kimberlysteele: (Default)
[personal profile] kimberlysteele


The straight dating scene, if it can be labeled as a single entity, is a hot, red mess.  Dating has always been a hellscape.  Contrary to popular belief, it was worse in the days before internet hookups.  Back in the day, the people at the local pub or bar were the only real choices unless you belonged to a church or managed to stumble upon your true love in the grocery store aisle.  College has become the number one way straight people find someone to marry.  Most people go to college firstly to date and mate with education coming in a distant second or third. The current woke climate of rape culture awareness and penis-policing is one of the dumbest acts of self-sabotage ever perpetrated upon colleges and universities. If straight kids cannot go to college in order to get laid without the scrutiny of finger-pointing ninnies, they might as well skip college and its attendant crippling, inescapable, lifelong debt.  

In an age without the internet, there weren't as many choices when it came to dating.  Anyone who is a certain age remembers personal ads: tiny little bits of text in the classified sections of newspapers where people advertised themselves semi-anonymously in order to find dates.  Though I was never brave enough to answer a personal ad in my single years, I used to enjoy combing through them for laughs and to creep myself out imagining who was actually writing them.  Pictures were expensive to put in the paper back in the day -- at least in today's dating scene, there is more information about a potential suitor or mistress than a few photo-free lines of text.  Additionally, potential dates can be intensively researched on the internet.  You can bet your bottom dollar if I was single and looking in today's dating minefield that I would do the equivalent of a private investigation on my potential date before I so much as swiped right.  Nowadays, any potential date can be vetted before a physical meeting.  That is a tremendous advantage.  Compare the old timey personal ad, which was like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: you never knew what you were gonna get, in fact, you could not check out what he or she looked like.  STD bug chaser?  Sleepless in Seattle?  Bigamist with four children?  Serial killer?  Yeah.

The improvement of videos, photos, and criminal records of the potential date becoming available does not seem to help the quality issues inherent to finding someone to pair off with.  The problem with dating is... well, humans.  The internet dating scene reminds me of the advent of cable television.  More is not merrier.  While it offered six hundred channels, there was still nothing on.  

Etheric starvation is terrible, especially because it is the commonest condition of our times.  Etheric starvation is a straight and unfettered road to addiction, fatigue, disease, and broken human relationships.  It is the reason I am working on a book called Sacred Homemaking which seeks to repair the etheric via relationships with housing, the land, and its spirits, along with the courted assistance of the Divine.

Men tend to feel the sting of etheric starvation more acutely than women.  Perhaps this is why there are always more men seeking to date women than women seeking to date men: they are hungry in more ways than one.  Women do more etheric labor than men, which is to say women do more of the daily housework that enriches the etheric plane such as cleaning and cooking.  Men of this era have lost both the ability and willingness to do housework and the more male etheric labors of building, maintaining, and fixing things around the home.  

When I was dating from ages 16-24 in the late 80s and early 90s, the men I had to choose from were a pathetic joke.  They weren't men so much as boys.  The first guy I dated spent his late teens rotting in his parents' basement playing the primitive video games of the era and watching syndicated re-runs of Duck Tales, an animated spin off series about Disney's Scrooge McDuck and his nephews.  Another guy asked me out to a restaurant, bragged about paying for his car in cash, and then surprised me by refusing to pay for a modest $12 meal, which obliged me to use one of my first credit cards.  I was so new to it, I did not know where and when to sign.  Needless to say, I did not agree to see him again.  A guy I managed not to date became unemployable after a string of petty thefts from the cash registers of the fast food jobs he worked.  He impregnated my friend when he was nineteen and she was seventeen.  They had the child and tried to raise it together for a time; she ended up as a single mom.  Their baffling relationship occurred despite his reputation of sleeping with over 100 girls (and some women) by the time he was out of high school.  

In this era of etheric starvation, men and women are looking for the same thing: etheric nourishment.  Sex of any sort is nourishing on the etheric plane.  Even masturbation can offer some etheric benefits, though like anything, moderation seems to be far healthier than polar extremes of excess or absence.  Etheric labor (housework) gives rise to etheric nourishment, and because women have either voluntarily or unwillingly given up their roles as etheric labor providers, etheric starvation has reached crisis levels.  

The Low Quality Woman

The low quality woman is a grifter who depends either on her looks or a combination of her looks and catfishing in order to acquire what she believes she deserves.  She lives in a mess subsidized by someone else's unearned wealth.  She cares only about social media and her appearance.  She is addicted to buying products and services she believes will improve her image.  She is extremely expensive to maintain because she lacks the skills, humility, and energy to cook, clean, and work.  To add insult to injury, she often has children in tow who are exposed and vulnerable to the men she fools around with.  Age is her primary enemy: she cannot outrun it and as she ages, her prospects rapidly diminish because of her lack of valuable skills, spendthrift behavior, and her unwillingness to learn basic survival.  

The Low Quality Man

The low quality man is the shiftless product of incompetent parenting.  If he can be summed up in one word, it is "helpless".  He could not fix a leaky sink if it walked up to him and gave him instructions.  Any cooking or cleaning he has picked up is limited to reheated convenience food in a filthy microwave.  Despite his life constantly being in shambles, he does not feel any pressing need to right the ship.  He has relegated himself to the role of passenger in spite of being the captain.  He is dependent and meekly waits for the day when either he or his enablers will die, in which case he will see what benefits he can scrounge from the local government.  He is what we used to call a "scrub" back in the day: no motivation, no mojo, and no manliness.

Neither of these two are what anyone wants, but because of circumstance, there are plenty of low quality women and men available; in fact, it seems that they are the only types available.  

What Men Want

Men want an etheric resource in a woman primarily as a source of healing.  Men have a reputation of wanting more sex than women, but I don't know that this is the case.  Young men of this era are more voracious where sex is concerned, but that seems to be the physiological result of addictive, mass-marketed porn, including the soft porn of video games.  From my observations, men want cooking, cleaning, and CARING perhaps even more than they want sex, especially as they get older.  Men would like a gentle place to land, plus a person and a home worth protecting.  

Enter the Low Quality Woman.  Often, she is so masculine on the physical plane, the casual observer would think he leans gay for staying with her.  A reliably common scenario among straight people is the woman "letting herself go" after being pinned down in a long term relationship or marriage.  This is a sign of taking the man for granted and lacking the kind of respect that would result in an effort to maintain the illusion of sweetness or softness.  Instead, the warts are exposed for all to see, which leaves the man to either live in denial or to understand he was a fool who was tricked.

If there is a short list of what men want in a woman, I would say it is these, and not necessarily in this order: 1. Nurturing, including etheric labor and sex 2.Attractiveness and sweetness 3. To feel appreciated

What Women Want

Women want a provider and protector, especially if we have children.  Feminism is a crock and a sham for the enrichment of idiotic astral pyramids.  Women don't want to be their own warriors.  We don't want to clean the house, bake the bread (I suck at baking bread, for the record), and to have to go out and win the bread as well.  A woman needs a man who refuses to provide like a fish needs a bicycle.  The overgrown man-child is about as useful as a benign tumor, and half the time he isn't benign.  Sadly, the good providers who quickly get snapped up by high and low quality women alike are frequently so consumed by making big paychecks that they have no time to interact with the families they go to work to support. 

Enter the Low Quality Man.  He also lets himself go, albeit in a slightly different way.  He's got an ego about it, and though he may see himself as a forthright paragon of truth and justice, this is more of an ideal born of extreme insecurity than reality.  For him, taking the initiative and making a better life for himself and others is always One Day rather than Day One.

If there is a short list of what women want in men, I would say it is these, and not necessarily in this order: 1. A provider and protector 2.Initiative and independent self-motivation 3. Loyalty/fidelity

Maybe arranged marriages and marriage-as-property-alliance was better, but I tend to think the logical result of such marriages was the Hapsburgs and incest-breeding one's line out of existence.  That's what happens when you try to keep unearned wealth in the family.  I hope that in the future, people will find a happy medium between Tindr/Grindr and all in the family dowry betrothals... until then?  Good luck.  

 

 

 

Date: 2024-01-31 04:31 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] causticus
Immensely fascinating topic. Wrt what men and women really want in a potential partner, I think there's some truth to these generalizations, but the **real** answer is always revealed by "look what [person X] does, not what they say."

Also, this by far I've found to be the most comprehensive breakdown of how sexual attraction is different for men and women, respectively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4aMiAesXjE
Informative part starts at about 2 and a half minutes in.

On that last part, I agree that once the dust settles from the mass cultural insanity we're all experiencing right now, some sort of arranged marriage will become the norm again. Ofc, such an arrangement will require the reestablishment of functional families and communities, which will happen one way or another once the cheap energy bonanza finally comes to an end. I think the form of arranged marriage where there is a choice of vetted suitors is much better than one where the marriage partners have zero choice in the matter. In other words, I believe both extremes (100% sexual free market vs. hard arranged marriage) suck and are a source of misery for everyone involved.

Date: 2024-02-01 03:45 am (UTC)
methylethyl: (Default)
From: [personal profile] methylethyl
WRT the chart on sexual attraction: that is hilariously OCD. I mean, yeah, there's stuff in there that's basically true and applicable.

But really, I married my husband because he smells like a little slice of heaven. All that other stuff is just prereqs and dealbreakers. Like, even with him smelling all great, I would have dropped him like a hot potato right at the start if he'd been... mean, drunk, into drugs, unwilling to work, atheist, a lapsed Catholic, lied to me (about anything at all), etc. And if he had been all the things-- intelligent, kind, honest, quiet, sincerely religious-- if he hadn't smelled like (histological compatibility?), I probably wouldn't have been all that interested. Dunno about other women, but it's not a point scale, or a gradation. There's a yes/no on the sheer animal attraction level, which is probably in the realm of molecular biology and genetics (and almost certainly gets screwed with by hormonal birth control), and then there are a bunch of tickboxes for must-have traits, and must-not-have traits.

Date: 2024-02-01 03:28 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] causticus
Yeah haha, see my tl;dr comment below, where I talk about how this "game theory" approach contains some accurate general principles, but misses a lot of nuance.

Is your acute sense of smell normal for women? Or is this an aspie trait? (If you don't mind me asking)

Date: 2024-02-01 07:01 pm (UTC)
methylethyl: (Default)
From: [personal profile] methylethyl
Apparently, neither. It's a familial trait, but tends more toward the women in the family. Even the non-autistic family have "noses like dogs" according to my inlaws. I can smell other people's sinus infections on their breath two days before they know they are sick, track down a gas leak like a pro, and smell the difference between good-quality and bad-quality butter. And so can my mom, who is totally normal otherwise. It's a thing.

But I think in general, women tend to have a more acute sense of smell than men do.

Date: 2024-02-01 02:35 pm (UTC)
methylethyl: (Default)
From: [personal profile] methylethyl
For real. No good, sane woman who is worth having, is actually into bad boys. Plenty of dumb women with poor self-control, sure, and they are welcome to all the bad boys out there! Probably those gals are fun in bed, but if you want a peaceable home life you'll stay well away, regardless of how attracted you might be.

I know the wait-until-marriage thing is not popular these days and I certainly don't hold anybody else to that standard, but being religious I know a fair number of people (self included) who went that route, and it has one amazing thing going for it: none of us are married to crazy people. I'm sure it's possible, but the rate is much lower than average. I don't think it's strictly the religion part that's doing that. I think it's everybody resolving to keep their pants on that acts as a hyper-efficient sorting mechanism for filtering out people with mental/emotional problems and low self-control.

Outside that community I know a scary number of people who've gotten divorced and then slugged it out in the courts for years *to protect their kids from their crazy/substance-abusing ex*. They are financially and emotionally broken, because they reproduced with ladies who were super fun, and super willing to jump into bed with them... and also had no morals, no loyalty, no self-discipline, and no inhibitions. I don't care how pretty she is, you don't want her raising your children. But this is where we end up by telling everybody sex is a recreational activity, and it's just some kind of weird accident if it ends up being procreational.

Date: 2024-02-01 10:57 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] causticus
True. I see women who go for "bad boys" as an instant red flag and if I come across such a woman I avoid them like the plague. But that doesn't stop a lot of men from foolishly shacking up with them, and then predictable results ensuing.

Date: 2024-02-01 03:16 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] causticus
Yes, he sure does, lol. As you can probably tell by his vocal intonation, he's a very nerdy, left-brained type of guy (i.e. extreme of "male brain"). The sort of perspective he presents is very materialist-leaning, deterministic and "game theory", i.e. something that would make a neat little ruleset in a computer game, but leaves out a lot of nuance and exceptions, as far as how things work in the real word. I think the general principles are sound as far as how a man or woman of average (or lower) IQ and self-development goes about selecting a partner, but as intelligence and self-awareness increases, things tend to become more nuanced and interesting. In some of his other videos he attempts to incorporate a self-development ladder into the equation, but unfortunately it's a "disenchantment"-based model he borrows from Ken Wilber.

Secondly, I think the whole "bad boy" label is somewhat of a misnomer, as far as what the majority of women are attracted to in men. A more accurate label for this axis on his chart be something like "impact traits", which would be a combination of willpower, looks, and confidence/charisma. Basically, how effective a man is at impacting the world around him; THIS I've found is what women are attracted to, in addition to the "good guy" stuff on the other axis. A man can be skilled in those areas and not be "bad" at all. But yeah, a "low impact" man who is a total wimp or pushover, and lacks practical skills and street smarts is generally a turnoff to women. Yeah, some women do go for actual bad boys, but they tend to be women lacking in social status. The bad boy has those high-impact traits, but is a callous jerk or lacking in status and reliability himself; or worse, a criminal lowlife. From an occult perspective, I do think young women especially like men who can generate fireworks on the astral plane, just as men really dig women who have a lot of (etheric) sexual energy to give. Overall, I think an occult version of this scheme would be interesting to flesh out.

"What worries me is the amount of transactions he is juggling in his head, and that women are all hoes"

The operative theory here is that straight women have the in-born nature to always seek out the highest-status (or most exciting) male of the group, just as straight men have the in-born nature to relentlessly want to boink everything on two legs that's vaguely female. What evolution has programmed into us for survival is sometimes at odds with what sort of behaviors make for a stable civilization (this is why monogamous marriage was invented). Luckily, part of being human is the ability to use our rational minds and will to contain and restrain (or at least, re-channel) our natural urges. The most successful social customs religions tend to be those with rules for keeping those urges in check in service of maintaining a civilized social order (because a lot of "normies" lack the self-awareness or discipline to self-regulate without a rulebook of some sort being imposed on them).

Date: 2024-02-01 10:07 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] causticus
He's admitted in a few of his videos that he's thinks he has ruined himself from sleeping around too much (probably those experiences are what he's drawn his formulae from). And ofc he illustrated that in the form of a line graph showing how the more and more women he sleeps with, the less and less he trusts women as a whole.

I agree that he's mostly measuring purely-transactional hookups and "situationships" facilitated by those gods-awful apps.

And yeah, it seems like trying to quantitatively-measure the astral is at best a fool's errand, and at worst, a path to insanity.

I do find his type of content fascinating because I see it relating to the sort of ideas the Religion of Progress moves onto next after it drops Wokeness like third period French. (I think this process is already in its early stages). I think something akin to "Techno-Darwinism" will be the next big craze among certain factions of the elite. We already see the likes of Elon Musk leading the way.

Date: 2024-02-02 05:34 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] causticus
The Sweeper-Sleeper-Keeper thing has rung true for me as well. Back when I actively dated and chased a lot of skirts, it went something like this:

Keeper: Sufficiently attractive (Bonus points if "hot", though mid is ok if strong in other categories), compatible personality, at least a few shared interests, NOT crazy, doesn't have kids from some other guy(s), and NOT embarrassing to have around family and friends. Sad: I've only had like 2 keepers ever.

Sleeper: Sufficiently attractive, NOT crazy (learned this part the hard way), someone my friends think is fun/cool/interesting to hang around. But I'm in no rush to be exclusive with her; I'd like to keep my options open for a better looking girl. I've had tons of sleepers.

Sweeper: Ugh, too many embarrassing experiences getting dredged up as I'm thinking of this. Generally, sweepers happen when I've been on a long dry spell and really need to scratch that itch. These are the encounters I try and forget about real fast, and most certainly the ones I don't tell my friends about. I haven't had TOO many of these, but they usually were one-nighters with crazy girls or single mothers.

I think all the sleeping around (along with heavy social drinking and smoking cigs) in my younger years messed me up real bad on the etheric and astral levels. It took a few years of consistent SOP practice to get those issues to subside.

Date: 2024-02-01 07:36 pm (UTC)
methylethyl: (Default)
From: [personal profile] methylethyl
"impact traits"

I dunno. Maybe I'm just weird. My husband is really the exact things I wanted in a husband, because I knew I couldn't tolerate living with anyone else. I'm really introverted, a homebody, bookish, etc. and there's no way I would have gotten along with someone super outgoing, loud, gregarious... would've hated sharing a house with them. He's more the uh... is there an awkward sexy dork librarian/accountant type? If so, that's my type. The one guy I went out with a couple of times (accountant) before I met my husband *almost* fit that mold... but then he bought a sporty car and he was so in love with that thing, and that was the end for me. Huge turnoff. I am not going to compete for love and affection with a *mode of transport*. Also he was an un-self-aware lapsed Catholic. That's a dealbreaker.

That's what I don't get about all these game-theory dweebs. They're basically coming up with a lot of theory about why the girls they like don't like them. IME normal guys are not that picky. Whatever complex or weird preferences they have (my husband likes redheads: I'm not a redhead and I don't pretend to be) on their imaginary checklists, the number one thing they want in a woman is... a woman who thinks they're great. That's it. And women... it really is more complex, but IMO most of it comes down to, 1) Not a pervert, 2) Not a dependent, and 3) Do we get along? Yeah, women are bad about lists too-- "oh, I want a man who's rich, curly blonde, jacked but not too jacked, anticipates my every want, etc etc" but that's fantasy, not real. In real life, most people who get married end up married to someone who is comparable to themselves in looks, IQ, level of gregariousness, and class background... and that's fine and good. If you're continually chasing women who aren't interested, it's probably because there's a giant glaring mismatch you're ignoring and you need to maybe meditate on that some, give up porn (there's a great source of unrealistic expectations!), and focus for a while on developing self-awareness and practical skills (guys underestimate how sexy it is when they know how to hang a door, balance a ceiling fan, hook up a tow cable, or fix a sink drain-- everyday competence is HOT).

Making full-color charts to explain what women want in men is frankly kind of scary and self-obsessed, and if I'd ever caught my husband doing anything like that I'd've run very fast in the other direction. Just sayin. It's not the chart itself, it's the egocentrism and obsessiveness that it reveals. Who wants to live with that?

Date: 2024-02-01 07:49 pm (UTC)
methylethyl: (Default)
From: [personal profile] methylethyl
TL:DR: It's not about what "most women" or "most men" say they want. It's about what sort of woman/man you'd be good with. If you're looking for permanence and stability, and you only like "hot" women, that's a losers' game: "hot" women are playing the short-term game. If you're playing for keeps, damn near the only trait that really matters is: can this person be trusted to raise your children? Everything else is bonus points. And that applies even if you don't want children.



Date: 2024-02-02 02:41 pm (UTC)
methylethyl: (Default)
From: [personal profile] methylethyl
IKR? I know there's this insta-filter idea that women all need to be flawless skin, huge lips, heavy makeup... I'm sure it's a great professional investment for hookers, but those aren't women that normal men even approach. Thinking on the men in my life: they've all got a type and it's kind of hilarious how consistent they are with it. One guy only dates pillowy women. One chases tall girls, and another only goes for short ones. One friend I strongly suspect only dated women with an IQ over 130 because nobody else could have interesting conversations with him. We've all got our priorities. And very few of those priorities match up to the creepy homogeneity of an instagram filter. As a girl, looking for a guy, you can try to be insta-pretty and go on a lot of dates with crappy men looking for generic women, or you can just try to be the best version of yourself, get asked by fewer men, but now it's men that *you're what they like*. Way better signal-to-noise ratio there.

Date: 2024-02-01 10:12 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] causticus
Yeah men are really not all that picky when it comes to women, despite what many decades of Hollyweird products and fashion industry propaganda might suggest. Just a few basics are what counts.

Date: 2024-02-02 05:38 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] causticus
That is great. It sounds like you lucked out in so many ways with him. Or a karmic perk that was gifted to you after having to eat a lot of shale in some of your recent past lives.

Date: 2024-01-31 09:25 pm (UTC)
methylethyl: (Default)
From: [personal profile] methylethyl
https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90x75/images/aee130177ece5926e1979e98fb3c727aa89f4350b2b81558dcb13b1ec205c3fc_1.jpg

Watching my younger friends and family either trying to date, or completely giving up on it, is so painful. Like I can *feel* all the good advice about finding a good man/woman, and about *being* one, welling up inside me every time I talk to one of them, but I'm old folks now. Nothing I say has any relevance now AND... I didn't follow any of that advice myself and still ended up happily married, so go figure, right?

All the functional young married couples I know now... I know them through church. Since Orthodox are thin on the ground, and it's hard to meet someone at *your parish* it's a pretty even split between "We met on an Orthodox internet chat group and dated long distance" and "we met at church camp". So... it's still possible, if you belong to a subculture that still holds fairly traditional ideas about marriage and family. But I notice that there is a very high proportion of... in order to get married one member of the couple had to relocate a long distance. 50/50 odds whether that's the man or the woman. We're not sexist ;)

When I met my husband, on the internet (though not, in my defense, on a dating site), he was finishing up college, had never had a job, lived with his parents... just a lot of stay-away going on there. But I saw in him a deeply compatible personality, someone who was intelligent, liked quiet, had genuine religious convictions, and was totally self-sabotagingly honest. And, you know, nice to animals and children. He was just the one for me. We talked very frankly about his situation. By the time we got married, I was making enough money to live on, and he was... working at a pizza place. But to my reasoning, it was the trajectory that mattered, not where exactly we were now. I grew up in a lower-income family and my expectations were pretty modest. He grew up in a white-collar PMC family, and couldn't seem to shake his parents' expectations: a soul-crushing government desk job with a pension and benefits. I think for him, at that time, unemployment was a weird parent-induced paralytic compromize between not wanting the future his parents had mapped out, but still not wanting to disappoint them by working plebe jobs. I convinced him to just take a plebe job and we'd figure out the rest after. I mean, in my economic class, everybody starts out working in food service and gas stations. That's how you rack up a little experience and a few references so you can get a slightly better job. He had literally never encountered this model for entering the workforce. Everybody he knew got jobs by working their parents' connections, and his parents were seriously falling down on the job there.

I think his parents are still kind of ticked at me for turning him blue-collar, but we're doing OK now, and it's not my paycheck supporting the family.

Still, rescuing nice men from their overbearing parents and unrealistic PMC expectations is not exactly a strategy one can recommend...

Date: 2024-02-01 02:17 pm (UTC)
methylethyl: (Default)
From: [personal profile] methylethyl
Yeah, similar here. Just a quick survey of happy younger couples I know... two or three girls who married into the military, one engaged to a fellow three states away, who just moved here to finish college, one engaged to a fellow in the UK and planning to move there after college, one met-on-internet and moved from literally the opposite side of the planet to marry here, one met at camp and the man moved here to marry her... friend from high school met his wife through eharmony, back when that was big, and moved four states away to marry her-- they have five amazing kids now.

On the one hand, I'm delighted to see people getting married young. That whole wait-for-financial-stability thing isn't gonna fly in today's economy. Who could afford it? On the other hand, I think it's a pretty dire indicator that I am part of one of the most marriage-oriented communities around, and I know *hardly anyone* (self included) who's just met and married someone locally. It seems to indicate that the dating market is in serious, serious trouble, if there are 10,000 singles in your area, and the actual serious-looking-to-get-married pool is so small you have to find someone five states, or a whole continent, away, over the internet. But I think we've reached that point. Thank goodness for the internet... but we're gonna need something else when that fails.

Date: 2024-02-01 07:41 pm (UTC)
methylethyl: (Default)
From: [personal profile] methylethyl
True enough! I suppose you could look at it as-- we're preparing for the death of global travel by maximizing local gene pool diversity now, while we still can ;)

Date: 2024-02-01 12:19 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
This essay is interesting timing, as I recently came across the concept of a "mommune", where women pool resources to raise children together, and it really resonated with me, because as much as the right wing loves to endorse 'family values', it feels like something has shifted in the world, and men and women can no longer relate to each other in the same way any more. Plus there's just a general realisation that the nuclear family model, distanced from other relatives a) kind of sucks for everyone involved and b) is no longer financially viable for most people, considering that it was a semi-artificial construct in the first place, made possible by fossil fuels and for reasons which best served governments and big businesses. Given that for many, friends have replaced family, and that many women would (justifiably) probably rather spend time with their friends than their husband, and many husbands would rather spend their time either alone or with their friends than with their wife and children, a hive-like structure of females actually makes a lot more sense. It feels quite appropriate for the Aquarian age as well, and is arguably more akin to how other large mammals such as elephants and whales live - as pods of females with offspring, then the males are cast out once they reach adolescence.

With regards to etheric starvation, I think you are correct, but I think a lot of people, even in relationships/families are just lonely (astral starvation). Even if you really love your spouse, you can't just see only that one person for the rest of your life. Modern life is such a lonely experience.

Then let's bring in the app scene. From what I gather from friends dating on Tinder etc, the fears of incels are not unfounded - only the attractive men get any attention or replies. (Classic Pareto plot - 20% of men get 80% of women). In this market, it's basically assumed the male will be dating multiple women, and the woman will be at least in contact with multiple men to keep her options open. In either case, the male is not sticking around to raise any children or will be diverting his resources amongst multiple mothers, so the female needs her own support group for raising a child, hence the mommune. In this case, it actually makes optimum sense for the woman to chase the most attractive man available (and use catfishing/filters/excessive makeup as bait), rather than looking for any other qualities such as intelligence or long-term compatibility, as only the offspring potential matters (and just enjoyment, I guess), as the children will be raised collectively. Presumably some of the women would work part-time and look after the children the other days, others maybe work full-time with less childcare and some would be fully stay-at-home mums/childminders.

(Note that the above only applies to heterosexual women who actually want children, but I'm not saying this has to work for everyone - the Aquarian age has room for all types of social arrangements.)

Will this work in the long run after the internet age, where societies of women (and presumably, pre-pubescent male children) could exist like the archetypal mermaids and Amazons, the Drow in Dungeons and Dragons or the women of the Green Place in Mad Max, never seeing an adult man except for the occasional one foolish enough to take the bait and follow his urges for one fateful night of fun with a black widow? I'd say maybe, if they can learn to shoot well enough to keep out intruders...

Mr. Crow

Date: 2024-02-02 12:03 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Haha, point taken. I did write the above fairly late at night and went into nature documentary mode. Mommunes are more likely to be a post-bottleneck response to a lack of suitable males, or a preponderance of unsuitable ones (read: warband) like an armed nunnery with children.
There's a series of books by the science fiction author Stephen Baxter where subsets of women create eusocial hives, like naked mole rats. They re-ocurr repeatedly throughout the books and appear to be a response to societal collapse (eg. end of the Roman empire - haha, there I go again!). Mommunes may be a form of proto-hive.

I've not seen the Barbie movie either - it was heavily promoted (to the extent that in a square mile area of the poorer end of the town near me, *every single* bus stop had a bright pink Barbie movie poster last year) and lauded by the mainstream media (and they're still going on about it now, with silly artificial Oscar nomination snub non-stories), so I assumed it would be propagandic trash using a well-known brand to promote an agenda of some description. From reading the plot summary on wiki and here: (https://vigilantcitizen.com/moviesandtv/the-absolute-hypocrisy-of-the-movie-barbie/), it looks like I was probably right.

Oh, and you're not wrong about the soft porn in video games by the way - short skirts and sexualised ambiguously-legal-age young women were ubiquitous in games when I grew up. Since then, more women have got into both making and playing games and the whole MeToo thing has given most game developers cold feet about such overtly sexualised characters, but instead things have got... weirder. I went on the video game platform Steam the other day, which I'd not logged onto in years, and it seems they allowed "explicit content" a few years ago - man, the whole thing is just *lousy* with so-called "H-games" now (the H stands for hentai, or anime-style porn. I just looked up the literal translation from Japanese, and it means "depraved/perverted"). So yeah, all the addictive elements of video games and pornography in one convenient, dopamine receptor-scrambling package. No wonder young men are such a mess these days - I'm just about old enough to have missed having broadband as a teenager, for which I feel quite grateful. Although apparently in Japan it's reasonably normal to see a subway train carriage full of men of all ages idly leafing through lolita hentai comic books, so it's not a uniquely internet thing, just a "societal moral breakdown" thing. (https://i.pinimg.com/474x/04/2c/7f/042c7fd7762b9d468d14120389f41701--greek-history-ancient-greece.jpg)
Fun fact: pornography as a word actually comes from Greek, and means "drawings of prostitutes", so I guess hentai is really just taking porn back to its roots.

Mr. Crow

Date: 2024-02-02 02:49 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Ha! I don't recall ever doing that with Barbies-- because their heads were so easy to remove, most of our Barbie games revolved around crime and executions. It always sort of grieved me that we couldn't have a guillotine, only an axeman. The problem of course, was that Ken's head, once removed, was broken and could not be put back on except with superglue, preventing any further executions.

I used to think this must be weird, but now I have my own kids and can verify: kids are ALL weird.

Date: 2024-02-09 06:32 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
My younger sister for some reason had a Ken but there was no Barbie in the house. I got hold of Ken and made him a loincloth out of bark, and a miniature Ken-sized bow and arrow. Jungle Ken. Such fun.

Ohhhhhhh..... wait.... I think there was a Barbie. Briefly. She wound up under the juniper bushes very quickly and stayed there, slowly turning green as the seasons passed.

- Cicada Grove

Date: 2024-02-01 05:17 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
I met my wife in college at one of the Christian groups on campus. We were just friends, and then she went to another school the next year. When I graduated, I was a bit depressed because I thought I had failed at the primary purpose of college. We reconnected years later on MySpace (thank you, Tom) while I was in the Army. We started dating around the time my Army service was complete, married the next year, and we have a wonderful life together with more than the socially approved number of children. So, it's difficult for me to give dating advice, because our situation was a bit unusual. But I do have pity for the single people out there. Seems unnecessarily difficult, especially since flirting in almost all public spaces has been increasingly labelled as inappropriate.

Christopher Kinyon

Date: 2024-02-02 02:51 pm (UTC)
methylethyl: (Default)
From: [personal profile] methylethyl
My husband and I met on Xanga.

The nice young church couples I know now... report meeting on Discord.

Perhaps that's just how marriage-minded religious people find each other these days ;)

Date: 2024-02-05 10:52 am (UTC)
open_space: (Default)
From: [personal profile] open_space

I'm looking forward to your book on Sacred Homemaking. It's an area that really interests me and one that has been lost in the last 50 years or so. I still can't believe that a 40 year old mans apartment today has the same vibe than a college kid. Specially because I am extremely sensitive to the energies of place.

More importantly, sacred home making is a way to not let outside vibes creep in... which today is very important!

Date: 2024-02-06 02:52 am (UTC)
open_space: (Default)
From: [personal profile] open_space

Most gated communities feel like a wasteland to me, so I wouldn't be surprised if they attracted all sorts of critters. Being a born clairvoyant must be a nightmare.

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