Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
CW: creepy dudes
A few days ago, a LWer of 15 years wrote a long very weird post about how flirting works:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3y9G4ybNb3rmTgev/why-physical-attractiveness-matters-for-men-s-dating
It made the frontpage.
Someone tried to set him right with both personal anecdotes and Aella-style research:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ytzrakjgcvCfLCCZp/contra-wentworth-on-physical-attractiveness-for-men
Here’s original poster thanking for the update, and writing
These are just very weird people.
The AI stuff is fun and all, but the awful gender takes is really why I subscribe to sneerclub. I swear some guys don’t realize how cute men can be (when they’re not posting awful gender takes anyway…) and it’s such a weird blind spot.
???
imo one should treat others as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to an end
that is to say, ugh! rationalists talk about your relation to other people without making it about consumption challenge
Ouch, “picking up a cute young thing at the bar and hot tub at the ski resort” “building a happy working relationship with a sex worker” and “romantic pair-bonding” are three different skills! No wonder he thinks looks and body language are so important if he is trying to take women straight to bed.
RMN is a pro wrestling event, but he probably means Red Means No, Aella’s consensual-nonconsent orgies.
In the same way that lazy studios need to produce a film for each element of the powerset of character IPs they own, I guess we were overdue a Rationalist x Pickup Artist episode. I’m slightly surprised the whole “model women as quasi-sentient deterministic sex machinery” idea wasn’t already very popular there, but maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.
I wasn’t around but supposedly rationalists were hugely PUA-curious in the early days when entitled nerds commiserating about not getting laid were a major voice in the community, along with a bunch of other more out there incel stuff like bi-maxxing, i.e. trying to get it on with other severely undersexed dudes to scratch the itch.
A lot of it was summarily scrubbed when they started getting money and attention.
Ah yes… the ‘bi hacking’ thing that they got real quiet about…
The tantalizingly close rat forcefem universe
The fact that in the community it was widely known who heartiste is (enough for Scott to publish an anti heartiste post) makes it clear they were in pretty deep. Normal places knew about this stuff from the ‘the game’ book (or later somebody like rooshv). Not the neonazi pua.
e: As youtube is spying on me personally, it suggested I watch ‘how one book [the game] ruined sitcoms forever’
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I mean, those sound like rookie numbers to me. I regularly spend like, less than five minutes between eye-contact-and-smile and wild hardcore sex, and most of the five minutes is the time to walk them down to the dungeon and negotiate limits. The only special trick is simply going to a space where everyone else also wants to have sex, it’s called a sex club.
Leaving aside all considerations of ethics, I cannot comprehend why the supposed bastions of rationality would waste time with baroque theories of psychological manipulation to try to coax randos during non-sexual situations into having sex, when if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever. You know, like, if I wanted to play boardgames I would go to boardgame night, if I wanted people to listen to me sing I would go to karaoke. I would not approach strangers in a bus stop and go, “hey wanna hear me sing?” The idea of doing that for sex of all things is bizarre to me.
(This is a rhetorical sneer, the pickup-artistry phenomenon is easily comprehendable; it’s because these men are not really trying to have sex, they’re trying to fulfil a gaping hole of unexamined, endless need for validation.)
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Rationalists used to more openly stew in incel culture, a big part of which is that beyond sex you are also owed undivided love and attention, so there’s probably still a big deal of self-worth attached to that.
Incels who are fine with just paying for it call themselves MGTOW and are kind of a separate subculture that I feel has mostly petered out by now, probably because it’s harder to separate from regular old women-strictly-as-sex-objects type misogyny.
Amazingly, this was the sitch for the first post
Now I have never been to a sex club nor do I plan to, but if I were to go, I’d probably try to talk to regulars to find out the workings of said club, instead of outing myself as a massive weirdo by writing a blog post on a forum ostensibly about the value of rationality.
That said, if you want sex, going to a sex club to get it is very Rational.