"I held my tongue as she told me: 'son
Fear is the heart of love'
So I never went back"
Death Cab for Cutie - I Will Follow You into the Dark
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"We'll ditch you in the harbour if we must
But if it all works out nicely
You'll get the bonus you deserve
But if it all works out nicely
You'll get the bonus you deserve
From doctors we trust.
That's what we're paid for here"
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"I come along, but I don't know where you're taking me
I shouldn't go, but you're wrenching, dragging, shaking me
Turn off the sun; pull the stars from the sky
The more I give to you, the more I die"
I shouldn't go, but you're wrenching, dragging, shaking me
Turn off the sun; pull the stars from the sky
The more I give to you, the more I die"
Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug
______________________________________________________"Let me be your ruler
You can call me queen bee
And baby I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll rule
Let me live that fantasy"
Lorde - Royals
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"I'm trying to figure put what's so wonderful about the women of
Basilica that a man like Elya keeps coming back here when he could live
in one of those places where men have their way all the time."
Only now did Issib answer. "In the first place, Nafai, there is no place where men have their way all the time. There are places where men pretend to have their way and women pretend to let them, just as women here pretend to have their way and men pretend to let them."
Only now did Issib answer. "In the first place, Nafai, there is no place where men have their way all the time. There are places where men pretend to have their way and women pretend to let them, just as women here pretend to have their way and men pretend to let them."
Orson Scott Card - The Memory of Earth
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"he knew that there was a filthy secret at the heart of power, and that that secret was in a sense a pornographic secret: that some people don't even need the excuse to wield power. They won't say we're doing it for your own good, or to civilize your colony, or to save you from communism, or to save you from fascism, or to liberate you from capitalism, or anything from this kind, not even an excuse. We're in power 'cause we like it. We're in power 'cause we enjoy punishing people. We're in power 'cause we enjoy owning people. We enjoy telling them what they can do. We enjoy telling them when we feel like having sex with them and when we don't. We do this for its own sake."
Christopher Hitchens - speech on Why Orwell Matters, 2002
Christopher Hitchens - speech on Why Orwell Matters, 2002
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"The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. [...] The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts were largely successful."
George Orwell - 1984
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"All men are playing with five fouls now. As they should."
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"Ben, why should anybody want that sort of power?"
"Why does a moth fly toward a light? The drive for power is even less logical than the sex urge... and stronger."
Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
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"Certainly a bloodthirsty character, without a doubt. I also told you that the character is romantic — so he is, as far as women are concerned, and erotic."
"Certainly a bloodthirsty character, without a doubt. I also told you that the character is romantic — so he is, as far as women are concerned, and erotic."
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Sandra and Woo proves difficult to praise because it's difficult to define. From month to month and year to year it might give its readers a puzzle to solve, racoon domestic comedy, art student in-jokes, pop culture humor, parodies of genre fiction like detective stories, etc. It's remained one of the few palatable webcomics after their descent into self-righteous anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight fundamentalism.
Three months ago, they ran a poll on the tired old issue of chainmail bikinis: if you don't like underdressed female video game characters and overdressed male ones, would you prefer both sexes sexy or sensible or both options? The results showed that women and men agree almost perfectly, as expected given they're both playing to each other. Most would like to have both options open, or if not would prefer the sensible adventurer garb option. However... aside from the common pitfalls of self-reported samples, this was not a sample of the human population, but of Sandra and Woo readers. Footnote citation humor fans can hardly represent the human norm, and men responded to the poll at an eight-to-one ratio compared to women.
Of course, an opinion poll is ill-suited to explain how we've arrived at a particular opinion. In Sandra and Woo's case, we can assume thirteen years' worth of comics featuring a clever female protagonist but refusing to toe the anti-male female chauvinist line have narrowed readership accordingly to a set knowingly dodging sartorial clichés. A more interesting question is how the populace at large have arrived at the inescapable consensus of sexualizing absolutely every single damn piece of entertainment while at the same time wailing and moaning (not in a good way) that sexualization can only be the result of evil, sadistic men foisting their inferior, demonic lusts upon pristine, angelic, innocently suffering women.
The answer, though Heinlein missed it and Orwell skirted it, is that the drive for power is synonymous with the sex urge, doubly so for women. While females display their fertility/willingness to mate, these are rarely in question for a man. His reproductive worth is instead weighted most heavily by the resources or protection he might provide in the future, during the cripplingly extended period of pregnancy and infancy. The overdressed male's layer upon layer of status symbols, the knight's shining armor, are as sexual a display as the underdressed female's breasts and buttocks.
The feminist claim that female beauty if a tool of male oppression is readily falsified by any number of real-world observations, but here's a fun one: the U.S., where feminists are among, if not the most vocal on the planet, is by pure coincidence also the most profitable cosmetics market. And the most profitable fashion market. Why would you expect virtual worlds to be any different? I reiterate my challenge from last decade: ladies, if virtual attractiveness be such a burden, by all means let's all make our avatars as deformed and disfigured as possible, and we'll see who cries "uncle" first, auntie. **
Returning to the more salient question of why men are being condemned on a fabricated accusation, let me suggest it's not a bug; it's a feature. The accusation of the male gaze exists in order to provide ammunition against men, and that goes back to the question of how females secure men's service. The particular means hardly matter, because once our offspring's survival began to favor paternal self-sacrifice, any and all tricks a female can pull to keep a man contributing amplified that advantage. Sex appeal works, though subverting protective instincts via neotenized cuteness is more insidiously reliable, but for the purposes of this discussion it's more interesting to consider female victimhood in light of Ayn Rand's comment on government control:
"when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt."
So yes, of course women rail against sex appeal even as they ransack the discount racks for tube tops, sun dresses and bikinis. Whether you're wearing a burka or cleavage down to the southern hemisphere, either way men should be made to feel guilty about it! Guilt is leverage. Guilt can be monetized. Guilt is power, and power, psychological control over a man translated, for hundreds of thousands of years, into more viable offspring. We have inherited those instincts. If you think I'm painting the fairer sex in an unfairly Machiavellian light, remember instinctive drives require no premeditation. Much like the drive to rut, the drive to control need not be spelled out, defined or "socially constructed" - it exists because it's been reproductively favorable, and it will persist in each new generation regardless of having never been verbalized.
A woman is not lying to you when she presents you with such a Procrustean demand as praising her sex appeal while demonizing sex appeal. She is merely acting out a belief as firmly rooted in our psyches as our love of sucrose and sunlight. A female nitpicking a man believes her bullshit as fervently as every male who finds himself acting on the unanalyzed belief that if only, if
he only kicks the ball across the goal line one more time, if he only
brings home one more paycheck, if he can just manage to afford one more
pair of earrings as a present, if he just vanquishes one more foe in
righteous trial by combat, then at long last he will find himself loved
and respected instead of merely grudgingly tolerated as a filthy draft
animal in his own home, as a utilitarian extension of his family unit's
social status. She believes her own personal fable just as you believe
yours. She quite likely honestly believes, without ever having considered it, that by enslaving you she is benefitting you, that
she is civilizing you, that you will be happier by acceding to her demands. She's doing it for your own good. It feels like she's making you a better person, fitting you to the familial ideal.
It feels right and fitting to us that men should live in constant fear of female condemnation, indebted from birth.
And if she thinks even less about it, she probably just enjoys the rush of power, sitting in judgment of you, constantly finding more crimes of which to convict you, even as she herself selected you as mate based on your criminality. Because let's face it, if you had not taken the even chance of getting kissed or slapped in response to coming on to her, you'd never have been permitted to bask in her august presence in the first place.
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* A comment intriguingly predating the '90s popularization of Interview with the
Vampire (1994 film adaptation) and the swooning gaggle of Twilight fangirls the following
decade(s). Christopher Lee knew his craft
** Seriously, how many female fans does an aggressively grotesque game like Urtuk have?
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