So I had to re-ban a couple of long-banned trolls today, who had returned with new names and slightly different IP addresses but who gave themselves away with their behavior. And that got me thinking about the people — well, the MRAs and PUAs and other such charming folks — who regularly denounce me as an evil censor of FREE SPEECH.
In fact, when I ban people, I do so for good reasons: one of the two trolls I banned today was a longtime MRAish commenter here who eventually creeped everyone out by boasting about having sex with underage prostitutes; the other was a man of many sockpuppets known for angry, abusive meltdowns full of slurs.
Anyway, so I thought I’d give you all a glimpse into my “trash” folder. Here’s a sampling of comments from would-be first time commenters at Man Boobz that I felt would not add anything to the discourse here. But in the interests of FREE SPEECH I thought I’d give these “ideas” an airing today.
TRIGGER WARNING for violent and offensive language. (Sorry about the quality of the last two; you can click on them to see larger versions.)
Not all of the comments I trash are quite this awful. Some are only mildly violent or abusive. I tend to be a bit picky with people’s first comments, assuming that if someone posts a shitty first comment it’s not likely to get any better after that. There are a few banned commenters who stop by and try to post anyway, including one fellow who leaves endless comments trying to prove, as far as I can tell, that teenage girls are objectively hotter than women in their twenties and older.
And, of course, there are comments targeting individual women, whether these are giant cut-and-pasted rants about Anita Sarkeesian, vaguely threatening remarks aimed at other well-known internet feminists, or bizarre sexual comments about female MRAs from fans of theirs.
Once in a while I will get a comment from a feminist that resorts to violent language; I don’t let those comments through either.
And then there are the pictures people try to post in the comments. Below, one of the ones I actually let through, depicting me in a dress with some extremely tall dude. A quick Google image search reveals that it was originally posted online by regular A Voice for Men contributor Janet Bloomfield, in a blog post of hers from last year on Disney princesses. Stay classy, Men’s “Human Rights” Movement!
Anyway, the pictures I don’t let through are worse.
I love you guys.
Fred Thursday, the cop in Endeavour? We don’t have it here in the States, but I’ve heard of it.
Ah, didn’t refresh soon enough. 🙂
DId you ever see the Inspector Morse or Inspector Lewis series, Shiraz? Endeavour’s the prequel – Morse as a skinny young ’60s detective constable – and it’s really good. They’re making a second series. The first’s out on dvd if you’re interested.
Ditto about not refreshing! 😀
Ah, okay! Consider me learned.
🙂
@cassandrakitty
as long as we’re on the topic of what’s hot, huge pecs are the best IMO
See, dudes who think they’re doomed because all women like the same thing and they’re not it? Women do not actually all like the same thing.
(“Complete asshole who hates women” seems to be almost a universal turnoff, though.)
That’s you in the picture? I thought it was supposed to be either TheAmazingAtheist or the Hairy Bikers.
Could be both Hairy Bikers on Strictly…
That must be it. I live in a small town. It appears to be a twink-free zone.
“BTW, if there’s such a thing as a heterosexual twink, I would love one.”
By the same token, there seem to be too few hetero ‘boyish’ (for lack of a better word) girls :p
Anyway – I delurked to say that you people shouldn’t be too dismissive about the concept of the “sex market”, creepy as the term may be. Let’s call it dating market instead. After all, we all know any true market is driven by supply and demand, right? But that means *individual* demand – everybody prefers something (or in this case, somebody) else, and everybody is willing to pay differently (in this case, willing to put up with different amounts of, well, whatever).
That’s what the broscience dudes forget. If they don’t want too date older women, hey fine, their choice. Let’s see if they can compete for the limited supply of younger women (yes, yes, sounds creepy but hear me out). But no, they want to have their behaviour be normalized, to set it as a standard for everybody. Essentially, they want to replace the “dating market” with “dating command economy” (ehem).
That’s also why “Men Going Their Own Way” is a good idea in *theory*. If you truly thing modern women are not worth putting up with (i.e., in market terms their “price” is too high), well, then don’t. But don’t try to force this behaviour on other men as well… which is what actual MGTOW try.
So essentially – the dating market is an area that would actually benefit a lot from true, unfettered “capitalism”, i.e. being a free market. That way, everybody can follow their own preferences, without any obligations or restrictions (like stupid, misunderstood Psycho-Evo). Which is funny considering how many MRAs are libertarians, yet they essentially want the dating market to be a central command “economy”…
Note to the commenter trying to post comments under the name “[person’s name] is a pedophile,” I’m not going to let comments through if you use that name, even though I’m obviously no fan of the person you’re talking about either.
Let’s not. Any discussion that treats human relationships as commercial transactions is creepy and diminishes us.
I’m sure this is another “misunderstood” comment by Octo that will be explained away now.
No.
No, no, no, and no.
I disagree.
A person should be dismissive of the idea of a sex market, because while it has a seductive air of applicable analogous terms, it does not apply to economic theories as those are understood and used by actual economists, and using them, these theories, to explain a sex market is a misunderstanding and a misappropriate of a very specific kind of information and system, which ends up destroying and utterly rendering null any kind of value that analogy has, while also supporting a system of misunderstood, exacerbated ignorance in an attempt to make preferences and proscriptions seem scientific (But I’m right! I’m not a fool, I’m using economics).
Economics might be the dismal science (Well, it’s dismal, science is a bit off), but it need not be used by dismal people for dismal aims. I’m going to go through exactly why this doesn’t work, and why you should be very careful about using those terms.
Why?
Because I’m an economist.
And it bugs me when people do this.
It bugs me infinitely. It bugs me like the multiplier effect bugs my sense of math.
———–
No.
Demand is not individual demand.
Demand is a function of price – the lower the price, the higher the demand, generally. The axiom is that “Demand is a buyer’s willingness and ability to pay a price for a specific quantity of a good or service”.
Willingness AND ability. Ability is just as important as willingness. It’s a review of the available MARKET, not the individual preference of a product. The term is used to describe a market analysis on idea of, say, at price point XX, how many Consumers will eat our ice cream?
Using it to mean “Demand for love” means ignoring price, willingness, ability, elasticity, the availability of substitute products and market differences, while still somehow maintaining the “scientific notion” that demand is a function of a price – which allows one to make easy, off hand statements like: “Everyone is willing to go to different lengths for different products, but old women are still yucky, just look at the way the graph slopes downwards”
Preference is not and have not been an economic term that relates to demand, because preference is nominal, and we can’t work with personal preferences in a seemingly theoretical science.
At any given price point, any given amount of producers will put out as much product as the market can withstand and they can supply. It refers to the amount of a product that producers and firms are willing to sell at a given price all, other factors being held constant. Supply in economics NEVER HAS and NEVER WILL mean merely the “Amount We Have Lying Around In Stock”, it is a specific term with a very specific meaning. Pretending that it means “Supply of”, instead of “The supply the producers put out”, means you can make statements like “People with different demands will be more willing to compete for limited supply”, which seems like it then ties into economic theory, but it does not. It is not what supply means. If there was an very high demand for young, nubile women, the market, in a free market economy, would see this imbalance (This is a called a supply shortage), and would attempt to correct it, because there was money going to waste as demand ability and willingness was not met.
What broscience dudes miss is that, according to economics, if there was such a high male demand for beautiful nubile young women, those beautiful, nubile young women would be produced and supplied.
Congratulations, I have just explained the sex trade to you.
Personal preferences does not influence economic supply, the producers of a good influence economic supply.
If you truly think not doing something is not worth doing, a person should not do this thing they do not want to do.
This has nothing to do with economics, because demand is willingness and ability, and in this case, we’re looking at no willingness. If the market terms would have someone’s “price” as too high, other people would still want to buy that thing, because demand slopes downwards, and at very high prices, you can still find consumers of a product (their willingness and ability is still present). In market terms, that’s what that means, which is very, very different from someone claiming that the “price” on an interpersonal relationship is too high to bear because all women are bitchy. Nevermind how I can’t conceptualize of a graph that somehow explains emotional states as a function of price, but claiming otherwise allows one to make the neat non-economic trick of pretending that women’s behavior are somehow a market changer, despite the fact, that in the system presented, women are the product being supplied – it allows one to make grand, magical tales about how bitches ruined dating, despite also controlling dating, supplying dating and providing dating, but those bitches are still reliant on us manly men for paying their now overwrought prices, and when we don’t, they’ll get all lonely.
It’s Revenge By Misunderstanding Economics, when what would actually happen is: “Large segments of the consumers are unwilling to pay for the supply at this price, but others still are. Perhaps we should change our business model?” with a significant amount of companies answering: “No, I’m good” and others answering “Okay, sure”.
Becoming a free market and going through unfettered capitalism is about the single worst thing that could happen to a “dating market”.
No restrictions on under age dating? No controls for the treatment of the supplied product? No oversight by anyone on how dates are acquired or set up? What people who think “Free Market” means “Wondrous Wonders” misunderstand when dealing with a personal, emotional thing like dating is that dating (and women and women in dating) is a product in economic terms, and that “free market” just means “No regulations and no barriers to entry”.
If you think a free market approach and unfettered capitalism would be the single best thing that could happen to a “dating” market, then you are saying that you want sex slavery, children imported for sex dungeons and roving gangs of “Asset Acquisition” teams chloroforming women and men of the street and selling them.
It’s not what you want to say, it’s not what you intend to say, but it is, as a fact, what you are saying, because the barriers to entry for dating are very, very, very high and the regulations we as human beings place on dating are very, very, very strict, and most importantly of all, all those things are there for a very good fucking reason, because dating and sexual activity involves other people with sapience, sentience and lives, and not blocks of wood we can transport in a container through the ocean without food while throwing out whatever happens to rot on the way to keep prices down. In free market terms, no one entity has control over any other producing entities, and consumers are free to buy any and all products at any and all times. There are grand cases for free market economics in a lot of things and terms, but “De-regulated” is about the last fucking thing you want ANYTHING resembling a dating market to be, nevermind the fact that in a dating market, dating is the supplied product, and not sexual activity, which changes every single facet of the ongoing discussion.
What would constitute a market failure in a sexual market place?
What would the multiplier effect be like?
Does wages and work have an influence on a sexual market place?
Is it micro or macro economic?
Are you applying Keynesian, Neo-Classical or, god forbid, Austrian economic theories to the dating market?
What kind of market structure does the sexual market place have, pray tell?
“Sexual Marketplace” is the kind of Just-So analogy that has an impact, because you can, if you want to, visualize sexual interactions like a kind of market place where people go to sell and buy their preferences in genitalia, experiences and moments of joy.
The invention of economics as a science, however, totally ruins that analogy because people then start talking in “Demand and supply of pussy”, while not understanding what those terms mean in the theories they are attempting to mangle into being.
We should be dismissive of an idea for a sexual market place.
It’s about most inane misunderstanding of a science you’ll easily find, on par with claiming quantum mechanics means water has memory, or that geometry allows one to access the Eternal spirit of triangles and bring financial success through applying proper principles of squares.
If you want to be taken seriously and welcomed with a warm embrace, definitely open your first comment with “you people shouldn’t”. Best way ever to make friends and influence people, that.
Also, understands-the-basic-principles-of-economics fistbump to Finibachi. If reading stuff like that is annoying to me after only a couple of years of economics classes, I can only image how irritating it must be for you.
I thought that was an awesome comment by Fibinachi too. I only have one question (I’m not an economist, I’ve worked with them, and my total economics training is in the design and analysis of a couple of different types of choice experiments).
My reading of the dating/sex market, as outlined by people like Octo, is that it assumes all menz have the exact same utility* for the same womanz, and that preference trade-offs don’t occur.** The only overall utility change appears to be on the basis of age, where each womanz utility decreases by some (?constant ?ratio).
Did you have anything you wanted to add with respect to utility?
* I’m using this word in its technical economic sense only. It does not equate to “usefulness”. Fibinachi will know what I mean.
** The number of factors never change, and the factor weights are aggregated using some type of basic (probably linear) function, which ignores step functions.
Well, that was quite a hammering-down Fibinachi provided there to me. And, uh, I can’t very well argue against it. Given the points you mention, Fibinachi, yeah, 1) the analogy makes indeed not much sense… and 2) can be (mis)used to justify such things as sex trade or sex with minors, things I admit I did not think about.
What I meant was, well, something along the lines of “don’t like it, don’t do it”, instead of people trying to make generalized comments about what “men do” or “women do”, but yeah, as you said… it’s not quite what I wrote. And as you exhaustingly argued, the free market analogy for that doesn’t really work out in the end.
Kiwi: Do you have a reading comprehension problem with my posts? While Fibinachi proved exhaustingly that my analogy doesn’t work, I did write about individual preference (and mistook that as ‘demand’ in the market sense, which Fibinachi rightly corrected). My point was exactly that there is NOT an uniform utility.
Stop exhausting people, Fibinachi!
(Please note that this comment is SARCASM.)
Octo: are you capable of actually communicating clearly? You wrote:
That’s one example of a constant utility in your post, aka younger women have higher utility.
Here’s another one:
Aka modern women have lower utility.
Those aren’t fucking *individual* preferences, they’re *group* preferences.
Group preferences, but not uniform preferences across the male gender as you laid it out:
“My reading of the dating/sex market, as outlined by people like Octo, is that it assumes all menz have the exact same utility*”
(how is quoting done here anyway? BBC code?)
That is exactly NOT what I wrote. Iń both cases you quote I think I made it pretty clear that this is what those people think. And would you seriously disagree with that assessment?
Octo, seriously?
So there is no stereotype that females lose their attractiveness with age, or that their utility is based on that attractiveness? Even though popular culture shoves that down my throat? I must be imagining it that there are fewer older female anchors and actors compared to their male equivalents. I must also be imagining it that it’s hilarious to show an older female with a younger male companion, whereas the opposite situation is normalised.
Because clearly ageing has no effect on how society views the competence or attractiveness of women.
Otherwise, you know, my point earlier would hold.