>Many of the workshops focused on outward signs of confidence like posture and clothes but left alone a history of deeper maladjustment. You can remove a guy’s fedora in an afternoon, but the rest takes years.
aye, and if this isn't the core issue for pretty much everyone who feels out-of-place, unloved, and had issues dating
I think there was a small chance in my past that I might've tumbled down the angry atheist / LessWrong pipeline. I actually knew a guy who did. I have to thank an English teacher who had us read Slaughterhouse-Five for steering me clear and leading me to secular humanism. that moral philosophy meant anyone as low and terrible as me (at least as low and terrible as I thought I was) still deserved to be treated with compassion and it made me feel loved for the first time in my life
I'm one of those people who benefited immensely from therapy (CBT at the time though I'd probably try ACT now). the me before therapy had the emotional maturity of a teenage boy, who thought you could and should rationalize away feelings, that they were fundamentally illogical. I'm decades beyond that now, in the best relationship of my life, equal partners with someone I deeply respect and love, and who everything feels natural with even after ten years. the key to all of this has been the fact that we validate one another, that we give each other the grace we would want for ourself. it's a real change and a watershed thing for me - realizing that you don't have to internalize your experience of having your feelings invalidated
that sad version of myself, who thought you could somehow extrinsically 'solve' despair and loneliness through some kind of scripted performance, that's the multi-verse version of myself that needs someone to tell him that he can be loved, that he doesn't deserve to suffer. here's to hoping these attendees are able to grow out of that same phase I had once been in one day - it's sure to do the world a lot of good if they did
Looking back, I also realize how close I was to falling into various shit. MLM schemes, 4chan far-right, this thing to name a few...
Somehow I got lucky. Somehow I read Terry Pratchett, Frank Herbert, Immanuel Kant to name a few.
And somehow knowing that "humans are never means to an end" or "humans are more than things", truly putting that as a cornerstone is great immunity against these viruses.
Look at this event. It's not seduce con. It's slutcon. Reducing women to an object of desire. That's what's inherently repulsive.
true enough, there's a reductionism at play here where it seems like it'd be easy to mistake the small percentage of women who like many partners (which presumably isn't even every 'flirt girl' like the author) to any broader category
that said, I have more sympathy for these types than the assholes I've known who literally used pick up artist shit to get with women. that line about so many attendees revealing autism diagnosis softens the angle a bit for me. if you're made to be subaltern, it is by the grace of luck that you don't fall down an extremist rabbit hole. I think about that passage by Solzhenitsyn a lot -
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
Socrates taught us: Know thyself!
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t."
I think attendees would probably claim that they don't see women as objects and the 'slut' label applies to all attendees (at least that's what a nominally sex-positive convention would portray it)
even if you and I know it's more a convention for predominantly hetero dudes lacking certain kinds of functional insight into their own self and the many people who want to sell cure-alls or culty thought-terminating cliches for the downstream symptoms, you'd probably get a lot of resistance to change if you were to push on that angle
I think there's a lot to be said about positive reinforcement > positive punishment (ie shaming) for actual behavioral change. that might be a bit of a utilitarian perspective but aye, I would pull the lever for the trolley
paimapi · · focus · HN ↗
aye, and if this isn't the core issue for pretty much everyone who feels out-of-place, unloved, and had issues dating
I think there was a small chance in my past that I might've tumbled down the angry atheist / LessWrong pipeline. I actually knew a guy who did. I have to thank an English teacher who had us read Slaughterhouse-Five for steering me clear and leading me to secular humanism. that moral philosophy meant anyone as low and terrible as me (at least as low and terrible as I thought I was) still deserved to be treated with compassion and it made me feel loved for the first time in my life
I'm one of those people who benefited immensely from therapy (CBT at the time though I'd probably try ACT now). the me before therapy had the emotional maturity of a teenage boy, who thought you could and should rationalize away feelings, that they were fundamentally illogical. I'm decades beyond that now, in the best relationship of my life, equal partners with someone I deeply respect and love, and who everything feels natural with even after ten years. the key to all of this has been the fact that we validate one another, that we give each other the grace we would want for ourself. it's a real change and a watershed thing for me - realizing that you don't have to internalize your experience of having your feelings invalidated
that sad version of myself, who thought you could somehow extrinsically 'solve' despair and loneliness through some kind of scripted performance, that's the multi-verse version of myself that needs someone to tell him that he can be loved, that he doesn't deserve to suffer. here's to hoping these attendees are able to grow out of that same phase I had once been in one day - it's sure to do the world a lot of good if they did
ArcHound · · focus · HN ↗
Somehow I got lucky. Somehow I read Terry Pratchett, Frank Herbert, Immanuel Kant to name a few.
And somehow knowing that "humans are never means to an end" or "humans are more than things", truly putting that as a cornerstone is great immunity against these viruses.
Look at this event. It's not seduce con. It's slutcon. Reducing women to an object of desire. That's what's inherently repulsive.
paimapi · · focus · HN ↗
that said, I have more sympathy for these types than the assholes I've known who literally used pick up artist shit to get with women. that line about so many attendees revealing autism diagnosis softens the angle a bit for me. if you're made to be subaltern, it is by the grace of luck that you don't fall down an extremist rabbit hole. I think about that passage by Solzhenitsyn a lot -
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
Socrates taught us: Know thyself!
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t."
ArcHound · · focus · HN ↗
I just wanted to pinpoint what bothers me (and probably others) about this event.
paimapi · · focus · HN ↗
even if you and I know it's more a convention for predominantly hetero dudes lacking certain kinds of functional insight into their own self and the many people who want to sell cure-alls or culty thought-terminating cliches for the downstream symptoms, you'd probably get a lot of resistance to change if you were to push on that angle
I think there's a lot to be said about positive reinforcement > positive punishment (ie shaming) for actual behavioral change. that might be a bit of a utilitarian perspective but aye, I would pull the lever for the trolley