painful (because I’m being reminded that you see me as a girl, which hurts) but I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. Shit happens and using the correct pronouns is hard; if you’re not deliberately being disrespectful, you’re not at fault. And of course some people mess up my pronouns but I trust they still see me as the correct gender, and then their pronoun mistakes cause me no harm whatsoever; like I said, I care about how I’m seen, not the pronouns.

8. If you are attracted to women:

A. What is wrong with being a lesbian, anyway?

Nothing is wrong with being a lesbian. I’m just not a lesbian, in much the same way as there is nothing wrong with being an ice dancer, a Francophile, or a collector of exotic geese, but I am not any of those things either.

B. What if there was no such thing as hormones or surgeries and you had to just live your life as a lesbian, how would your life be different?

Well, I used to live my life as a queer woman, so here are the differences I’ve observed:

The closest thing to being seen as nonbinary, if you’re presenting as a cis woman, is to be seen as a butch woman, so I made a lot of effort to be seen as a butch woman. I didn’t wear skirts or colors. I didn’t complain when I was in pain. I didn’t admit to liking Disney movies. I was very clear that typically feminine things were stupid, that most girls were stupid, and that I liked hanging out with men and my exceptional non-stupid female friends.

(It always confuses people when I tell them I conformed more to my assigned gender after transition.)

To be clear, this wasn’t conscious. I had no idea what a trans person was, back when I was trying to be a girl. I thought of myself as a woman. But on a subconscious level, I still valued not being either of the binary genders, and if the closest thing I could get to that was being a gender-non-conforming woman, then by God I would watch as many action movies and wear as much black as necessary to make this happen.

And then I transitioned and about six months into my transition– around the point where I realized that this really wasn’t going to go away and I could be nonbinary as long as I wanted– by some mysterious coincidence colors reappeared in my wardrobe, Alan Menken reappeared on my playlists, and I started whining like hell whenever I had a stomachache.

So there you go. I’d much rather not detransition. I think being a gender-non-conforming women should be left to people who actually want to be gender-non-conforming and actually want to be women, instead of to people who are putting up with it because it’s the closest you can get to being nonbinary.

C. To ask that same question in a different way, in case I get a more thorough response by asking it this way, are there any measurable or observable differences between your life and a lesbian life? Let’s say you are FtM and you live with your girlfriend in an apartment with your cat, and you like weight-lifting in your spare time and you enjoy having strap-on sex. What is the difference between what you’re doing and what every other lesbian couple is doing? Is the difference just “I identify as a man,” or is there anything else?

Well, uh, for one thing, Miranda Selmys aside, lesbians are very rarely married to men.

But looking back at my relationship with my ex-girlfriends… well, they wouldn’t have been much different if I were a girl. Of course, I actually don’t think any of my relationships with girls would have been much different if they were cis men either. We would… have fewer threesomes? In my experience, both sex and gender don’t actually have a huge impact on the people I’m dating. I mean I would say “we’d have to use barriers when we had PIV!” but like all my girlfriends were asexual or tokophobic or living in fucking Narnia so I’m pretty sure our sex lives would have been the same even if they’d been cis dudes.

My partners would probably have spent less time worrying that they were Fake Bisexuals? Eh, probably not. I have literally had someone explain to me that he’s a Fake Bisexual after having a threesome with a woman and a man, so the Fake Bisexuality worry seems completely immune to ‘logic’ and ‘evidence’.

D. In regards to your life outside of home, how would your work life and family life and hobbies be different if you were a lesbian instead of an FtM?

I am interpreting this question as saying “what if you, Ozy, were a non-gender-dysphoric lesbian and everything else was the same?”

My dad would no longer send me emails about how I was mutilating my body, but he probably wouldn’t have come to my wedding either and would have referred to my partner awkwardly as “your… friend” for the rest of time. My mom, instead of awkwardly attempting to understand my transness, would be awkwardly attempting to understand my lesbianism. So that’s a wash.

Work life: my boss would call me “she” instead of “they” and otherwise I can’t imagine how anything would change. My job is not one in which gender is involved very much.

Hobbies: I currently do not attend social events labeled For Women Only, even if the organizers assure me that it is actually For All People Who Aren’t Cis Men Only. So I would probably be more willing to go to things labelled For Women Only. I would also spend significantly less of my time talking to people who are considering transitioning, and my blog would be relatively more composed of mental illness, sex positivity, and effective altruism posts instead of transness posts. Maybe some of the super-cute lesbians I know who won’t date me because I’m not a girl will date me, which would be excellent.

E. If you felt uncomfortable identifying as a lesbian or being seen as a lesbian, why? Have you ever tried to work on internalized homophobia? Why or why not?

Because I am not a woman who is solely attracted to women? I am, like, missing both of the basic qualifications for lesbianism here. I have to say, if I met the qualifications, I would be super-happy to be a lesbian, on account of I really like Sappho and also lesbians have a bitchin’ flag:

Purple flag with a black triangle. In the middle of the black triangle is an axe.

None of my flags have a weapon on it! Totally unfair!

I have tried to work on internalized homophobia, because I am bisexual and suffer from internalized homophobia.

F. Have you ever spoken to other lesbians to find out whether they felt the same way you do about some of these issues? Why or why not? If so, what have you found out?

Most butch lesbians of my acquaintance are butch because they like being butch, not because they terminally value being gender-non-conforming. I agree that this is a much more sensible way of going about things. Some of them seem to terminally value being butch women in a similar way to how I terminally value being nonbinary, but few of them seem to feel that their lives would be improved by transitioning so that they can wear colors again. (Most of them don’t seem to show much desire to wear colors.) Some of them are really grumpy about being classified as butch lesbians just because they have short hair and a masculine build.

I am not sure that lesbians of any sort disagree with my assessment of what would happen if I were a lesbian or about whether my relationships would be different if I were a girl. Okay, probably the latter, some of those girls are really into The Innate Purity of Lesbianism, but I feel like that’s the sort of thing that’ll get sorted out once you actually date a girl and realize girls are just as likely to be dickbags as men are.

Lesbians agree with me that Sappho is great and the labrys flag is bitchin’.

Book Post for September

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Stumbling on Happiness: Daniel Gilbert’s writing style is super-fun; I recommend reading Stumbling on Happiness if you like Slate Star Codex’s characteristic snark, because there’s a lot of it here.

Neurotypical people are very strange. I spent a large portion of this book going “wait, when most people experience something really really bad, they come up with reasons why it wasn’t so bad after all? They don’t think of a bunch of reasons about why it was actually worse than they thought and means they are doomed to eternal misery? Are you sure?” This just sounds incredibly fake. #DepressiveRealism

I am not sure how accurate this book is. I noticed several citations of things (priming!) that turned out to fail to replicate, but I don’t actually know off the top of my head everything that failed to replicate. Someone should write me a program that automatically highlights citations of papers that failed to replicate so I don’t believe them.

Deep Work: I have rarely read a book that was as useful for solving my particular problems that didn’t have “for borderline personality disorder” on the cover. Even then, half the stuff in the borderline personality disorder books are for people who have violent rages or substance abuse issues, which is not a problem Deep Work particularly has. So this is likely to be a fairly useless review for people who aren’t Ozy.

Deep Work is about cultivating deep work: distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to its limit. As a heuristic for separating deep work from shallow work, Deep Work suggests thinking about how long it would take to train a bright undergraduate to do the task. For instance, writing a good book is deep work because it takes years of expertise to become a good author, while scheduling a coffee date or creating a PowerPoint with the latest sales figures is shallow work. While not everyone needs to do deep work– entry-level positions are full of shallow work, and high-level executives hire other people to do deep work and are selected for their ability to make good snap decisions– Deep Work argues that our current economy has a high demand for deep work and a low supply. The current economy favors people who are superstars in their field and those who are really good at using computers, both deep-work-heavy skills; however, because of the rise of the Internet, we’re more distracted and prone to hyper-connectivity at the expense of deep thought and focus.

Deep Work emphasizes a sense of craftsmanship. Through cultivating a sense of craftmanship, you get into flow state, which is linked to overall happiness and pleasure. And through creating work that you can feel proud of– instead of frittering your life away going to meetings and answering emails– you can find a sense of meaning in your work, which allows you to be more satisfied.

Newport’s single biggest piece of advice, which he returns to hit on again and again, is that excessive use of the Internet kills deep work. If you don’t ever let yourself get bored, you’re not going to let your mind wander and have interesting new ideas for what you’re working on. (I personally have all my best ideas in the shower, probably because that’s the only place I can’t bring my laptop.) And if you’re constantly distracted and multitasking, you’re not developing the powers of focused concentration which are necessary for work. Work-related Internet use, like email, is actually even more evil than recreational Internet use, because it gives you the feeling you’re doing something productive. Newport’s advice is as follows: Don’t schedule time away from the Internet; schedule time where you are allowed to use the Internet. (I actually disagree with him about the evils of All Internet Browsing; fact-checking a blog post or researching Kuznets curves on Google Scholar are obviously different from Twitter, and I’ve found it’s nigh-impossible to do deep work without an Internet connection.) Quit social media for thirty days and only add back in services that caused a concrete improvement in your life. Pick up a hobby or form of entertainment other than reading Buzzfeed articles about the 33 Dogs That Look Most Like Presidents.

Other advice: Create a ritual to begin your deep work and transition your mind into a flow state; this might include stretching, setting up your workspace, or making a cup of tea. Write down what you’re doing for every half-hour of the day, and when you notice you’ve gotten off track revise the schedule. Alternate time spent alone and concentrating with time spent in serendipitous encounters (he gives the example of Bell Labs, in which people in a bunch of different disciplines encountered each other in the hallways and at lunch and talked about their work), which can prompt creative insight. Keep track of your daily hours spent in deep work; aim for about four. At the end of the workday (he recommends five-thirty), check your email a final time, prepare your to-do list for tomorrow, and then shut it down and don’t think about work until tomorrow morning; this gives you the idleness to recharge your energy and have insights, and since at the end of the day you’re tired enough to only do shallow work, the work you were doing probably isn’t that important anyway.

The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource For Your Child’s First Four Years: Amazon.com has discovered my weakness and is now solely recommending me parenting books with ‘science’ in the title.

This book makes an argument which I think is very reasonable about the alcohol/pregnancy connection: it seems plausible that alcohol has a dose-dependent effect on fetuses, so that light drinking has similarly light effects, which are outweighed by women who drink lightly in pregnancy typically being more educated and wealthier. (Of course, since the effect is quite small, there is no reason to freak out about drinks you had before you knew you were pregnant, nor even much reason to cancel that trip to Napa Valley you were looking forward to, as long as you only sip the wine and alternate it with lots of food.)

Studies about the safety of homebirth in other countries don’t necessarily generalize to the US because other countries have a lot more medical licensing. In the US, a person calling themself a midwife is not guaranteed to have any medical training whatsoever.

About 5% of women can’t breastfeed, and 10% can’t produce sufficient milk to feed their babies. If you are in this group, it is not because you are a bad mother, and there is nothing wrong with feeding your children formula, which is perfectly safe; the benefits of breastfeeding are fairly small and the costs of babies not being sufficiently fed are very high.

Effective ways to soothe a baby: white noise; skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding; giving the baby something to suck; swaddling the baby; rocking the baby.

Shaken baby syndrome is most often caused by parents who aren’t bad or abusive but who are overwhelmed and sleep deprived because their baby won’t stop crying and who do what humans naturally do with something that won’t work– they shake it. It can help to know that colic is normal and common and will pass, and to notice when you’re getting overwhelmed and take a break before you do something you’ll regret.

Children do not understand that guns are not toys. Studies repeatedly suggest that children– even children that receive gun safety instruction– will pick up and play with handguns. If you have guns, store them locked and unloaded, with the ammunition in a separate place, until your child is a teenager.

Exposure to print and books is tightly correlated with reading ability as an older child and teenager (a result that is, of course, completely unconfounded); eating books is therefore an important pre-literacy skill that parents should encourage.

Science of Mom: Unlike The Informed Parent, which takes a somewhat encyclopedic approach, Science of Mom explores a few issues in more depth. I particularly appreciate the first chapter, which is a good and accurate explanation of which pieces of parenting advice are worth listening to (whenever Cochrane says something other than ‘more research is needed’) and which pieces are not (anything that primarily focuses on rats, which is mostly useful in the event that you happen to be parenting a rat).

Another thing I really liked about Science of Mom is its focus on tradeoffs. The decision that’s right for some people isn’t right for others. The breastfeeding chapter can be basically summed up as “breastfeeding has health benefits, but many people can’t breastfeed and that’s totally fine and they should not feel guilty about it, and the benefits of breastfeeding are not large enough to be worth making you feel miserable.” And the bedsharing chapter explains how conflicted the research is on bedsharing and SIDS/suffocation, then encourages the reader to make their own decision based on their own values and assessment of the evidence.

Anti-anti-vaxxing is too mainstream, so fortunately Science of Mom has enlightened me about the possibilities of getting pissed off at parents who don’t get the Vitamin K shot. It is not dangerous! It is literally a vitamin that all babies are deficient in! Do you want your baby to have brain bleeding? I don’t think so! Those are two words that do not belong together! (And, yeah, babies are deficient in Vitamin K. Humans are very poorly designed.)

Delayed cord clamping is surprisingly important: because breastmilk is not very rich in iron, babies often experience iron deficiency, and a few minutes of iron-rich blood from the placenta can prevent iron deficiency and anemia. (For the biodeterminists in the crowd: adequate iron as a baby reduces the risk of lead poisoning.) Iron is also important in feeding your child solids; omnivores should consider starting their child on meat, while vegetarians/vegans should begin with iron- and zinc-fortified infant cereal.

The Birth Partner: The Birth Partner is primarily aimed at birth partners (i.e. non-medical people who support the pregnant person during labor). However, it is still useful for the pregnant person to read, as the book clearly explains the process of labor and provides guidance for figuring out what you want out of labor.

The Birth Partner is a wonderfully nonjudgmental book about giving birth. It lays out the evidence for and against medical interventions, as well as the available alternatives, then encourages the mother and birth partner to consider their values about birth and come to the decision that is right for them. It’s a rare book that is equally nonjudgmental about homebirth and elective C-sections (while acknowledging the dangers of both). Another thing I liked is that it didn’t assume that birth partners are the pregnant person’s life partner or the biological father of the baby; when it had advice for one of those groups it always says “if you are the X.”

I particularly appreciated the clear explanation of various non-painkiller pain relief techniques; a lot of books tend to just have “breathing” and “meditating” as your only options, while The Birth Partner gives a lot of different strategies for reducing your pain. (I particularly appreciated the woman who chanted “epidural epidural epidural” and, when asked if she wanted one, said “if I get to chant it I don’t need it!”)

Apparently it is recommended that if you’re doing natural childbirth you use a safeword. They called it a “code word” but it’s definitely a safeword. I am so amused. My safewords are, as always, “red”, “safeword” and “I forgot the safeword.”

Gender Dysphoria Rating: 0/10. This book is sufficiently inclusive that its use of “the mother” as the term for the pregnant person actually stuck out to me, instead of being something I glance over as normal boring societal cissexism. But it’s not exactly fair to take points away from a book because it’s great on every issue except this one.

The Danish Way of Parenting: This is a weird book for me to read because my friend Ilzolende fucking hated living in Denmark, and so whenever it is like “the Danish way of parenting is so great!” I am like “if Denmark is so great how come ILZO didn’t like it???” which I admit is not the best objection.

I have been spoiled by Science of Mom and The Informed Parent and am now sulky about parenting books that don’t include proper citations. This book’s evidence was mostly “Danish people are very happy, and therefore they must be happy because of the parenting techniques they use, so if you use the parenting techniques then your children will be happy! What’s a confounding variable?” Also they don’t cite any studies that show that people in Denmark actually parent the way they are claimed to parent in this book. I mean, I don’t know anything about how Danish people parent, they very well might, but how do I know that this person wasn’t just in Danish Berkeley?

In Denmark are there books that advise everyone how to parent like an American, or is Raise Your Children As If You Are In A Foreign Country just an American book genre?

I mean, the parenting advice is probably fine. I am totally in support of being authentic with your children and playing with them and family togetherness and positive discipline and the rest. But I do not think this book has good evidence for it.

Age of Em: I had been vaguely under the impression that Emworld was bad because subsistence living, but since making ems have a really nice world is significantly cheaper than running an em in the first place, we’d actually expect ems to have very enjoyable leisure and lots of music and stuff. And anyway most ems would probably be emulations of workaholics who actually want to work twelve hours a day. So it’s a very noncentral example of a subsistence world, and in general sounds like a very nice place that I hope my descendants would manage to experience if they have more conscientiousness than I do.

The Essential Guide to Freelance Writing: Nope, the concept of pitching people still gives me a panic attack. In retrospect, it is probably not this book’s fault that it failed to fix this.

The Gated City: This book informs me that a large number of economic and environmental problems could be solved by the policies which lead me, Ozy, to have lower rent. Since I don’t like having to pay a lot of money in rent, I have obvious reasons to support this thesis. So it seemed pretty convincing to me, but take with many relevant grains of salt. (Unless you happen to live in the SF Bay Area, in which case you should agree with this book 100% and also contact your local Insert County Here Forward for a voter guide.)

[cw: sex trafficking, slavery]

The Slave Next Door: I am impressed by the existence of a book about modern slavery that spends more time talking about agriculture and domestics than it does sex work, and sad that I feel impressed.

One thing I hadn’t realized before I read this book was how fuzzy the definition of ‘slave’ is for people in the modern US. There’s a remarkably thin line between “victim of sex trafficking” and “sex worker in an abusive relationship who gives her boyfriend some of the money she earns working.” There’s a remarkably thin line between “victim of labor trafficking” and “domestic who is being mistreated by her employer but can’t leave because her visa is linked to her employer.”

The impression that I’m getting from The Slave Next Door is that immigration reform would do a lot to reduce slavery in the US. A lot of slaves are either undocumented or have their documents stolen by their employers. Decriminalizing sex work also seems to me to be important for reducing sex trafficking; sex trafficking occasionally involves U.S. citizens who speak the language, while labor trafficking is almost solely immigrants.

Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: The title of this book is ‘Beyond Victims and Villains’, but there is clearly a villain in it! The villain is the child welfare system! False advertising!

Anyway, this is a really amazing book about minors doing sex work. Most of the time, the author argues, it’s not that minors are forced into sex work by pimps: it’s instead that– due to poverty, abuse, neglect, or homelessness– for many minors, sex work is the best way to support themselves. To many minors, street sex work seems like a better option than an often broken child welfare system. If we want to end underage sex work, the solution isn’t criminal: it’s changing the push factors that drive minors into sex work. This book does a really good job of emphasizing the agency of underage sex workers (something that is far too often ignored) while also recognizing how limited their choices are.

Disposable People: Before I read this book, I hadn’t realized how much innumeracy affects someone’s life– even more so than illiteracy. Many of the slaves in this book were kept in debt bondage (that is, they were laboring to pay off a debt to their owners). Their owners often told lies about how much the slaves owed, but the slaves, being innumerate, had no ability to check their owners’ numbers. They just thought “well, I did ask for a loan for my son’s wedding, and there was that one time my daughter got sick, and we had to pay for food that one time the crops failed… I know we’ve harvested a lot of crops for the owner, but I guess it makes sense that we’re still in debt,” because they have no way of comparing the very large number that medicine costs with the very large number that they earned from harvesting crops. If all the slaves knew they were being lied to, the institution would end: you can kidnap and beat up one person who tries to escape, but you can’t kidnap and beat up five hundred people. And also a lot of people stay because they feel honor-bound to pay off their debt, which they wouldn’t do if they knew they already had. Being able to do basic math is really important!

I hadn’t realized quite how much sex work happens in Thailand. The book points out that sex workers aimed at white people, being high-end, are usually not sex slaves; instead, sex slaves usually service middle- and working-class Thai men. While Disposable People does bash the police a little bit (they collect bribes and have no interest in actually preventing sex slavery), I think the book could have used a little more bashing of the sex-slave rescue industry, which is also pretty awful.

Mauritania really sucks as a country. I had known about the force-feeding of girls, but I hadn’t known that it is one of the few countries which still has endemic old-style hereditary slavery (as opposed to debt bondage, etc.). Of course, the Mauritanian government likes it that way, having declared all Mauritanian slaves to be ‘former slaves’ and then magically claimed to have fixed its slavery problem, because now all the people who are working for no pay but rice and a bed are doing it of their own free will! (It gets away with this because the government is totalitarian and censorship-happy.) Mauritania is also very poor, and many people go hungry, which helps preserve the slavery institution– if slaves ran away, they would starve.

Thoughts On Cults

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[content warning: descriptions of spiritual abuse]

I prefer the phrase “spiritual abuse” to the word “cult” for several reasons.

First, spiritual abuse is less discrete. Either a religion is a cult or it is not; however, the same religion may be spiritually abusive to some people in some contexts while not spiritually abusive to other people in different contexts. For instance, some Alcoholics Anonymous groups isolate their members, tell them not to take psychiatric medication, and pressure them into sex; however, a lot of people find AA an invaluable resource in getting sober. The Catholic hierarchy covered up pedophilia, and a lot of people are faithful Catholics whose lives have been tremendously improved by the church.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s okay to go “well, we’re not literally one hundred percent always spiritually abusive, so there’s no problem here!” Part of one’s religious or spiritual organization being spiritually abusive ought to be an enormous wake-up call to examine what led to the spiritual abuse and how it can be prevented in the future. But I also think that you can say “wow, spiritually abusive AA groups are horrifying, I wonder how we can prevent thirteenth-stepping in our groups” while also saying “my AA group is great”. You can’t say “wow, AA is a horrifying cult” and also say “my AA group is not a horrifying cult.” It does not work that way.

Second, “cult” tends to be applied disproportionately to new religious movements.

Now, there is a good reason to be suspicious of new religious movements. The Catholic Church has been around for a long time and although it has caused quite a bit of harm it is also a known quantity. We know the circumstances in which the Catholic Church directly causes mass murder and have secularism laws in place to prevent this. A new religious movement might unexpectedly lead to mass murder in a way we don’t have laws to prevent.

On the other hand, it is not exactly like the Catholic Church has never been spiritually abusive, between the coverup of the sexual abuse of children, the Magdalene Laundries, churches in which women are pressured into having far more children than they can handle to prove they don’t have a contraceptive mentality, traditional Catholics who teach that it is a sin to refuse sex, and relationships in which Catholic teaching on Hell and sin is used as a tool of abuse. Even if mainstream religions are less likely to be abusive than new religious movements, spiritual abuse in the former affects more people than the latter– after all, they’re bigger! I think “cult” gives a mistaken idea that old religions that aren’t New Agey are safe from spiritual abuse, when in reality every religion has been touched by spiritual abuse.

(I suspect this is historical– “cult” originated from the Christian countercult movement which conflated spiritual abuse and heresy, while “spiritual abuse” originated from survivors of fundamentalist Protestant spiritual abuse. Naturally, the latter is more willing to admit that mainstream religions can be spiritually abusive.)

Third, “cult” is a word which a lot of times gets used against harmless weirdos.

I actually find the broad use of the term ‘cult’ wildly offensive. Like, you do realize that people get PTSD from spiritual abuse, right? “Cult” is not a cool shiny term to use about every group you don’t like. Here are some things that are not, in and of themselves, spiritually abusive:

  • Normal groupthink and ingroupy behavior.
  • Donating money that you can afford to spend to charities other people in the group approve of.
  • Weird but consensual sexual behavior.
  • Fervently holding beliefs that outsiders think are weird.
  • Having rituals.
  • Having group houses.

Here is a list of things that are actually spiritually abusive:

  • Isolating people from friends and family who aren’t members of the group.
  • Requiring people to make financially unsustainable donations to be part of the group that go solely to finance the group leader’s lavish lifestyle.
  • Coercing people into sexual behavior they don’t consent to.
  • Not letting people disagree with the orthodoxy.
  • Encouraging people to think of themselves as evil, wrong, or shameful.
  • Physical assault.

The difference between these two lists is whether it causes harm. A person who thinks they were abducted by aliens who gave them a message of peace and love to share with the Earth: weird but harmless to themselves and others. A person who spends hours screaming insults at people who like the peace and love message but are skeptical of the aliens thing: very damaging to other people! Like, honestly, if you can’t see the difference between “lots of people in this group live in housing situations which are kind of like cult compounds if you squint” and “people who disobey in this group are physically assaulted,” I am kind of worried about you.

A lot of people who sling around the word ‘cult’ have a missing mood. You’d think they’d feel sad that people have been deceived into an ideology that hurts them; after all, the primary people that any spiritually abusive situation hurts are, you know, the people being spiritually abused. Instead, a lot of people’s response is something like this: “Ha ha! I think you’re a victim of psychological and possibly physical abuse! I have so much contempt for you! I’m going to laugh at you for being terrible now!” I am not sure whether these people enjoy laughing at and blaming victims of abuse, or they know perfectly well that the people they’re talking to aren’t spiritual abuse victims but they enjoy making light of the experiences of actual victims in order to insult people they don’t like. Neither one speaks very well of their moral character.

Advice on Becoming Conventionally Attractive

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Caveats

None of my advice should be taken as saying that people absolutely must become conventionally attractive: this would be quite hypocritical of me, as a medically transitioning transgender person, for whom comfort in my body trades off against conventional attractiveness. You have no obligation to be any more conventionally attractive than you please, and being conventionally attractive does not make you a better person. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked female (or human).

In particular, I would very much advise against adopting any habits you would not be willing to have in the long term. You want to date someone who wants to date you. Prioritize things that you’ve always meant to do (maybe this can be the motivation you were looking for to work out), then things that don’t make much difference one way or the other (getting your teeth whitened). If you’re like “but I don’t WANT to do Thing”, don’t do Thing.

I am deliberately phrasing this as ‘conventionally attractive’, because there are plenty of people who get laid like tile and go against my advice. Niche marketing works! But the question of how to maximize one’s attractiveness to the average person is still interesting.

The single two best things you can do to get laid are (1) socialize with new people and (2) actually ask those people out. If you are not doing those two things, I would strongly advise doing those things BEFORE you take my advice.

I suck at online dating and can’t give advice about it.

My advice is based only on my own observations. Take with all relevant grains of salt.

Physical Appearance

Everyone always recommends losing weight, and it’s true that people in the 18.5-25 BMI range tend to be more attractive than those who are heavier (or lighter). However, diets usually fail in the long term, which makes me leery of giving this as advice. I think for most people the lowest-hanging fruit is something else.

Lift weights. Pretty much everyone, male and female and other, would become more conventionally attractive if they lifted weights. Don’t worry about getting “too bulky” or “too muscular”: in order to get sufficiently muscular that it’s a detriment, you’d have to have lifting weights as your primary hobby. (Which is why I’m not giving the opposite advice– bodybuilders generally fall under the “don’t change important aspects of yourself to get laid” exception.) For women, squats are an excellent way to get a round ass. Starting Strength is a good guide to lifting weights. Muscles require lots of protein to maintain; try eating half a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight.

If you have skin issues, go to a dermatologist. If your teeth are crooked or stained, go to a dentist. Hair makes a lot of difference in your facial appearance. In my experience, the best way for a person who doesn’t know anything about hair to get a good haircut is going to an expensive salon, saying one or two adjectives you’re going for (“punky” and “androgynous” were my go-tos), and then agreeing with whatever the hairdresser says.

It is important to get clothes that fit properly. Yes, even if you’re fat. I see so many people in ill-fitting baggy clothing that doesn’t flatter them at all, when they would be perfectly attractive if they had clothing that fits right. Here’s a guide to fit for men; I don’t know of a similar guide for women. If you have the money and want to, buying your clothes off the rack and getting them tailored can improve how much the clothes fit.

I understand that there is something mysterious about colors going with your complexion, but when I tried to learn about it I got really confused about what seasons have to do with anything.

Men, in general, tend to care more about youth in their sexual partners than women do, so people who want to have sex with men might want to look into reducing signs of aging. Applying sunscreen daily is the single best thing you can do to prevent wrinkles.

Personality

Some people do well with canned lines of the pickup-artist sort, but I tend to prefer actually developing the attractive traits that the canned lines are simulating. If you actually have the trait, your body language, tone of voice, and word choice will all line up, but if you don’t you might wind up having confident words and insecure body language and come off as weird or creepy. And having the trait, instead of using lines, allows you to react well in unfamiliar situations. That said, it’s a crutch that’s useful for some people.

I do not support lying, but it is not lying to selectively emphasize things when you’re flirting. If sometimes you are cheerful and happy and sometimes you are whiny as hell, it’s okay to choose to be cheerful while you are flirting.

Physical appearance is relatively more important if you want to have sex with men, while personality is relatively more important if you want to have sex with women. That said, both are important to both groups, and a lot of people who are willing to admit sentence #1 tend to underestimate the importance of personality to men and physical appearance to women.

People always talk about how confidence is attractive. In my opinion, about half of why confident people get laid has nothing to do with confidence being attractive and is instead about being willing to actually hit on people (the single most important thing you can do for your sexual success!) and bouncing back well from rejection. That said, feeling secure in yourself and being able to laugh off criticism are pretty attractive traits. (I was going to have a sentence here about self-deprecating humor as countersignaling confidence vs. self-deprecating humor as apologizing for your existence, but then I realized how hard it was to distinguish these two things. Seriously, I don’t envy the canned-lines people their job.)

Getting groupies is dating on easy mode. If you have a talent that you can show off easily– whether it’s writing, music, art, or spinning poi– you can impress people with it and then many of them will want to date you. While it’s theoretically possible to get groupies for anything, it requires less talent to get groupies for talents that are sexy (think poetry, not programming) and that are easily demonstrated to an unskilled person.

Kindness is attractive. Note that I did not say that pedestalization and codependency are attractive; they are not. Key things to think of: are you being nice to people whom you don’t want to have sex with as well as those you do? Are you setting reasonable boundaries? Are you being nice because you want other people to be happy, or because you’re terrified that they’ll dislike you if you don’t and being disliked is the Worst Possible Thing? Do you expect people to throw a ticker-tape parade because of how nice you are? Being nice to the waiter used to be a big kindness tipoff, and now everyone knows about it so it’s expected, so I would suggest instead giving a dollar to a homeless guy and then if the person you’re flirting with notices shrugging and saying “eh, he looked sad, it was nothing”. (This may not work if the person you’re flirting with is the sort of person who doesn’t like giving money to homeless people because they might spend it on drugs.)

Many people find it attractive to be listened to as if they are the most interesting person in the world. This is also terribly useful for introverts, because you don’t have to think of new things to say. It is possible to counterfeit (any good book on interviewing for journalism or qualitative research will explain the techniques) but probably the best way to achieve this is to flirt with interesting people.

People like it when they have good feelings, and therefore tend to prefer happy people to sad people, unless you can be the sort of sad person who makes a bunch of flippant jokes about it, in which case they like you again because you’re funny. Be enthusiastic about things you like. Try to look on the bright side of bad situations. Smile.

Speaking of good feelings: being funny is a good thing, and unfortunately extremely difficult to teach, so I don’t think it’s low-hanging fruit for non-funny individuals.

For reasons I do not understand, a dark and tragic past is one of the most attractive traits one can have. Combine with several other attractive traits; a dark and tragic past all by itself just looks pathetic. Don’t be whiny; as best as I can tell, the best ways to deploy one’s dark and tragic past is through mysteriousness, flippancy, or forthright honesty and owning your shit. Don’t bitch about everyone who has Done You Wrong, because that is generally considered a red flag. If you heavily rely on dark and troubled pasts as a flirtation strategy, be aware that this attracts people with a saving-people thing who are terrible at setting boundaries, and be prepared to have a long conversation about Putting On Your Own Oxygen Mask First.

I am informed that some men don’t like sluts, but I have never actually met a man of this sort; the men I know tend to find it a selling point when you openly like and enjoy sex. (Yes, it’s a selling point for commitment too.) I recommend women work on overcoming their internalized slut-shaming and sex-negativity, if they have any.

A lot of having an attractive personality is learning how to flirt, because that’s where you show off your shiny awesome new personality. The key to flirting is practice, practice, practice. Like any skill, flirting gets easier the more you do it. And don’t be afraid of creeping people out: while you shouldn’t go about deliberately creeping people out, if you accidentally happen to make someone feel uncomfortable, it’s not the end of the world. It’s okay to make mistakes while you’re learning.

If you are a nerdy woman who wants to have sex with nerdy men: watch Firefly. Look at Kaylee. Try to be Kaylee. In particular, note that she is cheerful, cute, non-threatening, and happily sexual, and that she infodumps about a topic that nerdy men are interested in (spaceship engines). These traits are very attractive to nerdy men.

If you are a developmentally disabled or personality disordered woman who comes off as childish: watch Enchanted. Try to be Giselle. Notice that she is optimistic, idealistic, compassionate, and happy; when she’s sad, she’s adorably sad; she takes joy in little things and has faith in people. I have found this to be an excellent strategy for making your childishness work for you.

Everyone Chill Out About Other People’s Parenting

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Parenting is scrupulosity hell, and I don’t even have a kid yet.

Like, effective altruism gets a bad rap, but at least most effective altruists are aware that excessive guilt is an issue and try to combat it. The parenting advice world, however, is full of articles with titles like If You Send Your Kid To Private School You Are A Bad Person, Facebook friends-of-friends who say that not homeschooling your child is child abuse, comment sections who think that agoraphobics shouldn’t have children, and parenting books that say that if you tell your baby not to cry you better put aside a lot of money for their therapy bills.

I don’t mean to say that there’s no such thing as bad parenting. It’s a bad idea to call your kid a stupid lazy failure who will go nowhere in life. You should probably take your children to the doctor on a regular basis. It is not a good idea to give your child lead lightly sprinkled with arsenic and botulism for dinner. Notably, sending your child to private school, not homeschooling your child, parenting with a mental illness, and saying “don’t cry” are not actually in any of those categories.

First of all, there’s not actually a whole lot of evidence that parenting does much of anything. Of course, don’t abuse or neglect your kids and don’t decide that the Vitamin K shot is a bad idea because technology is bad epidemiology is scary and Thomas Edison was a witch. And you have a lot of control over how happy your kids are in childhood and, relatedly, how much they hate your guts as adults– and substantial control over how happy a human being is for literally two decades is nothing to sneeze at. But for a lot of the things the Mommy Wars are over– formula vs. breastfeeding, homeschool vs. private school vs. public school, positive discipline vs. timeouts vs. nonabusive spanking– the best evidence shows little to no effect on long-term outcomes. (For more, check out The Nurture Assumption and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.)

On a related note, for a lot of parenting, the evidence is very mixed. Bob doesn’t let his children under two watch television, following the advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Alice, on the other hand, notes that a lot of the research the AAP relies on is correlational, and better designed studies suggest that television is, if anything, mildly positive. It can make sense for Bob to explain to Alice why he trusts experts more than his own assessment of the literature, or for Alice to explain the studies she’s relying on. Yelling at each other about how they are terrible parents doesn’t promote sharing information; it just makes people feel like shit.

Even if the evidence is clear, parents have different needs and constraints. Charlie’s kid is being severely bullied in public school, and sending him to private school is the only way Charlie can think of to keep them from being repeatedly assaulted. Dana is a single mom who works two jobs, and frankly she barely has time to sleep, much less homeschool– she knows that if she homeschooled her children they’d wind up being educationally neglected. Eve has wanted children for her entire life, but she’s struggled with agoraphobia for years: right now, thanks partially to good coping mechanisms and partially to working from home and Instacart, she’s managed to minimize its interference with her daily activities, but she knows that eliminating her agoraphobia will take years and may never happen. She has planned to live with roommates and to have her husband drive the children to activities.

I don’t think that Charlie is a bad person, Dana is a child abuser, or Eve shouldn’t have children. They are doing the best they can in their circumstances. Even someone who’s a hardcore homeschooler can admit that public school is better than educational neglect or homelessness, even someone who’s very much in favor of diversity in schooling can admit that a child being assaulted is too high a price to pay, and even someone who’s leery about mentally ill people having children in general can recognize that a manageable, chronic condition does not necessarily mean one shouldn’t have kids. Since they agree with those statements, they need to stop using the harsh rhetoric that makes it look like they don’t.

The most important thing any child needs is a happy and healthy parent. If you’re running yourself ragged trying to be Supermom, all that’s going to happen is that you’re going to stress yourself out, snap at your kids, make your kids feel guilty because of all the sacrifices you’re making for them, and make parenting decisions you wouldn’t have made in the right state of mind. If you have to bedshare (increased risk of SIDS!) or let the baby cry it out (not respectful of your baby’s needs!) in order to get a good night’s sleep, do it; I’m pretty sure either way the downsides are outweighed just by the risk of you falling asleep at the wheel of a car, not to mention all the other benefits of actually getting to sleep. If breastfeeding is ruining your relationship with your baby, don’t breastfeed. If driving kids to fourteen activities leaves you with no time for yourself, ask them which activities they really want. Even if the only thing you care about is your children, in the long run the right decision is to take care of yourself.

No one is a perfect parent. Even parents who are committed to respect and kindness get pissed and scream at their kids. Even parents who care a lot about their children’s autonomy have days where they don’t care about respecting your ability to choose the pink shoes or the purple shoes, just wear this one and get in the car we’re fucking late. Even parents who care a lot about their children’s nutrition have weeks where they get McDonalds for every dinner because they’ve been on their feet for fourteen hours and they can’t bear to cook from scratch.There is not a person in the world who manages to go eighteen years without making a mistake. Think of it like a primary relationship: even if you’re committed to good communication, self-awareness, and emotional maturity, there are going to be times when you say things that you don’t really mean, you have stupid fights that could have been avoided if you just explained what you meant, or you skulk around the house saying you are FINE just FINE when you are clearly no such thing. That’s not to say that it’s a good idea to skulk around the house saying you’re FINE, any more than it’s a good idea to scream at your kids. But what it means is that you should apologize, say you were having a rough day, and stop beating yourself up about it. And it means that if you’re being judgmental of someone for screaming at their kids, you should stop, unless you would like to go through the greatest hits of times you did things that went against your values.

But my most important point is that children are different from each other. Again, think of it like a primary relationship. Obviously, there are some baselines that apply to everyone: it’s a bad idea to have contempt for your partner, you ought to respect your partner’s needs and boundaries, you should own up when you’ve done something wrong, and so on. But a lot of advice simply doesn’t generalize to everyone. “Watching porn is a great way to strengthen your relationship!” works for sex-positive people but not for the serious Catholics. Some people find playfully calling each other assholes breaks the tension, while other people would find that tremendously disrespectful. Some people take time for their weekly date night, while other people find that unnecessary and stuffy. Some people sit down for State of the Relationship talks, while other people just bring up things as they come up. People need different things in their relationships, and so naturally relationships are going to work differently from each other.

The difference between parenting and primary relationships is that children spend quite a few years without a good model of their long-term needs (“I need ice cream for dinner and all the toys in the store!”) and even after they develop such a model are powerless to leave the relationship if it doesn’t suit their needs. It’s very possible for a parent– even a good, loving parent– to make mistakes about what their child needs. So where you might shrug and go “well, I guess it works for them” at a friend’s incomprehensible primary relationship, a friend’s incomprehensible parenting style might prompt you to go “holy shit! That’s horrible for your child!”– even if it’s exactly what their child needs. And of course this bitterness is most natural on the part of children whose parents had a parenting style or practices that just didn’t work for them.

To pick an example close to my heart: Borderline personality disorder is caused by a combination of a genetic predisposition to BPD and an invalidating environment in childhood. Some invalidating environments are genuinely awful, such as being a victim of child sexual abuse or being abused. But some invalidating environments are just what’s called, evocatively, “a tulip in a rose garden”. Borderlines get born in families that are very emotionally controlled, that encourage stoicism, and that teach them to keep a stiff upper lip. If your child has a genetic predisposition to BPD, that makes them feel like their emotions are stupid and that they’re worthless, fails to teach them any useful coping mechanisms for extreme emotions, and encourages them to make their emotions bigger so that people will pay attention to their pain– all of which lead ultimately to having a personality disorder.

The problem here is that encouraging stoicism and emotional control are great ways of parenting some children. Saying “look, it’s not that big a deal” can help teach a child to reframe the situation and look at the bigger picture. Modeling control of your emotions in the face of negative life events helps many children learn to face their problems effectively. Most of the parents who teach their children emotional control do that because it’s what worked for them as kids.

There’s no such thing as a perfect parenting style for every child. There’s not even any such thing as a parenting style that is 100% guaranteed not to give your child a personality disorder. Even if you do the best you can, you might hurt your kid. That’s terrifying. And I understand why people back away from this terrifying reality by claiming that they know the One True Right Way To Parent and if anybody else disagrees it’s because they’re horrible people and child abusers. But it still has the possibility to hurt other parents and your own children.

Before you criticize parenting decisions, consider why you believe what you believe. Do you believe it because of:

  • High-quality academic evidence, like twin studies or Cochrane reviews
  • Low-quality academic evidence, like correlational research
  • Ethical principles (e.g. “don’t hit people unless you have a really good reason”)
  • Anecdotes about what worked for you (either as a kid or a parent) or kids or parents you know
  • Having read a parenting book that includes wildly enthusiastic testimonials from people without surnames

If you believe something because of relatively less valuable evidence, consider toning down how angry you are about people not following it.

Consider the context as well. If someone is treating your child in a way you consider disrespectful, it’s totally justified to complain to a friend or in a Facebook post. If a stranger is making a parenting decision you consider unwise, or you have read an article about a parenting technique you think is evil, maybe consider toning it down and recognizing that things that work for you don’t necessarily work for others. And when you issue general advice, always be aware of the many circumstances that keep people from following any piece of ethical advice; make it clear that you believe that people should do the best they can, and there is no shame in not doing something you’re not able to do.

Against John C Wright’s On The Sexual Nature of Man, Part the Last

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Last part of a series in which I argue with John C Wright’s On The Sexual Nature of Man. Part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here.

5.5 The Investment of the Interest In Virginity 

John C Wright argues that your partner has a right to you being a virgin.

To be clear, before I begin, one has a perfect right to any dealbreakers one chooses. If you, personally, don’t want to marry anyone who isn’t a virgin, good luck and Godspeed. And there are lots of situations in which I think it’s wise to only marry a fellow virgin. If you’re in a sexual relationship with someone, it’s important that that person share your sexual values; if your values say that sex is only to be shared with your life partner, or that God frowns on non-marital sex, then finding someone who shares those values will usually mean finding a virgin. (But not always! It is possible, after all, that someone made a mistake.) Nothing I write here should be taken to imply that people who have thought about it carefully and decided that non-virginity is a dealbreaker should not have this dealbreaker.

5.5.1. Economic and Prudential Considerations 

 If you fornicate with another before marriage then you bring to your marriage partner a diminished capacity for love. Merely on economic terms, your marriage partner now knows you have shared the most intimate moments known to you with another, and so the intimacy you have remaining has less value.

It is possible that I am expressing my diminished capacity for love here, but what? . My husband has held me when I cried, learned secrets I didn’t tell anyone else, brought me my favorite dish from our favorite Chinese restaurant, supported me through the ravages of an excitingly diverse collection of mental illnesses, and stood with me in front of our friends and promised to be together for the rest of time, and you’re telling me the most intimate thing we’ve done together is an exchange of genital friction and bodily fluids? I have to say, if I were listing off the most intimate moments in my marriage, sex would not be number one. It probably wouldn’t even make the top ten. (Admittedly, I’m cheating a bit, because most people don’t get two wedding ceremonies, but even so!)

Frankly, this strikes me as a very juvenile attitude towards sex, one more reminiscent of a teenager excited that she let me touch her boob!!! than an adult seriously contemplating a lifelong commitment. Sex is just one part of an overall relationship. Often an important part, and one that allows people to express their feelings for each other– the same way that they express their feelings through compliments, holding hands, spending time with each other, being on their partner’s side about how awful his fucking boss is, making mixtapes, finally cleaning out the garage, or killing the terrifying bugs.

(Tangent: I am definitely the bugkiller in all my relationships, partially because I have dated people with a strong aversion to touching bugs, and partially because I enjoy slaughtering them and saying “cower before me! behold my might! I REVEL IN THE LAMENTATIONS OF YOUR INNUMERABLE MANY-LEGGED CHILDREN!” …aaaaaand I’m pretty sure Brian Tomasik’s going to fire me now.)

while past behavior does not predict the future, she had a reason to suspect you have less ability to withstand the temptations of adultery, should those arise in the future, than perhaps other potential suitors for her hand…

He, your theoretical rival, can claim his physical affections are and always will be an outpouring of his noblest affections. He has never made love except when he has been in love, and he has been in love only with one bride.

Hey, wait. How do we know that he’s better at resisting adultery if he’s only been in love with one person? You have no idea how he’d respond if after long nights at work his mind turns slowly from friendship to love, or whatever, because he’s never been in love with anyone but you before! What you really want is someone who has been in love with other people but not had sex with them, or perhaps someone with a history of long-term relationships in which they did not cheat.

You, on the other hand, have two choices.

One: you can say that those other girls really meant nothing to me, baby. I was thinking of you when I was ejaculating into her! Or I would have been had I known you! That was before I met you baby, and my standards were lower back then!

Again, on purely economic terms, all this makes your protestation of true love less valuable (and less persuasive) then someone with no history of taking love to be a casual matter.

Two: you can say that you loved Rosalind (or whoever) with your whole heart and soul, and deep as the sea and as high as your heart could reach, BUT, that you did not love that other girl enough to marry her. This signals to your prospective bride that your capacity for love is limited, and, yes, self-centered, and that your prudence is wanting.

So there are two things here.

First: loving one person does not diminish your love for another person. As we poly people say, “love is infinite, time is not.” A father who has ten children cherishes each of his children as much as if he only had one. A woman with four friends feels as close as if she had only had a solitary friend. A woman whose father died before she was born does not love her mother more than a woman who was raised by two parents. Why is this any different for romantic love? Mr. Wright provides no such argument.

Frankly, if I adopted that sort of attitude, I would lose a lot of self-respect. Love is a good thing. Sometimes love has to be put aside rather than cherished– if the person you love doesn’t want a relationship with you, or if it’s romantic love and you’re in a monogamous relationship with someone else, or if you’re giving up a child for adoption. But that is always sad, and always a sacrifice. And I do not want to be the sort of person who says “I am angry at you because, breaking no promise and telling no lies, you loved other people”, any more than I wish to be the sort of person who is angry about the existence of food I don’t like to eat or sunrises I cannot see. I do not wish to be the sort of person who hates the existence of the good.

Second: you have a third option. You can say, “I have loved deeply and widely and well. I did not seek you out because I had no other option, because yours were the first pretty face and deep voice who stopped by my farmhouse door. I have loved many men, enough to compare them in all their qualities, and of all the men I could have married, the one I have chosen is you. Yours is the character I admire most; yours is the personality that most delights me; yours is the life I want to make myself part of; yours is the smile I want to wake up to every morning. My love for you was not something imposed on me from afar. I choose you.”

Personally, I think the latter is quite romantic.

5.5.2 I perfectly agree with: your partner is wise to expect that you will adhere to your and his values. My one quibble with Mr. Wright is that I don’t think there’s anything imprudent, uncourageous, unjust or intemperate about nonmarital sex. 5.5.3 and 5.5.4 point out the obvious fact that if one wishes for people to remain virgins, then it’s wise to have this expectation before they meet their spouses, and that social norms may help them do this.

6. Matrimony or Fornication

John C Wright argues that either non-marital sex is punished or it is not:

Fornication (including adultery) either is or is not against the law, and either it is punished or not. If it is either not against the law, or is against the law but not punished, then no deterrent exists, and the law is a dead letter…

Under these facts, the proposition that adultery is licit when all three parties agree and give their consent, and is otherwise illicit, cannot be carried into effect. In a society where the Libertine position is the consensus, If Arthur goes to the magistrate carrying a paper in hand, which purports to be the document where Guinevere vowed eternal fidelity, a contract she broke, the magistrate cannot condemn or punish her beyond what terms the contract stipulates. The magistrate cannot, in the long run, enforce the contract, because the contract does not follow the values and opinions of the consensus. A society that approved of adultery would be outraged that a mere legality, a flimsy piece of paper, would block her sacred right to commit adultery: the outcry would ring to the sky. But even if the outcry were ignored, and the penalty stipulated in the contract enforced (if there could be such a thing) such contract laws would only penalize the short-sighted, and the social utility of punishing adultery would be lost.

Under any practical consideration, adultery cannot be against the law in a Libertine society, even if the two individuals would have it so. The law reflects the consensus, not the individual will.

Likewise the opposite: in a commonwealth where adultery is illegal, the magistrate has no choice but to punish it, even if the three people involved agreed in writing not to complain, lest the law be no deterrent to others and hence of none effect.

It is literally the entire job of contract law to deal with contracts that are different from each other. If I went to the magistrate to complain that McDonalds was not paying me my $10/hour wages, the magistrate would not say “well, some people are making forty dollars an hour! How can I tell apart the wage theft of you not making ten dollars an hour from the wage theft of you not making forty dollars an hour? Truly, the only way we can have enforceable wage contracts is for everyone to be paid the same amount of money!”

This is clearly not the case. The law is perfectly capable of distinguishing the injustice of me not being paid the ten dollars an hour that McDonalds agreed to pay me in my employment contract from the injustice of me not being paid the forty dollars an hour that no one anywhere agreed to pay me. Judges are not, in the real world, confused by the fact that contracts are sometimes different from each other.

(“But Ozy!” you say. “All marriages in reality are the same sort of contract, and in practice in order for you to have no-fault divorce everyone else has to have no-fault divorce too!” I agree, that’s ridiculous, people should be able to customize their marriages much more than they currently do. Prenups are a step in this direction but frankly don’t go far enough.)

If fornication (including adultery) either is or is not rigorously and vigorously penalized by social opprobrium. In this, there is not much latitude for diversity of opinions: the society as a whole is either committed to the proposition, or is not committed. The minority has a veto over the majority. If the majority condemns adultery, but a sizable minority does not join in that condemnation, the condemnation has no real force or effect. Anyone suffering ostracism or mockery for his adultery can move to the neighborhood where it is not condemned. The society merely polarizes in this case, it does not form an enforceable consensus…

As the magistrate keeps the laws, so too does the consensus of public opinion keep the customs. The laws cannot bind if custom does not, and the keepers of the public opinion operate under the same restriction as restricts the magistrates: public opinion cannot track each individual contract, or carve out exceptions. The society that allows for adultery when a contract stipulating open marriage allows for it, will be at best lukewarm in its condemnation of extra-contractual adultery. It is simply risible to assume that a society could condemn the loss of honor involved in breaking a contract, but embrace the loss of honor involved in breaking a marriage vow.

Or public opinion has to switch its norm from “no adultery” to “no lying to your partners and breaking promises.” Public opinion already deals with lots of issues where the difference is consent. Public opinion’s support for having sex with your husband does not imply that it’s lukewarm about raping your husband; public opinion’s support for giving your friends money if they need it does not imply that it’s lukewarm about theft; public opinion’s support for boxing and karate does not imply that it’s lukewarm about assault. Therefore, public opinion can damn well condemn people cheating on their partners without condemning consensually polyamorous individuals.

The best a woman can hope for in a society like ours is to dump the guy before she gets dumped herself.  If she goes from man to man, breaking hearts and hoping her contraception holds out, she can maintain her self-esteem. Or she can be lucky enough to snare the ever-shrinking pool of nice and decent guys who want to settle down and get married early on, before the lifestyle begins to tell on her.

7. Prudence Regarding Matrimony

All non-essentials forms of sexual gratification are unchaste in essence.  The mock or impersonate the sex act with the same physical sensations as the sex act, but they are sexually by accident, not sexual essentially. This means that a proper concern for virtue (and virtue is based on habit) should permit, if at all, these non-essential sexual acts when and only when they are part of, or leading up to, or added to, the sex act. With apologies to my Christian friends, I see nothing wrong with unnatural sexual acts with your own wife, provided these acts increase the union and love of matrimony.

But care must be taken not to allow non-essentials to drive out essentials. There are people who suffer a neurosis (there are harder words for this, but I will not use them here) where ordinary sexual acts or sexual stimulations will not stimulate them. Their sexual attraction does not attract them to sex, but, rather, away from it. We call this neurosis sexual deviancy.

Here we must make a distinction between sexual deviancy and merely sexual difference. The extreme cases are easy enough to distinguish: a man who prefers redheads to brunettes merely has a difference of taste. He will say Ginger is more attractive then Mary Anne (and, of course, he will be wrong on that point!) but there is no accounting for taste. A man who cannot get an erection unless his love is dressed in a Nazi uniform with stiletto-heeled boots, on the other hand, is neurotic. Likewise for a man attracted sexually to creatures with whom he cannot, biologically speaking, have sex: prepubescent children, dogs or sheep, dead bodies, and so on. There are specific names for each neurosis: pederasty, bestiality, necrophilia…

There is a gray area where certain things that seem like mere differences of taste might be neuroses, or things that seem like neuroses are mere differences of taste. The touchstone for making the distinction is whether or not it adds to or subtracts from normal and healthy lusts for normal and healthy copulation.

If it is neurotic, the lust for the non-essential will grow over time, and drive out the appetite for the normal. It will be a substitute rather than an adjunct. Ladies, if your man looks at a racy magazine rather than at you before the loveplay so to encourage an erection, that is odd, but not unhealthy. If he cannot get an erection at all without the magazine, he is addicted to porn, and that is unhealthy. Such a man is powerless, addicted to vice.

His erotic emotions and appetites and passions not longer serve the purpose of erotic love. This is not a matter of taste. If I prefer beer to wine, that is a matter of taste. If I drink urine and it tastes like wine to me on my tastebuds, there is something objectively wrong with my tastebuds. My appetite for wine is objectively disordered: it no longer reflects reality; it is as illogical as a statement that is false.

I would like to draw Mr. Wright’s attention to a neurosis he has perhaps overlooked: kissing.

Kissing is connected with sexual gratification, but obviously not PIV intercourse. It is not a human universal. (About half of cultures do not have romantic kissing before it is introduced to them by the West.) And yet in the West this neurosis is so widespread that nearly all sex is proceeded by kissing. Many a woman, in fact, would refuse to make love to her husband unless she is kissed first! This unchaste form of sexual gratification which mocks or impersonates the sex act with the same physical sensations is endemic! Even worse, many couples make out– often for hours!– with no intention of the making out leading to sexual intercourse!

Now, you might say ‘non-essential forms of sexual gratification’ refers only to things that result in orgasm, but Mr. Wright has specifically stated that not being able to get an erection if your partner is not dressed as a Nazi is a neurosis, regardless of whether you orgasm from your partner dressing as a Nazi. By extension, needing to kiss before you have sex must also be a neurosis.

I am not saying that there are no differences between dressing as a Nazi and kissing. One might argue that incorporating Nazis into your sex is disrespectful to the victims of Nazism, or that bringing violence and oppression into the bedroom harms the unitive purpose of sex, or what have you. I disagree with these arguments, but they could be made. Mr. Wright does not make them. He defines a sexual neurosis as a non-essential form of gratification pursued for its own sake which eventually is required to appreciate the normal, and if you accept that argument every Westerner is sexually neurotic about kissing.

(Is this [porn gif] the most virtuous form of sex, as it contains the least nonessentials? Inquiring minds…)

If you were among the Tapirapé, a Brazilian tribe which finds kissing disgusting, needing to kiss before sex would seem as perverted as needing to dress up as a Nazi is to us. Among Americans, needing to kiss before sex is not perverted; if anything, needing to not kiss before sex would be. The difference is, well, that for Americans kissing is popular, and for the Tapirapé it is not. Which is, what’s a nice word for it… culturally bound? Subjective? Not relating to the fundamental nature of sex?

Human sexuality is diverse. It evolved for the production of children, and now involves actions as diverse as sublimation into art, getting sucked off at a gloryhole, and having sex with stuffed animals– just as our ability to make mental maps evolved to help us figure out where the water hole was and is currently used to make memory palaces, and our visual processing evolved to help us see predators and is currently used to understand Magic Eye pictures. I don’t think Magic Eye or memory palaces mock or impersonate waterhole-finding or predator-fleeing, and I don’t think that fetishes mock or impersonate procreation.

What I have learned from this essay is that Mr. Wright believes that every American who needs to kiss to become aroused is powerless, addicted to vice, objectively disordered, no longer reflects reality, and as illogical as a statement that is false– or rather than he makes an unprincipled exception for the fetishes which happen to be common in his own culture.

8. Closing Remarks

John C Wright is wrapping up his argument, so I think it is about time to wrap up mine. In this absurdly lengthy post series, one might have gotten confused about which points were incidentals and which points get to the meat of our respective arguments, so I will outline exactly where Mr. Wright and I differ, the cruxes (I believe) of our respective positions.

Mr. Wright holds that morality is objective, while I hold that it is subjective. Still, one may answer questions like “what allows the average human to best fulfill their values, reach their goals, and pursue eudaimonia?” While I don’t expect my arguments to be persuasive to serial killers, unfriendly AIs, or that nice German man who got eaten, and presumably Mr. Wright does, Mr. Wright and I could still theoretically come to consensus on how we prefer society to be set up and the best way for a normal person to live.

Unfortunately, Mr. Wright and I disagree very much on the issue of fundamental human nature. I believe that people are more likely to be different from each other than he does, and thus that their ways of pursuing their goals are more distinct. Thus our respective opinions on polygamy, divorce, children being raised by people other than their biological parents, parents having a high degree of control over the lives of their adult children, etc., as well as my investment in coming up with social norms in which people can choose different life paths and still have the promises they made to each other enforced by social disapproval. I believe this difference may be at the core of the difference between the Matrimonial and Libertine positions.

One specific and quite important way this difference manifests is that Mr. Wright believes that there is a single best way to enjoy sex and other ways are insulting or degrading the best way, while I believe that people can have different thoughts on sex without any of them meaning the other ones are less valid. Similarly, Mr. Wright believes that only penis-in-vagina intercourse counts as real sex, while I think that ‘real sex’ is a silly concept. Thus we get my approval of homosexuality, kink, and oral and anal sex, and his disapproval of same.

The second key difference between me and Mr. Wright is that he believes that birth control is significantly less effective than I do, and thus that all non-marital sex runs a significant risk of conceiving a child without biological parents. I, however, believe that this problem is best solved through nudging people into using long-acting reversible contraception.

The third key difference between me and Mr. Wright is our philosophies of casual sex. Mr. Wright does not believe in sex accompanied by positive emotions other than the various forms of romantic love, while I do. I believe it is romantic to be chosen out of many potential romantic partners and unvirtuous to declare the existence of love itself to be wrong (as opposed to breaking promises, murder, etc. that may be caused by the love), while Mr. Wright disagrees. These differences lead to all of our disagreements about nonmarital sex that are not the product of our disagreement about the effectiveness of birth control.

Mr. Wright believes that men are worse than women, while I believe that human evil is dished out equally among the genders. This leads to surprisingly little difference, since if I agreed with him on the other things I would merely point out that men need to be protected from women, and not just the other way around.

Mr. Wright is absurdly optimistic about the ability of alienation of affection torts to keep people from committing infatuation-motivated crimes.