181–190 of 699 posts
Interesting essay. As a fan of cinema, I've noticed that there is a clinical deadness lately when it comes to representing real people. I don't agree with the conclusions of the essayist, but there's something there. Verisimilitude is gone. Real people are gone. In their place, there's a clinical, sterile plastic automaton put together by marketing departments. Even when there's nudity and sexuality, it feels like a…
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I find the War on Terror explanation a little far fetched. Yes, that was a bit much. The Cold War produced a much more serious fitness boom, especially during the Kennedy Administration.[1] It also produced an education boom. Today, 71% of young Americans are ineligible to serve in the military.[2] Too fat, too dumb, too criminal, or too drugged. There seems to be little concern about this at political levels. [1] ht…
I wonder if the lack of concern is because of the future of autonomous warfare. There's drones of course, but also tech that enables things like aircraft carriers to run with much fewer crew. I'm betting that national healthcare will cause a fitness boom. We'll start seeing each other's poor health as tax money, and there will be more stigma for being overweight.
Don't see this in Canada, where tax dollars pay for it. Stigma only works if there is a majority against a minority. Most people are fat.
> This cinematic trend reflects the culture around it. Even before the pandemic hit, Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them. Maybe we’re too anxious about the Apocalypse; maybe we’re too broke to go out; maybe having to live with roommates or our parents makes it a little awkward to bring a partner home; maybe there are chemicals in the environment screwing up our hormones;…
Part of me wants to put the blame on the female side for the reduction of sex. Mostly because girls will be slut shamed for doing anything sexual. So girls hold it back. You can't blame them for being conservative in the society we live in. Stop telling the female half of the population that they need to be innocent virgins,sex is normal. The other excuses don't really resonate with me. Roommates? We were having plen…
Last time I had a girlfriend I'd come off a 2 year spree of virtual homelessness and poverty. I was living with my parents (mom and dad, both separated) transiently. I was dirt poor, drugs problem, losing jobs etc... She was in college studying to become a nurse. It wasn't one of those asymmetrical relationships either. She wasn't on the goon squad.
Now that I have money, my own place, some direction and intention in my life... In most context where I have exposure there's some sort of hazard. Like trying to do anything at work when there might be a signal there seems like a terrible idea. Way too much potential for bad shit. At college, well shit I don't know if I'd be okay with dating anybody younger than 21, or a 21 year old for that matter (which is the rough majority). Even if we assume the age floor was 28 I still wouldn't dare approach anybody without evident interest, and networking at school is impossible because I'm swamped with work and work. I can get conversations started on Tinder, but they burn out fast and hard, no effort on the other end. I get a lot of matches, but I've only managed to finagle 2 dates out of what has to be hundreds of matches. I can't say how many I've actually opened, the odds look like shit regardless. Doesn't help that I live in an ultra-conservative rural cesspool where there's like... .5 degrees of separation.
And then what are you to take from all the man-bashing shit? All the vitriolic speech against white males? And so on and so forth.
I'll go to pornhub, thanks.
My money’s on this one.
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I appear to be the highest ranked woman on Hacker News. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent any time on the leader board here (under a different handle). A number of people on the leader board are millionaires. I have reason to believe their participation on HN is part of what makes them wealthy. I was homeless for nearly six years and remain dirt poor and continue to get a lot of guff any time I try to…
Thank you for your honesty. > While I was homeless, men sometimes offered me cash to sleep with them based solely on my looks and obvious poverty. The way I find girls is through a community forum which practices reviews. I very rarely visit a "new" girl which doesn't have good reviews from reputable members so while I am sorry to hear your experience, I have never offered money to a girl for sex out of the blue or b…
I'm not making any of the assumptions you accuse me of. I'm just trying to say that the world of work and opportunities available to women are different than for men, so their logic for why they make certain choices may not be what a man would expect based on how he thinks about his choices in relation to how to earn a living.
I'm medically handicapped and for that reason I have been celibate for nearly 16 years. If I thought I could successfully become a sex worker or exotic dancer and make good money for a while to pay off my debts and pay cash for a house, I would likely do that. I have no moral objection to sex work and I've thought a great deal about it and a lot of marriages are thinly veiled sex-for-money deals, in essence.
I would rather get paid by the hour for sex than be some man's property pretending we "love" each other when we don't. I'm crystal clear on that detail.
I'm sorry if you feel uncomfortable with the idea that maybe some of these women don't really want to be doing this kind of work and feel like it's a big moral issue if they don't. But the simple reality is that, say, in Hollywood, women need to look good and be sexy to become successful. In contrast, men are deemed to be sexually attractive because they are successful.
When push comes to shove, women are expected to use their sexuality to some degree to open doors career-wise in a way men are generally not expected to do. This is rampant across multiple industries and it's something people mostly don't want to talk about and it's part of why you see so much sexual harassment of women on the job, etc.
I haven't caved to the pressure to go that route because I have a bigger personal demon looming over me that does such terrible things to a person it is classified as a dread disease.
But trying to get into that probably isn't clarifying anything. It's probably just opening up a giant can of worms pointlessly.
I think I will stop here, whether it served to clarify anything or not. Sometimes the least worst action is just "stop digging your grave deeper."
You have a good day.
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I bet there's a cottage industry of porn that specializes in serving you that kind of experience. Even if it's just packaged from existing movies and more "softcore" or something. Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be. And if there's enough demand (and it's legal), people will make specialized porn to serve it.
Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be. It seems like you're using something like the efficient market hypothesis without looking at the evidence. I'm not a huge porn consumer but I've seen enough and know enough of the industry to say you're basically wrong, at least wrong as far as any "cottage industry" for porn with decent production values, acting or "sincerity" goes. The key thi…
Someone solves that safely and they'll do really well imho.
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> The public had infinite access to the sexual equivalent of gourmet food If you think porn is "gourmet", you've not watched enough of it. Porn is the McDonalds of sex: repetitive, predictable, largely "safe" (with minimal care, you won't see what you don't want to see), and purposedly all-encompassing but still largely detached from the real thing. I'm an unabashed porn consumer and I have to tell you, I yearn for a…
I bet there's a cottage industry of porn that specializes in serving you that kind of experience. Even if it's just packaged from existing movies and more "softcore" or something. Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be. And if there's enough demand (and it's legal), people will make specialized porn to serve it.
[1] which are all really boring, seriously they're like four hours long and nothing happens, and that's besides the completely different set of morals and expected fetishes
Tiny point: "It was all bullshit: no one looks like that without calorie restriction." I'm 6' and I've weighted 135-145 pounds for my entire adult life and I'm 50+. Being a guy, I never restricted my calorie intake. I'd expect there are women with a similar metabolism. Which isn't to say that a lot of skinny celebrities aren't dieting like mad to get this look. But probably some percentage aren't and the rest hate th…
It would appear that the article briefly engaged in overgeneralization and propagation of the “you can’t be skinny unless you under-eat” myth.
[0] I’m sure it’s somewhat less of a problem for her than for me, as the weight gain issue applies to muscle mass as well and that stereotypically matters more for males. As a downside that affects us both, though, we sometimes experience an issue where inadvertently not eating enough—and this would still be more than a person on a diet might eat—can result in very unpleasant states with shakes and headache (probably low blood sugar or something like that).