Fresh from the Men’s Rights subreddit, some thoughts from some dude called atiwywr on cougars, age of consent laws, and Justin Beiber.
So “cougars” are perverse, but pedophilia – sorry, ephebophilia — is natural and good?
The age of consent in most American states is 16.
Complaining that men can’t legally have sex with girls – sorry, “fertile women” – aged 15 and younger: Men’s Rights activism at its finest!
Also my hot guy folder just has pictures of money….oh wait NO IT DOESN’T
Also can I just say I love it how the comment threads often turn into discussions on philosophy? I always learn something new
Oookay…i think I made people uncomfortable now cuz it went quiet >.> sorry…
Also I read back some more and want to point out to no name that it is possible to be both cynical and idealistic. I tend to be like that, so does one of my close friends, in that we recognize there is lots of predictable shittiness going on in the world, but there is hope for us yet. As Shadow already mentioned, laws and attitudes have changed considerably over the past 60 years.
@ Quackers
I have multiple hot guy folders, organized by which guy we’re talking about. Pretty sure I’m not alone among women in this regard.
Also re. het versus gay porn and what straight women watch…most het porn is focused on women in a “don’t you want to fuck her?” way. Now, I’m bi, so sometimes that can work for me, but for a straight woman? The focus is just all wrong for a lot of straight women – where are the images of men’s bodies? Why is the cock all we’re seeing? Whereas gay porn is all about men’s bodies, so…
Nah, I think a lot of folks were already gone when you arrived. And I just had nothing to add.
Yep. I think he failed to grasp that my calling him out on that earlier was because of my (Gasp!!) cynical take on on what his possible motivations might be.
@Cassandra
My computer folders are pretty organized, but I shove all the hot guys into one, I will organize it soon…and before MRAs yell at me for being a hypocrite, I don’t care if men collect pictures of hot women. There’s a difference between keeping it to yourself and seeing sexualized women everywhere in the media.
@Dracula
Yeah that’s true, I popped in at the wrong time 😛
His whole spiel reminds me of this http://xkcd.com/610/
What an empty answer; you could literally take anything and claim that this proves your point.
btw, you do realize that your mechanistic view doesn’t actually require biological determinism, right? I mean fuck, you’re laying out social rules as a form of control, which isn’t inaccurate, but how do you not get that it affects people’s desires far more than genes do? XD
The other thing wrong with Nomless’ “it’s about good genes” argument is that “good” in a genetic context is pretty straightforward, “does it kill the organism before reproduction”? If doesn’t, it’s neutral, and neutral is about as good as it gets.
I will, again,use an example from some evolutionary biologists (I know it a radical idea, citing people who work in a field, but sometimes you just have to do something unusual). Down in Galapagos there has been an almost 40 year study of every finch on Daphne Major.
One of them, in the 80s, was really good at getting mate. The female finches all thought he had good genes. They were wrong. For whatever reason none of his offspring ever managed to get a mate of their own before they died.
If there is a “rule” I can see about, “genes” it’s that, inside a species, variety is the name of the game, because what will work isn’t obvious to the genes (they have no mental abilities at all), and the individual has no way to know what’s going to happen as a result of mating with “x” person.
So “good genes” is a null concept, in terms of what drives attraction, because it’s not obvious what they are until long after the mating has happened. My grandparents (all four of them) had good genes. Their kids have had lots of kids (I’m the eldest of seven; with a total gap of 31 years from me to my youngest sibling. My dad’s siblings have kids; he’s one of nine; spanning 53 years. My mother is the younger of three [one of whom died from TB, at the age of 3], her surviving brother had four kids, over a span of six years. Three of them have kids).
That’s good genes, by the only measure which; from a biological standpoint matters.
Type II diabetes, genetically neutral; from an evolutionary standpoint, because it doesn’t kill you before you breed. Same for most cancers, and coronary problems, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, etc.
All the arguments about “people are attracted to ‘x,y, and z’ are stories, made to justify cultural ideas. They aren’t proven science.
Yeah, nudity is not a great look for men. Notice the men in the video aren’t naked. In fact, notice those guys look like they have careers. Notice the dad-like quality of the pilot. And I’m turned on by the firefighter who saved the baby. Generally speaking, we women want our men to be protectors and providers. Fleggaard also has a commercial with sexy women. They’re all topless, and one ends up naked. Men and women obviously aren’t looking for the exact same qualities in a mate.
Alcoholism in men was greater right before Prohibition than it is now. As for the male suicide rate, single men are more likely than married men to kill themselves. So what are we going to do, outlaw divorce? Would we want to go back to a time when people were stuck in bad marriages? And I’m not giving up gender equality because some men kill themselves.
Ruby, you really are dumb. You don’t like to look at naked men, other women (and men!) enjoy to look at naked men, and your conclusion is that men don’t look good naked? Same thing for money. You’rea woman, not The Woman who can speak for all women.
Whenever Ruby talks about “women” or “woman,” I’m just gonna mentally replace those with “traditional women” or “traditional woman.” At least then I can pretend she’s talking about only a certain stereotype rather than lumping all women everywhere together. It’s a bit easier on the brain.
Just a little TMI, but I’m still watching True Blood and Eric really looks much better as he’s taking off his clothes. Oh my.
@ M. sansnom- It’s a hell of a leap to go from ‘we can see how this social construct can be beneficial to the human species- neat!’ to ‘Since I can ceatively describe this behavior as beneficial to the human species it must be written into our DNA. I have exactly zero hard evidence to prove this is a biological reality, there are dozens of alternative theories that explain the existance of social phenomina better, and there are countless examples of humans engaging in social activities that are actually counter to their survival as a species, to the point where entire civilizations have died out. But this isn’t going to stop me from treating this as hard scientific fact.’
Ha!
Just found and watchted Ruby’s video about sexy men. First off, there’s plenty of naked men in there, just as naked as women wearing bikinies or skimpy clothing. They aren’t gonna have full-frontal nudity in there in a commercial (I think its a commercial?)
Second… Aren’t the men taking the piss in that commercial? I mean, everything is just so over the top in stereotypical male hawtness (and sensitivity, gotta show that men are sensitive by having them hold babies or ruffle children’s hair, or shed a single tear while plaing a piano). One guy’s standing in the middle of a fire for crissakes. And when they start singing together in a blimp? That was just goofy.
In my opinion, the coolest one was probably the one with the falcon. But maybe I just think that falcons and awesome scenic landscapes are cool.
*sigh* typos… I don’t even car eanymore. Goddes Tpyo, take my sacrifice!
>>>Dude, Hobbes was wrong.
He was *extremely* wrong. There is no evidence at all, for instance, that the hunter-gatherer life was ‘short and brutish’. That belief comes from unfounded backward extrapolations and from observing agricultural societies that collapsed.
The current understanding of life expectancy is that it was mostly constant in the West from the days of hunter-gatherer societies but took a huge dip during the Dark Ages (right after the collapse of the Roman empire), slowly went back up over time and stagnated until the rise of modern medicine and the germ theory of illness. Of course, to the ignorant it seems like life expectancy has mostly risen non-stop (with some long plateaus) since the Dark Ages, so they just assume whatever came before the Dark Ages was even worse.
There were, of course, short spikes in life expectancy early on when societies each came up with agriculture (because it created food surpluses in the immediate) but those went back down again quickly as population density rose to the level possible with surplus creation and job specialization. And obviously when agricultural civilization fails there’s a really radical down spike of life expectancy until population comes back to a sustainable level under hunting-gathering.
It’s similar to the way Adam Smith wrongly extrapolated backwards to assume prior societies before the rise of coinage worked by barter. The economists assume barter -> coinage/markets -> credit, but in truth (as David Graeber shows in Debt: The First 5000 Years) the development was credit -> coinage/markets -> barter (barter only happens in societies that have *already* developed markets, but where the economy has broken down or coinage is unavailable or rare due to a collapse of central authority/the state). Societies before the invention of coinage worked on “Hey I need eggs.”, “Here, take them, you owe me. I might need shoes later.”, which makes sense to anyone who doesn’t assume past societies were dumber than present ones (or who doesn’t assume something dumb like the idea that economy/the market exists as its own free entity independent of the state or political organizations’ regulations). Coinage was only invented once it became necessary to trade with strangers (that is, outside of one’s own society).
Also, anyone who is a liberal or, in fact, supports a republican/representative democratic form of government should steer clear of Hobbes entirely. His Leviathan is about the need for a dictator or absolutely powerful monarch, it is antithetical to liberal government.
I’ve pretty much figured Ruby out. In the skeptic movement, it’s kinda common to hear people say stuff like “I’m a skeptic, but I still be blieve in (aliens, psychics, etc.)” The response is “you may be a skeptic in some things, but on this issue you aren’t being skeptical.”
Ruby’s like that. She may hold a couple feminist or socially liberal views, and she uses those to cover when she holds really terrible views. These labels really are only meant to apply to particular beliefs, labling yourself as something is meant to show that you generally adhere to the principles of that label.
In simpler terms, Ruby, you may be socially liberal on some things, but in this case you’re being backwards as fuck. (Oh yeah, and still shame on you for thinking rape is hilarious. “Support” isn’t just about actively promoting it, it’s also about tacitly ignoring things or not finding things to be a problem when they happen, like the myriad of people who think rape of non-prisoners isn’t that big of a deal.)
What amuses me about follies like, “men don’t look good naked” is that until very recently the reverse was the considered opinion. Greek art… all about the naked men.
Romans… lots of naked men. Michaelangelo… his naked women were (until he was in his sixties) naked men with no dicks and odd lumps where breasts ought to be.
But the ev-psychers, and other idiots, will say, “men are not as attractive as women, it’s a biological fact that women needed to be attractive to men, or the species would die out.”
Never mind that in most of the animal kingdom the males have to be the flashy pretty ones. Lions? flash.
Stallions… flash.
BIrds of Paradise… Über Flash.
Gorillas? Flash.
Baboons? Flash.
But Humans… nope, we are the reverse of that because we’re special.
Never mind that, well into the 19th century, men were the flashy dressers. So we could argue that men do need to be attractive, and the clothes being flashy are to make up for the lack of being naked; so that women could see who the good lookers are; and other men would know who the competition to beat was.
It’s as reasonable as any other just so story, and has some wider cross-cultural evidence than most Ev-psych.
And now I am off to work… where I’ll be in a kilt, so the ladies (and I am sure) some of the laddies, can have something nicer to look at than my legs all hidden with trousers.
🙂
I wonder if Ruby is actually trying to fail at being everything she labels herself as, or if it just comes naturally.
Ruby if you get anything out of this thread, take a look at the link that darksidecat posted. That should clarify the Muslim thing for you. I’m sure you’ve heard “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” If you’re skimming the surface of culture, you can come away with “Muslim countries do this.” but there is more to it than that.
Also, can you please concede that it’s not FUNNY when “evil” people get raped? I mean at least take a different angle of justification than that one, it disrespects the serious nature of their original crimes. I keep saying this and went into detail in another post, but I’m sure you have a hard time reading all these posts and things get lost. I don’t want to reiterate my argument again, but being charitable to your POV at the very least you need to admit it’s not FUNNY and change your reaction to that. So that’s my two cents on what you should be taking away from all this.
Shorter Ruby: “How is road formed?”
Her not knowing about roads being built/run by the government may be the funniest shit to come out of her yet. I actually LOLd.
The rest is just her garden-variety hatefulness and stupidity.
DOH! I was going to mention the road thing, I actually did laugh out loud at that. Ruby, where do roads come from, how did they get there? How do they work? There is a separate issue in that libertarians do argue that roads can be handled just fine and dandy by private interests. That stupid hurts.
Yeah, yeah, anyone who doesn’t conform to leftist beliefs are idiots. I get it. For all the Left’s talk of tollerance, many of them aren’t tollerant when in comes to opposing opinions. I’m sorry the idea of women wanting men to be providers and protectors is so offensive to leftist feminists. I think I’ll go back to ignoring you.
FUCKING ROADS, HOW DO THEY WORK?!