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On the one hand, you're not wrong in that we exacerbate the psychological damage to victims of abuse by our treatment of sexuality, and we do so on many levels. Part of the reason why victims feel so much shame about what they've been through is because we go out of our way to treat it as shameful.

But that's not the scary thing here in the least; the scary thing is how absurdly many of these men are immediately and overtly predatory towards someone they evidently clearly perceive as being a target for manipulation. They contacted her unbidden for the sole purpose of getting sexual gratification out of an individual who they knew was at a disadvantage to them. What are the cultural roots driving this behavior? What does it say about the perception of sex we're engendering in these men that they're so driven to express their sexual will on someone they perceive as vulnerable? These could never constitute a healthy sexual interaction, they are compulsively extractive and impersonal.

I'd argue the real damage that our society does is foster in people an addictive appetite for exploitation and satisfaction through the expression of power over others. No doubt, for these men these young children don't register in their minds as human beings, but as valued objects they can attempt to have control over.

How deeply fucked up are we as a society that hordes of men seek sexual satisfaction through that kind of dynamic? What did we do to them to generate a pathological craving to dominate and feel power?

I'd argue that perhaps this is just what a society based around hierarchies does.




Women just have to learn to deal with such men. As the current top comment says, she was first cat called at age 6. So women learn early that there are men after them.

I don't mean it as victim blaming or shrugging it off, either. It is in a way a sad fact of life. On the other hand, I personally think there is too much emphasis on the downside of being attractive, and not a lot on the upside.

Personally, to be honest, I also think about a rich white woman walking through a poor village in a third world country. She'll be swarmed by beggars, but is she really oppressed?

As another commentator answered, men typically experience nothing of that. Zero, zilch, nada - no interest by other people at all. I am not convinced that is the better side of the deal. The usual comment will be "talk to women" - I have talked to women who would be bothered if nobody would notice them on the street. So there is that.

To point to another example: we learn to lock our doors, don't show our valuables around, and so on. Not because everybody else is a thief, but because a few people are thieves after our valuables. It sucks, but outrage about it doesn't really help against it. Not do draconian laws, it seems.

On the internet, there are presumably over 3 billion people, so if you are fishing for predators, you can easily attract some, even if their general prevalence in the population is low. Even a "horde" would be few in relation to the several billion total.

Another issue, of course, is how to explain it to young girls. I am really not sure what to tell my daughter yet.


> Women just have to learn to deal with such men

You're not even considering the idea it could be different. Many people have lived in communities where they don't lock their doors because they were actually able to trust the people around them.

You realize that it is the disparity itself that creates such incentives to harm each other? The rich woman is an apt comparison, because I think the extreme stratification of society is a large part of what creates this incentive to prey. Women are still today decisively limited in their access to wealth and power unless they appeal to powerful men, which is the attention they want. Most men don't get any attention because they are of relatively little worth compared to the rich and powerful, likewise their sense of the worth of women is warped and judged by the standards of the rich and in their desperation to feel powerful they prey upon women they think meet those standards. It's disgusting on every level for everyone involved except the most powerful men, the ones who sit atop the pyramid. Does this sound just?


> You're not even considering the idea it could be different. Many people have lived in communities where they don't lock their doors because they were actually able to trust the people around them.

The trust in these tightly-knit communities is generally maintained by driving off predatory and criminal folks, and/or by harshly and promptly retaliating against them should anyone be victimized. Unfortunately, this is not something that can work beyond the scale of a fairly small town or perhaps a "gated" neighborhood in a larger city.


I disagree completely, trust is rare in gated communities and police states. The more harshly the law is enforced, the more clear the sign that people do not trust each other to follow it. Trust is most easily maintained by people simply having no need to steal because there is nothing they want more than they want the trust and respect of the people around them. Why would I steal from you if you're no richer than I am and I know you'd help me in my time of need if it came? Society starts to break down when there come to be things that people view as more valuable to them than each other's good will and friendship.

That is to say, trust is only possible under conditions of equality.


Whenever the talk comes to equality and so on, I actually do think about women, or mating partners in general. While you could perhaps try to distribute property to everybody in equal amounts, so that (in your theory) nobody would have a reason to steal anymore, what about mating partners?

It seems some socialist communities actually tried to make it mandatory for women to sleep with everybody, but I don't think that is a good solution (not sure if that needs to be discussed).

So mating partners to me show that that equality in society you describe is not really attainable.

And even if everybody would own the same things, it wouldn't imply that nobody would want other people's things. If you would steal stuff from somebody else, you would still have more things than before.

I also don't think it is generally true that only poor people steal. Many criminals seem to become rich and they don't change their mind afterwards.

And there would be all the other issues with socialism - some people would work more, some would work less, yet all would get the same things. That would be another recipe for dissatisfaction and social unrest.

Your story of "men preying on women that fulfill the standards of the rich" also doesn't ring true to me. Why would non-rich men find other things attractive about women than rich men? And why can't they have normal relationships with women, why is it preying if a poor man contacts a woman? It is also definitely not true that women depend on men to make a living these days.

Of course you can consider the long-term effects of whatever morals you want to instill in society. For example Christianity seems to have done quite well with their monogamy mandate, providing most people with a mating partner. In reality, presumably the few attractive men and women would be happier if the attractive men could mate with several women, and the women could get to only mate with the most attractive men. It would just leave many men (the majority) in the dust, again causing social unrest. Other societies try that model, and have problems of their own.


What is attractive in society is always aligned to the values of that society. Contrary to what evopscyh would have you believe, there is massive cultural variation in the standards of attractiveness. Wealth inequality itself is the most massive driver of inequality in partner selection; the entire reason a mandate to monogamy exists is because there is a huge incentive for all partners to flock to the richest person. If we lacked wealth inequality, we would have far less inequality in the factors of attractiveness, and less sensitivity to those factors which still existed. Being attractive in modern society is an incredibly time and resource intensive activity, and is composed of far more than raw genetics. And even then, those genetic traits are weighted in value by society. The reason all of this takes on so much importance for us is explicitly because we are constantly awash in the act of competition to climb the socioeconomic hierarchy.


I don't think that is true at all. If wealth was taken away, physical attributes would simply become more important.

It's true that culture has effects on what is considered attractive. That doesn't mean it is arbitrary, though. And I don't think any culture managed to make unhealthy people attractive, for example.


It's pretty common for societies to do exactly that. For example, if you look at the descriptions of beautiful women in the Victorian society, it overlaps pretty well with the symptoms of tuberculosis - obsession with unhealthy levels of thinness, or pale translucent skin.

And whenever you look at what underpins it, it almost always has to do with class and wealth - basically, physical traits that correlate with lack of need to perform hard menial work become a mark of belonging to the upper class. Better yet when it's physical traits that make it impossible to perform such work from birth, or close to it. When they didn't exist, they would sometimes be invented, such as foot binding.


All explained by signalling theory - signalling status, which is useful for survival of offspring. That's what I mean by it isn't arbitrary. And it isn't all about wealth, either. Walking in high heels proves a certain level of fitness, for example.

And most things that are seen as attractive in women are simply signals of youth, as young women can have more children than old women. You can't remove that with socialism.

As for descriptions of women in Victorian society, they may just be caricatures, or something like modern fashion photography might be going on - the women displayed in fashion photography (artificially thinned) are not actually the ones men find the most attractive. It might be more of an intersexual competition between women. And again status - in our world thinness proves status, because it is difficult to be thin. In scarcity worlds, some fatness proves you are rich and can afford to eat.

(Peacocks signal with their tails that they are healthy and strong, even though they have no society they live in, so no inequality and class struggles).


> (Peacocks signal with their tails that they are healthy and strong, even though they have no society they live in, so no inequality and class struggles).

And yet many animals have very little sexual dimorphism and exhibit very little sexual competition or selectiveness, so it would clearly seem to be a result of their evolutionary niche or environmental factors that lead to one behavior or the other. The most common example being the differences in form/behavior between the chimpanzee and the bonobo. The difference being that the bonobos live in relative abundance because they are not subject to competition with the gorillas. Likewise if humans did not face the intense artificial scarcity imposed upon us by strict social hierarchy and economic inequality, we might see our society shape itself much more like bonobos than chimpanzees.


> How deeply fucked up are we as a society that hordes of men seek sexual satisfaction through that kind of dynamic? What did we do to them to generate a pathological craving to dominate and feel power?

Maybe they’re just a small minority of psychopaths that have always existed, and the internet has made it easier to trick them into revealing their true nature and produce objective evidence of it.




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