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Sex
Aellagirl writes a really interesting guide to successfully camming. (Worth reading even if you’re not interested in camming for the insight into the business.)
As a change of pace, the Atlantic clutches its pearls about how people are having less sex. I make fun, but this is actually an interesting, albeit deeply flawed, read. It’s really unclear to me to what extent people having less sex is a result of positive trends– such as people not being coerced into sex they don’t want or people having enjoyable and satisfactory sex lives that consist primarily of writing about fictional characters having sex on Tumblr– as opposed to negative trends– such as people getting into Facebook arguments when they’d prefer to have sex or porn making miserable celibacy just tolerable enough that people don’t do anything about it. Excellent read for being appalled at straight people. 72% of women experienced pain the last time they had anal sex?! Some straight men apparently go around choking people without asking first?! Seriously, guys, do you need help?
Old article, but an interesting read: the Protestant sexual abuse crisis is more decentralized but just as far-ranging as the Catholic sexual abuse crisis, and Billy Graham’s grandson has set himself up as the person to fight it. Boz Tchividjian is a really admirable person and I salute him.
Disability
I’m sharing this article about the complications of Lasik less because I want to raise awareness about complications associated with Lasik and more because it’s a fascinating example of how our culture talks about disability. The eyes of people who get Lasik are repeatedly described as “healthy eyes”, despite the obvious fact that they are not: Lasik is a treatment for various medical conditions, including nearsightedness, farsightedness, and myopia. The assistive tech for people with vision problems is hardly perfect: I once accidentally flushed my glasses down the toilet and had to call a friend to Seeing-Eye dog me to the glasses store. But they are normalized. It’s interesting to me that there does not seem to be any social pressure on people with myopia to cure our myopia at any cost, even though a cure is inexpensive and readily available. It’s also interesting to me that the cure is considered cosmetic (!) and not covered by insurance.
Just Plain Neat
Okay, fine, Payless, you got me to share your advertising stunt: Payless creates a fake luxury store, Palessi, and discovers a lot of fashion influencers are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for twenty-dollar shoes.
Thing of Things 
>nearsightedness, farsightedness, and myopia
I thought nearsightedness *was* myopia. Is there a distinction I’m unaware of?
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this Atlantic article reads like “we have reached the achievement of a nightmare dystopia straight out of the fever dreams of caricatural puritans”
my silly human brain wants to narrativize it as “see, yeah, this is what happens when all the common knowledge of what sex is like is left to the incentive gradient of the porn market while nobody in your retarded country has the authority, or if they do, the political BALLS, to ensure that people get taught healthy sex ed”
but some elements do not fit that narrative, of course. large societal trends are never due to one single factor (yeah, yeah, with the exception of that one time when banning leaded gasoline solved like half of all the societal problems)
the apps being an arid desert of nothingness for the majority of men
and a sea of dick pics for the majority of women
the fear of a better option, choice paralysis, etc : oh get the fuck rid of your idiotic “monogamy” hangup already, how hard is this, if you can get someONE you can also get also other someones, jealousy is insecurity in the sense of fearing one will be foreveralone if one does not (how do i say “defend their property” in non-inflammatorily-insulting terms again?), the only real foreveralones are the ones who get zero chance at all evar (whether due to a crippling fear of ever trying, learned helplessness from thousands of rejections, or other reasons)
the friction of fearing to be seen as creepy for asking anyone out in meatspace
the whole societal pressure thing of “getting your life in order before making kids” (which is a trap because at that point it will be too late) (this one is afaict *the* main reason for the situation in japan : conflicting societal pressures of, on the woman side, “you need to have a career before sacrificing it in the name of being a housewife” (in hansonese, costly signaling that the woman is worth marrying because she could get a career and validation for the man who can get her to sacrifice it in exchange for housewifing for him) and “if you’re not a housewife at 25 nobody will ever marry you” – japan being the hellhole of the most murderously extreme social pressure in the world, i kind of can see the shape of the male side of that issue but i can’t put it in so many words because i suck at words)
all in all, lots of good points in that article
(reposted from my tumblr)
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If you wanted a grand narrative that explained most of the points which the Atlantic article discusses, the best way to go would probably be something like “rising levels of anxiety and depression [probably caused by being Very Online] are both making it harder for people to pursue partners and less inclined to have sex with the partners who they do meet.” Rising anxiety does a lot to explain things like people only wanting to meet partners through apps (because they can’t deal with the uncertainties that come with asking out people they know), preferring porn to real-life partners, etc.
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Many people overly rely on apps to get dates because they believe they lack other methods of meeting potential romantic and sexual politics. The ethics of asking people you know from work out are way more complicated than it was when my parents met at work in the early 1970s. People often lack social networks where they can meet partners. Even if they are involved in some type of hobby with a good mix of people, the meetings might be too in frequent to get close or they could be on the periphery of their social scene rather than deep. Again, the rules regarding dating people in your hobby scene are stricter now than they were in the past.
Regarding sex education, I’m not sure if that is to blame. From what I’ve read in the Atlantic article, this seems to be a problem throughout the Western world. This includes countries that have great progressive sex education in Europe. The real issue sees to be the increasing autonomy of society and fewer people being in situations where they get close to others. Plus there is still a debate on what constitutes a proper sex education. I think telling teens that some of them are going to have the time of their lives and others are going to know only frustration and misery is important but nobody really wants to this to kids.
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I think that the common definition of sexual assault/harassment is also to blame. It is commonly defined as undesired behavior, which is rather problematic, since all (sexual) behavior is undesired by some people. In fact, a subset of women seems to not want any sexual attention when pursuing other interests and another subset only wants it if they are attracted to the guy. Furthermore, those who #believewomen will assume that the man is guilty and will assume that any accusation is reasonable, even if it is not so.
So the modern focus on preventing harassment/assault makes real-life approaches more perilous and makes scrupulous people feel like they are transgressing.
In contrast, a dating app like Tinder doesn’t have an initiator, since people only see whether the other is interested, after they have indicated their own interest first. So in theory it’s perfect.
In practice…
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That is absolutely not the definition of sexual assault or harassment.
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I’m talking about the definition that people tend to use for themselves, not the legal system. People/the general culture often have/has their own definition.
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I don’t understand the complaint. Different people have different comfort levels. If someone make one person uncomfortable, then perhaps it’s just a personality difference. If someone makes many people uncomfortable, then I guess it becomes a group dynamics issue. If someone is consistently “pushy” about sex stuff, toward people who really don’t want to flirt with that person, then yeah, it can cross over into “harassment” territory. So it goes. People get to have boundaries.
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You are both right. Different people are allowed to have different comfort levels and set their own boundaries. Since many women seem to expect men to do a lot of the initial romancing, this can end up being bad to men who aren’t really good with social signals in heterosexual relationships. They have to take risks, which on rare potentials can go wrong even if they act with good faith. Generally, people do not like tight-rope situations, where getting one thing wrong could lead to deadly consequences. Many heterosexual men these days feel like they are in a tight-rope situations when it comes to dating. This doesn’t make the process fun. It makes it nerve wrecking.
This is what I meant by a conspiracy of the most extroverted and introverted. Not a a real conspiracy but a sort of situation good for the extremes at both ends but terrible for everybody else. The people who really like game and are really good at reading people’s subtle cues are having the time of their lives. So are the more extreme introverts because the Internet allows them to achieve many of their social needs while still being their introverted selves. People in between the two extremes seem screwed though.
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@veronicastraszh
The issue is that a certain movement has been reinforcing traditional ways of looking at men and women by telling women that they are harmless and can only be victims, not perpetrators; while telling them that men are taught selfish and harmful behaviors. That very same movement has been giving (more) weapons to women and has been telling them to use those & has discouraged empathy with men by telling them to treat their own ‘lived experience’ as the truth. It has sought to reduce protections for the accused, etc, etc.
Furthermore, any questioning of the impact of these changes on men has been met by implied or explicit accusations that the men that complain are not acting in good faith, but are defending rape, assault, etc. In fact, organizing around the interests of men is taken as evidence of horrible misogyny in itself. So instead of an open discussion where people get to explain their point of view openly and we try to find a compromise between the interests and desires of various groups, people try to achieve their goals by silencing and cowing the opposition.
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Of course, ‘people get to have boundaries,’ but your statement is rather irritating to me in how it implicitly portrays this as merely involving honest and open interactions, with no attempts to punish, like so:
– Hi Mary, I’d like to violate your prime directive.
– Hi John, your proposal violates my boundaries. Also, no.
– Sorry Mary, didn’t mean to make you upset. Won’t do it again.
– Very well John, now let’s get back to finger painting each other’s bodies.
In reality, there seem to be a lot of situations where women don’t complain at the time, but then after the fact decide that the guy was too pushy or otherwise didn’t act in a satisfactory way & then seek remedies, where those remedies can include punishment by shaming, trying to get the person punished by extralegal systems of punishment, go to the police, etc.
Furthermore, quite a few feminists seem to have the belief that their demands have been communicated to men and should be regarded by them as law & that any further transgressions of the boundaries of herself or her subculture merit punishment (again, often extra-legally).
Ironically, the most ‘pushy’ people and subcultures are often those that progressives try to be supportive of, like those with disabilities or black people. However, this cognitive dissonance seems to result in denial.
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@LeeEsq — Wanna know a difficult truth? Flirting is really easy. After all, it’s just talking. Sure, if you’re overwhelmed by social anxiety, then it’s rough, but it’s normal for both parties to be kinda nervous. It’s easy enough to negotiate that, once you’ve done it a few times and have an easygoing, “take it or leave it” attitude.
The key to flirting is simple: both parties want this to progress. They’re just both feeling out the situation. Again, sure, it’s possible to go too fast, or else go too slow. You might fuck up and trigger some “red flag.” But actually, there is a lot of middle ground, and the “social cues” are not usually so subtle.
So what about the people who can’t flirt? What’s going on with them?
Well, consider this, another “not so nice” truth: notice the part where I said both parties want this to progress. What happens if only one of the two parties want that?
Thus we arrive at puzzle box thinking. What incredibly mysterious and specific things can you say to her that will cause her to like you?
Except she likes that other guy, so she’s giving him all of her attention, and making it really easy for him to flirt.
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Veronica, that strikes me as an incredibly self-serving response. Why should the people who are effectively frozen out of the system accept it? That you have a minority of people having the time of their lives and not really wanting to deal with the people getting nothing.
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@LeeEsq — I don’t know what to tell you. I see what I see. If some people are unattractive, uninspiring, and undesirable, then what should happen?
You frequently ask me what I think you should do, but I don’t know. Sure, you can refuse to “accept” it, but so what? What happens next?
The answer is, of course, that you must accept it, or at least make peace with it, otherwise you’ll stew in bitterness. We’ve discussed this before, many times. My answer hasn’t changed.
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This conversation is unproductive and it will stop now.
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When I first glanced at this sentence, I thought it was saying something about the article mostly only treating the straight dating scene, which I did find a bit of an issue that detracted from the article as a whole.
I actually knew a straight guy who did this to a woman he’d just met that evening (I was there that evening when they met and saw them making out but didn’t witness the choking part.) To keep a long, juicy, but mostly digressive story short, she was fine with it because it so happened that she liked being choked. She went on to have an ongoing relationship with him. This was despite the fact that her very vocal feminist views, which included constant grievances against threatening male behavior, were some of the most intense that I’ve ever seen.
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This kind of hypocrisy, where quite a few people have highly feminist views, while they actually behave in a highly traditional way, is a common meme among pickup artists and it seems to be a major reason why many of these men became rather angry (feeling bamboozled by society/feminists/women).
Feminists have a strong tendency to blame men for having gendered expectations, behaviors, etc & to demand that they change; yet to ignore or find excuses for gendered expectations, behaviors and such from women.
Of course, pretty much all ideologies are appropriated by many people for selfish ends, where they adopt a variation that helps them legitimize their own desires, demands, etc to themselves and others, in a way that is rather unethical in my view. This is why it is important to have a certain balance of power in society. Unfortunately, the gender roles prohibit that balance of power when it comes to gender.
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Well, I wouldn’t use words like “traditional” for a woman who accepts being choked as part of a sex act, but yes, I see your point. The situation with that particular guy that I knew indeed epitomized the crux of the PUA / angry incel community’s frustration, as he was very successful at hooking up with (often very feminist) women while being a blatant chauvinist and a general a-hole to both men and women and quite self-aware about it. Of course, the frustrated men we mentioned above (the ones who yearn for full-blown relationships anyway) tend to overlook the fact that the kind of sexual relationship gained by aggressive guys who don’t care about consent tends to be devoid of anything deeper, as was certainly the case with this guy I knew.
All that said, I feel kind of bad for bringing him up because I agree with Ozy’s and the article writer’s point that it’s appalling how many straight men seem not to have much common sense when it comes to checking with someone before trying things like choking or anal penetration. That guy just happens to be the one real-life example of this that I’ve seen, but I have no idea how many feminist women there are out there who let such men get away with that behavior, so I’m not claiming that that example is in fact representative of anything really significant.
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I mean traditional in the sense of having the man lead, do things without asking, act confident, etc. What the man specifically does is merely an implementation detail that doesn’t change that the general way that people interact is highly traditionalist.
As for the lack of a deeper connection in PUA sex, there is a major issue with the male gender role denying men emotions or other non-stoic needs, like physical contact (as in hugging, handholding, etc). Of course, men do have these needs, but even to themselves they tend to deny it, transmutating these needs into other socially acceptable needs, like needing sex or having a girlfriend. It goes beyond being laughed at when they say ‘I want someone to hug,’ it hurts their own self-esteem if they admit that, because society has told them that real men don’t have these needs.
So you get the issue that incel men tend to adopt a very sex-focused narrative, although it is pretty obvious that they don’t truly believe this, if you look at such things as their rejection of sex with prostitutes as a solution and such.
The issue here is that asking will very, very often be a turn-off in itself, so it really pays to not ask and instead to gamble.
From the perspective of men, most women tend to collectively act like a Skinner box. If you press the button, you now and then get a reward. If you don’t press the button (waiting for women to lead or asking women what they want), nothing tends to happen. The specific woman you point to is conditioning men to choke women without asking and despite her supposed feminist leanings, she thus teaches men what is sometimes called ‘toxic masculinity.’
I would personally suggest rather strongly telling women it’s wrong to feel turned off by men who act nontraditional, but there is a taboo on shaming women and a more general rejection of the idea that women play a major role in teaching/forcing men (into) their gender role. So instead, we just keep rewarding AND punishing men who act traditionally, while we withhold rewards and punish men who don’t act traditionally.
Heads, you lose, tails, you lose. Why oh why are so many men cynical, do so many men give up, etc?
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One of my exes experienced the choking thing, from some guy. I guess it was actually pretty bad. He didn’t even do a blood choke, but went full tracheal breath choke. She had to struggle free.
Anyway, yeah, it’s a thing.
Add to that guys who try to initiate anal without preparation.
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Many health insurances in the US cover eyeglasses – it’s generally considered cheaper than LASIK.
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But the coverage is quite frequently shit: they would set the maximum covered amount way below the median price of frames, lenses, coatings, etc.
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technically I could get glasses through work for free because I use my PC all day and eye strain is considered part of the on-the-job-heath-risks
but what it would cover is basically the price of the cheapest glasses you can get. If I was stuck it would be utterly reasonable .
but as something that I wear basically all the time, everywhere, I’m willing to shell out a few hundred quid for fashion sake.
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I tried glasses from a cheaper brand, but they simply couldn’t get them right. I would get headaches, eye strain, etc. Only the expensive shop managed to make good ones.
I probably have difficult eyes, though.
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Aellagirl’s guide is very good. I would add that when starting out having a sockpuppet account or two (not operated by performer, but by a confederate) can skip ahead many weeks/months in the timeline.
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The Atlantic article is confused because a decline in recreational sex could be for a variety of positive, negative, and neutral reasons. It is a complicated issue. There is much more emphasis on getting consent now than there was during the Sexual Revolution, which is a very good thing because there were lots of rape and sexual assault during the Sexual Revolution that got hidden because nobody wanted to sound like prude except social conservatives and radical feminists. See the entire Baby Groupie phenomenon. On the more negative side, people have more worries that interfere with pursuing sex or thinking about it.
One thing that the Atlantic doesn’t mention is that we are about one or two generations removed from the Sexual Revolution. When the taboos against premarital sex began to disappear, it was obvious that there might be a lot of sex because more people were free to have it. When the novelty of pre-martial sex not being a taboo wore off, the frequency of sex stopped because it was just an ordinary recreational activity rather than something new and exciting. It’s like movies. People still like movies but after several generations of movie going, they lack the novelty they did during the early 20th century.
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Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917
There is often an crippling problem for people who try to start out in the workplace, where they lack the skills to be productive right away and yet no one is willing to train them. Most likely, this worsened as the consequence of reduced loyalty by employers to employees and vice versa, so the return on investment is likely to be for another company than the one that trained a person. So then you can get into the sad situation where there is demand for more employees and people available who could be trained to fill those jobs, yet supply and demand never meet up.
During the industrial revolution, when loyalty went down sharply, we implemented mandatory education to partially solve this issue, by allowing prospective employees to build up skills before getting a job. Of course, this only works to some extent, as education usually can teach only some of the skills required (and there is pressure on education to dumb itself down, to certify more people, at the expense of making them less skilled).
Another way for prospective employees to get a foot in, is to embellish on their CV and/or during their interview. Note that willingness to embellish seems higher for men, which may partly explain differences in outcomes by gender. Of course, women embellish in other ways (like by wearing make up).
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We may have a similar situation in relationships now, where the reduced loyalty in relationships means that women expect poor returns from teaching an inexperienced man. Instead, just like companies are looking for employees who can be productive right away, they look for men who are pleasing right away.
Despite an insistence by some that (sex) education can teach men these skills, it seems unlikely. Firstly, because you can’t really realistically instruct people to a high level of detail when it comes to having sex due to its taboo nature. It’s not like you can tell a boy and girl student to start caressing each other, while teaching people other skills in school/college generally involves practicing, not just learning the theory. Secondly and more importantly, society is in denial about the real desires of most women, so many of the things that men are being told are counterproductive.
For example, part of the male gender role that most women demand from men is to be confident, to lead, to be in control, to know what to do, etc. It’s highly taboo to acknowledge this, so during sex education and other education, men get told lies about openly discussing things, figuring things out together, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then they try to apply these lessons when wooing real women and will generally crash and burn. So they turn to other sources, like forums dominated by men and porn, to educate themselves.
Many also choose to ‘fake it till you make it’. This may explain the counter-intuitive scientific findings that show greater personality differences between men and women in more emancipated countries. This may be because these countries have less relationship loyalty and because personality is weighed more heavily for dating decisions, so it’s more important to be perceived as being a mostly
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I tentatively agree with this. It is not all women but there do seem to be many women that see the early part of the relationship/courtship as their time. They want a man that can perform. Or as it was put on an allegedly liberal dating advice forum once “You have to make it easy for us but we don’t have to make it easy for you at all.” So if a man can’t really do the courtship ritual right, he does not get. If he finds a woman who can and will give him slack, good for him but otherwise he is screwed.
There are other women whose ideal man is one capable of constant performance throughout the entire relationship. Somebody who could give her what she wants when she wants it but not need anything in return. So if he had a long day at work and is tired to his bones but a woman needs him to do something, he does it. Meanwhile, if she does not want to do something he ideally would do without even if he really needs it emotionally or something.
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This is a very unprogressive attitude IMO. And there is a strong taboo to oppose it, where those who do typically get attacked with gendered, dehumanizing insults, for double non-progressiveness points.
Men typically compete with each other on the courtship ritual, making it very hard for them to go against it, for then they will lose out to other men. This is like how women compete with each other on looks, making it hard for them to go against these gender norms, for doing so means losing out to other women.
Mainstream feminism typically fails to understand this and usually portrays behavior as being caused by people being forced to conform to the needs of men or the catch-all ‘patriarchy’ (which is so vague that it can explain everything and thus explains nothing). However, when intra-gender competition is a really strong force, you actually expect to see oversatisfaction of needs. In other words, you expect men and women to go further in their behavior than the other gender actually prefers, because winning the competition is itself a signal of fitness.
This is exactly what we see. For example, studies show that women desire to be thinner than what men prefer on average. Men also seem to want to be more stoic than what women desire.
Another aspect of the dating ritual is that approval by other men/women is taken as a sign of fitness, which is what makes shaming on the competitive factors so strong/painful. An example is slut-shaming. Again, progressives/feminists typically have a completely incorrect (and ironically very sexist) model of this, failing to see how shaming men for being neckbeards and such is the gender-flipped equivalent to slut-shaming.
The gender-flipped equivalent to the woman who is confined to the kitchen, is available for sex when the men desires, etc. Of course, this kind of abuse is highly taboo among progressives. So why not…
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Re: sex education– I’ve found over the course of my experiences with both very bad and very good sex that if you have the sort of basic grasp of the anatomy and mechanics of sex, arousal, and orgasm which you could learn from a good book, about 70-80% of what distinguishes good sex from bad is psychological rather than mechanical, and about half of the important tacit knowledge about sex’s mechanics is partner-specific. The psychological stuff is itself a skill that you have to learn (and some of it is tacit knowledge which develops through experience), but a lot of it overlaps with social skills that you can practice in other contexts. Making another person feel special and appreciated, easing their feelings of discomfort, anxiety, or shame, communicating directly and assertively about your own desires, etc. are all skills you can learn outside the bedroom. You can learn about some of the useful psychological things that are specific to sex by reading people’s writings about their desires and (perhaps even more revealing) studying the porn they consume. I don’t think that you could pack all of this into a course at school, but you certainly could create online resources with explanations and exercises which could help people practice.
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Be slightly careful with the porn thing, though. I like certain activities in porn that I absolutely don’t want to do in real life.
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That’s a good point– in general, people’s porn preferences are something that you should take seriously but not literally.
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I’m not sure I understand what shade of claim you’re making here. Are you saying that on the surface the message men receive from women and from Society (but not sex ed class) is that they have to be forceful and take the lead? Or are you saying that women on the whole actually prefer men to take that approach rather than openly discussing things, figuring things out together, yada yada yada? If the latter, what brought you to this conclusion (personal experience, forums you can point to, etc.)? I’m not trying to challenge you here, just genuinely curious.
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Society doesn’t send just a single message, but the explicit messaging from much of the blue tribe to men, including during sex ed is that sex is:
– a place where equality is very important, for example, by making sure that the woman orgasms
– that they should ask
– that they should be careful & very ‘nice’
From a woman’s perspective, this is very logical advice to give, because women tend to have sex relatively more often with men who are too aggressive, selfish, etc. Also, it’s logical that this is more unpleasant to them than experiencing sex with men who are too meek for their liking. The latter is bad sex not to be repeated, the former can be BAD sex. Also, women tend to enjoy their first time less than men & sex education tends to heavily focus on the first time.
The average male perspective is different.
As already noted by Scott, people can fail to hit the sweet spot in both directions, where advice that is suitable for some people can exacerbate the issues for others, who should actually reverse the advice.
An example is common feminist advice for men to be less sexually aggressive, which would have been good advice for Harvey Weinstein, but very poor advice for a shy man.
On average, yes. Putting the burden on men to figure out what works for both partners allows women to let go. A very common theme in women’s desires that I’ve seen expressed is that they want things to happen ‘naturally’. From the male perspective, this desire can often only be met by adapting to the woman’s needs, so she feels that the needs of the two people are in tune.
This disconnect between the male and female experience showed in this study, which found that:
Correspondingly, men reported being more focused on their partner’s state and being less able to abandon themselves in a letting-go state during heterosexual intercourse than women. More specifically, during heterosexual intercourse, men, as compared with women, reported being more centered upon their partner’s needs, thoughts, and reactions as well as being more preoccupied with pleasing their partner and being less able to give up control.
and:
Indeed, previous findings revealed that sexual satisfaction in both partners was correlated with men’s understanding of their partner’s preferences during heterosexual intercourse (Purnine & Carey, 1997)
It’s part of the big lie to claim that men are too selfish during sex, when the actual truth is that men are much more concerned with pleasing their partner than vice versa. Ironically, men’s inability and/or unwillingness to prioritize women’s interests even more, is used as evidence to argue that men are selfish.
This is all part of the greater confusion/lie where decision making and being the initiator is equated to selfishness and getting your way, ignoring that one can make decision & act to sacrifice and/or please the other.
PS. I can’t point to one specific thing. My conclusions are based on a variety of sources, from personal experience, to anecdotes of others, to studies, etc; which I then synthesized into a theory that seems to explain reality better than other theories.
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Thanks for your answer!
Yep, that’s pretty much my MO, except usually minus studies I can actually cite.
That’s been exactly my impression actually, and while I’m not particularly inclined to disagree with your position, my model for what lies behind it has been somewhat more cynical with respect to the continuum between genuine altruism and the self-serving desire to feel helpful. Namely, straight men (at least nowadays) place lots of status on their abilities to not only get women into bed but to please women in bed. Being able to make a woman orgasm makes a man feel like a stud. Whereas our culture sort of takes it for granted that straight men are always wanting to sleep with women, and women probably assume (not without obvious reason) that men they sleep with are going to enjoy themselves orgasm with no problem.
Of course this places certain unfair pressures on women to come across like they’re maximally enjoying themselves in bed, hence trying to moan like porn stars, faking orgasms, etc. It’s bad all around.
Yep, that’s pretty much my MO (including for the views expressed in this comment), except usually minus studies I can actually cite.
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Of course both male and female gender role conformance results in large part from men and women deriving self-respect from conforming to it. It’s not like there is a patriarchy officer in the bedroom telling people what to do.
Furthermore, a lot of sacrifice and/or caring behavior is intended as part of an implied quid-pro-quo. And what isn’t, is often done for status, self-respect or such.
Pointing this out seems a bit unpleasant for many people, as their just-world beliefs shatter into a thousand little shards, each piece reflecting their shortcomings back to them in a distorted image of themselves, like the most disturbing fun house mirror in existence, without the fun.
Now, personally think that people tend to be too harsh about the immorality of self-interested behavior, but first shattering their beliefs and then gluing the shards together again may not be very helpful. So I try not to point it out too much, although I often can’t help myself.
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It’s also interesting to me that the cure is considered cosmetic (!) and not covered by insurance.
And the price of LASIK dropped faster than insured procedures, while the quality increased faster.
This is not a coincidence.
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Re: less sex
I’m reminded of an old documentary about re-creating some of the 1950’s style British family holiday camps.
A scene that stuck with me was that after they’d set this thing up and had a load of people staying there including a load of seniors who’d been to the same sort of camp as kids and teens… they had some interviews with the old folks to ask how accuracy the recreation was.
And some of these little old grannies just started on about how in their day there “was far more sex… the teenagers these days weren’t sneaking off together!” and going into how much sex was normal for teens at the summer getaways.
I think society in general has become in some ways far more conservative about real-flesh-world sex. (while becoming less conservative about porn.) Young people are staying in more, parents have more capacity to go full Panopticon on their childrens lives.
“or people having enjoyable and satisfactory sex lives that consist primarily of writing about fictional characters having sex on Tumblr”
I’m seriously doubting that much of the writing-about-fictional-characters-having-sex-on-tumblr population would willingly choose a night in writing vs real sex with a real reasonably-appealing partner if it was an option they perceived as open. I’m sure some would but I’m doubting they’re a majority of the relevant population.
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When I linked this comment to my talking-about-fictional-characters-having-sex group chat there was widespread laughter among the mostly celibate ones about the idea that real sex with a real reasonably attractive partner would be better than writing! I do think this is a real thing.
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Fair enough, color me surprised.
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That could still be a negative trend though – if real-world sex is becoming objectively less satisfying, due to increasing social anxiety, SSRI side effects, et cetera.
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The Atlantic article talks about this with the raise of helicopter parenting. There are fewer opportunities for teenagers to hang out because getting into college is a lot rougher than it was for baby boomers, Generation Xers, and even people born in the early 1980s like me. This really cuts the time teenagers have to hang out with each other and learn how to flirt, get into relationships, and have sex or even heavy petting.
Whether this means that society is getting more conservative about real world sex is up for debate. What I think is happening is that the excesses of the Sexual Revolution are being subjected to a necessary correction. Talk about consent was not really a thing before or during the Sexual Revolution except in some radical communities. This meant that there was a lot of predatory behavior and sexual assault that got passed off as consensual sex.
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Many men and women no longer being able to be interact sexually at all doesn’t seem like a necessary correction or progress.
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On the other hand, the Sexual Revolution removed the few restraints on high status male predators that existed previously. When Jerry Lee Lewis dated and even married his barely pubescent cousin it killed his career. During the 1970s, there was the entire baby groupie phenomenon where rock stares in their mid-twenties to early thirties had sex with barely pubescent girls while engaging in other reprehensible conduct, like Jimmy Page effectively kidnapping Lorrie Maddox to have sex with her or Steve Tyler becoming the guardian of his teenage girlfriend so they could live together, without anybody batting an eye. By all accounts, there was a lot of sexual assault guised as consensual sex during the late 1960s and 1970s. Getting rid of this is what I mean by a necessary correction.
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Yeah sure, I’d just like if this was balanced out with empathy for and attempts to help failing men (not just when it comes to relationships/sex, but in general).
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“The assistive tech for people with vision problems is hardly perfect”
If you use glasses, the assistive tech available is much better than you think and for most people it is good enough that it hardly matters.
When I get out of bed I put my contact lenses in and when I get back in I take them out. Otherwise I hardly think about them. If I don’t want to do that or forget about it that may lead to some brief discomfort upon waking. If you are still wearing glasses, try contacts (preferably those designed to wear over night) they are fucking awesome. (Context: I have ~ -8 dioptres, so without seeing my visual acuity is well below 20/200.)
Also nearsightedness gives you some benefits: When you will get presbyopia you can just pop one contact lens out and put it in your mouth (or remove your glasses) to read. Sufficiently strong myopia even comes with a disability superpower: If I cannot resolve a small detail sufficiently, I don’t have to run for a magnifying glass but can just remove one lens to at least double my spacial resolution.
So all in all, if I could remove my myopia with the press of a button, would I? Probably. Would I get costly surgery with possible complications, many of which would prevent me from wearing contacts for my possible residual myopia? Hell, no!!!
For people without medical conditions prohibiting contacts the strongest argument for LASIK I could come up with is probably that you are less fucked in a very long term disaster scenario, though storing contacts and cleaner for a lifetime might still be preferable (one pair ~ 200 Euros, one pair for five years plus 30 Euros cleaner per year).
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Maybe it’s just that things that aren’t sex have been improving faster than sex.
Colour television, the internet, cheap air travel have all revolutionised the way we spend our time oustside of one another, compared to what, improved siloxane chemistry leading to silicone rubber?
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Exactly. I worry way less about the lack of sex, compared with the lack of closeness and intimacy. We are such an atomized society. A person can just kinda “drop out” and disappear and few will know or care. That person becomes an anonymous name on a few scattered internet forums, but it’s hard to build closeness that way.
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Very true.
How do people actually make friends in a new city nowadays?
Universities have all kinds of clubs, societies and other organs designed to get people to socialise, but after graduating and getting a job you only really have your own bootstraps to pull on.
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I think a lot of people make friends through work. Also, if you’re a nerd, there are things such as book clubs, game nights, improv class, etc.
Of course, it can take a while for people to warm up to you. It’s even harder if you’re neuro-diverse or have social anxiety. One thing is for sure, if your hobbies are video games and math, you’ll need to branch out if you want to make friends.
For me it’s kinda easy. I’m trans, so I have the whole LGBT social scene, plus I like to drink and go out dancing. That’s a tricky way to meet people, but it has a kind of “cool factor.” Also, there are things like queer BDSM culture, which works pretty differently from str8 BDSM culture. We don’t have to navigate the gender wars. (On the other hand, half the nation seems to want me dead, so that kinda sucks.)
The DBT workbook has a whole section on how to meet people and make friends, under the premise that borderline-ish people will do better if they don’t feel socially isolated. (I’m pretty sure this doesn’t only apply to borderline-ish people.) Anyway, it talks about stuff such as how to join an ongoing conversation without “butting in.”
Good skills. I recommend.
Classic advice: if you’re in a social space where you feel awkward and kind of left out, find someone else who appears awkward and kind of left out. Talk to them.
I’ve done this. In fact, one of my rules if I’m at a social function: make sure the people who appear “left out” get included.
I do this because I fucking know how it feels, and often no one else will do it.
If you’re a bit spergy, be careful that you don’t “pontificate,” “hold forth,” or otherwise “suck up the oxygen.” Speak briefly, but then stop to listen to others. Even better, try to notice if someone is being shut out of the conversation. Direct the conversation to them. If people are standing and talking, adjust your body position so everyone is included in “the circle.” Do the same to adjust seating arrangements.
The point: in a lot of social spaces, you won’t be the only person who feels left out. You will often have many shy people being shy in proximity (while the not-shy people carry on with their not-shyness, not noticing you). To break this cycle, someone has to take the lead. It might as well be you.
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Modern society seems to be an agreement between the most extroverted and the most introverted to make life miserable for everybody else.
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That sounds absurd to me.
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Some information that might help understand 72% of women experienced pain the last time they had anal sex, that likely includes a lot of women who tried it, and then decided it wasn’t for them. For example, my wife and I want to try anal sex, we read several guides on how to have anal sex safely, use lube, try to be as gental as possible, and my wife uses the safe world so we stop. We discuss whether we want to try again, and mutually agree vaginal sex is better for both of us so there is no point. That is consistent with the statistic, but also good practice. I suspect the majority of the 72% are in the same situation, unless I drastically are underestimating the amount of straight women that regularly have anal sex.
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On the sex decline, I think it’s important to establish where and when this is happening. Among teenagers, (where we have the most detailed data since 1991 because “think of the children!”) the decline started in the early-mid 90s in America (https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/trends/2017_sexual_trend_yrbs.pdf), and similar declines are reported Japan (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/japan-sex-problem-demographic-time-bomb-birth-rates-sex-robots-fertility-crisis-virgins-romance-porn-a7831041.html) and across the Western world (https://www.economist.com/international/2018/01/10/teenagers-are-better-behaved-and-less-hedonistic-nowadays). So it doesn’t make sense to blame the sexual revolution or anything else that happened before the 90s, nor does it seem plausible to blame anything particular to North American culture such as helicopter parenting or #metoo (which is also far too recent) or even feminism in general because that doesn’t seem to be too popular in Japan.
My favored explanation is very simple: people aren’t spending as much time outside these days because it’s way easier to have fun inside. Here’s a Youtube video made by some guy who tried to “live like the early 2000s” for a week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgr4kY_-8pQ Starting around 6:20, he describes what sounds an awful lot like cabin fever and wonders why he isn’t satisfied by 13+ year old video games, movies, and so on when that stuff was sufficient for him back then. Then it hits him: “we weren’t really at home that much.” He remembers that back then in his social circle, it was not uncommon for people to go out or have friends over every single day.
If things were so different in the early 2000s, imagine how different things were ten years earlier, when even if you had the internet it wasn’t good for much besides email, home video required either a large investment of money and space in a tape collection (as late as the mid-90s, pre-recorded VHS tapes typically cost $25 or more to buy, equivalent to more than $40 today) or regular trips to a video rental store, and the best that TV had to offer was described in a popular song as “57 channels and nothing on” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAlDbP4tdqc). Is it any wonder that teen characters in fiction from the 90s and earlier spend so much time hanging out after school in malls or juice bars or wherever?
Another interesting thingin fiction from the 90s or earlier is how many romantic relationships just kind of happen. Two members of the opposite sex end up spending a lot of time around each other as friends or acquaintances or research partners, develop mutual crushes, the truth about their feelings comes out at some point (sometimes involving comic hijinks) and bam, they’re a couple. Or they’re set up by mutual friends, something as part of what was called a “blind date,” where neither knew the other’s identity beforehand.
And sure, a lot of this is surely due to the dramatic and comedic potential in such stories, but it isn’t hard to find real couples who met in similar ways, and studies have found that the percent of American heterosexual couples who met each other “through friends” entered a decline in the mid-90s, right around the time when the general sex decline started (https://www.businessinsider.com/most-american-couples-meet-online-2016-9).
What else started to happen around the mid-90s? Cable TV subscriptions reached a majority of American homes, and cable networks put more resources into quality content of their own, while network TV shows were increasingly written with cable reruns in mind. VCRs also started to reach market saturation, and prices for tape rentals and purchases declined due to economies of scale, before DVDs came along and totally transformed the home video landscape. The internet started to enter the mainstream, and changes in the practices of credit card companies made it much easier to shop from home.
In short, it has become increasingly easier to find things to do without leaving your house. This meant that people spent more evenings at home, which thanks to network effects meant that everyone had a harder time meeting other people in meatspace. Today, it’s reached a point where even nightclubs and bars are feeling the pinch (http://www.6am-group.com/why-are-so-many-nightclubs-in-europe-closing-down).
The next question is: why hasn’t online dating fixed this? My favored explanation to this is also simple: people can and do lie about anything in online dating profiles, and there are huge opportunities for trolls (I have a feeling that many men who send dick pics to women online fall into this category, rather than legitimately thinking that this could get them laid) and scammers to make other people miserable. Online shopping had similar problems when it first started out, so websites developed systems for customer feedback and fraud reporting. But those systems can’t work in a “market” where everyone is trying to sell one thing once.
Online job seeking has a lot of similar problems to online dating. Recruiters talk about posting a job ad and getting flooded with applications, many of which have no relevant experience and were clearly sent by some kind of automatic program, while many job seekers report sending out application after application and getting nothing in response. But imagine if there was a huge social stigma on posting your job history or getting recommendations from previous employers, and you’d probably end up with something similar to the online dating scene.
If I’m right, then it isn’t an easy problem to solve. It’s not like we can uninvent the internet (though we do seem to be in the process of uninventing Netflix, so I guess that’s something https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/disney-streaming-service-netflix-coming-soon), and technological solutions seem to be intractible unless polyamory gets *much* more mainstream acceptance.
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