Emerald

@Tenebroso It's that same narrative playing out again and again. What statistics do you have that show this? If what you say is true that only the top 20% of guys get women... then it stands to reason that each of those top guys have 5 girlfriends on rotation and everyone else has none. Do you have any stats to back that up? And have you even anecdotally witnessed it (as a rule and not as an exception) that each attractive guy from the top 20% has 5 girlfriends who are committed only to him... and furthermore are fine with sharing him just to be able to have him? Also, if you look around the world, you'll see plenty of men of all different levels of attractiveness with girlfriends and wives. How does the ubiquity of partnered up average men square with your theory?

Many systemic emergences can lay bare the collective societal Shadow. Consider what the internet has allowed us to know about how humanity operates on a level that we weren't even capable of knowing before. Prior to the internet and social media, all of that was in a blindspot. But now we can look in any comment section on the internet and see so much about how people operate. But with regard to Trump's demagoguery in particular, it has laid bare many human vulnerabilities that were previously operating underneath the surface of consciousness individually and collectively. And it has also given us a brand new angle through which to understand the internal and external happenings associated with authoritarianism. Just think about how much more you know about humans and how we operate over the past 1 year... and the past 10 years. Then, imagine how much less you'd know if Trump never won a presidential race and if things had just continued like business as usual. We only really examine things collectively when it gets shoved in our faces. And even if we are the examining type, things that are unconscious to us are just unconscious to us.

I don't really think there's been a miscommunication. I understand what you're trying to say. I just don't agree with what you're saying. And I am familiar with Lacan's line about there being no sexual relationship... which I haven't looked into his argument deeply. But I also related that statement to Lacan being male and having a male experience of sexuality and seeing his male experiences as universal to how humans operate. It's a huge issue that women's sexuality and internal subjective experience tends to get papered over by all sorts of religions, philosophies, and paradigms that were created by men who project male patterns onto women. And so, it becomes difficult to be understood... and difficult to communicate your experiences and needs as a woman. And a side effect of this is that men can create a lot of untrue and ugly anxiety-inducing narratives over top of female sexuality, which is actually really beautiful and operates in favor of a particularized love towards a specific man.

You're just incorrect. And I know you're incorrect because my subjective experience of desire has always been holistic. Women's desire operates differently from male desire... observably so. That's why women tend to get hyper-focused on one guy that they like as an object of desire... while men just want to get good with women as a whole group. Men and women's experience of desire is different, and that's okay Now, a caveat here is that women are capable of desire in the way men have it as well. It's just not that gratifying or motivating the way it is for men. Like I can see an attractive guy and be like "He looks good." And I can admire certain objective qualities, and that might make me more receptive to be interested him in an initial meeting kind of way. But it doesn't get anywhere close to the ambrosial ecstatic feelings that I feel towards a particular man when I love and desire him. It's like a particular man's personality is a flavor... and if I am into a guy, I desire that flavor to move through me. Here's a song that captures the essence of the experience of how love and desire feel together from the female perspective...

I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying. For women... there is no trade-off between love and desire because female desire has to do with a desire to merge deeply with a particular person. So, love toward that person deepens desire and that desire softens her and deepens love and increases desire to merge. And women bond more deeply to a man through the experience of desire and intimacy... and the sense of erotic merging and desire for closeness. It's like, the more desire you feel as a woman the more open and soft your heart becomes. And you want him in particular close to you and inside of you. And all the body chemicals that arise make you feel so bonded to and addicted to that particular person. And as long as there is good communication and partners work through emotional rifts so that intimacy can happen, this doesn't go away over time. It only deepens. As long as you fuel it with real human to human intimacy... the softening can happen, and desire for merging emerges and love and bonding deepen. And that's what the subjective experience is like for a woman when she loves a man. This is also why women tend to see sex and love as deeply connected... while men don't as much.

I wasn't writing that about you in particular, nor implying anything about you. And there was no contempt or anything personal in what I wrote. I was writing it as a rebuttal to your statement that love and desire are a separate thing. Love and desire are separate for men... but not for women. That's the gist of what I wrote. It wasn't meant to imply anything about you... other than that you're projecting the male MO onto women, when women operate differently. And women love and desire the whole person as greater than the sum of their parts... while men feel desire for parts and love for the whole person in a separate way. That's the main difference. For women, love and desire are holistic and come together towards the whole person. For men, they feel love towards the whole person but only feel desire towards the parts and qualities.

When I was in my 20s, I was transferring a lot of inner turmoil and fears of abandonment onto men. And this came out in the form of the fear "What if men are not capable of truly loving a woman." And from the time I was about 22 until I was about 30, I had this sense that as soon as I hit 30 that I would forever lose the ability to be loved by a man because I really believed that men were only capable of experiencing love towards a woman he finds ideally attractive. On some level I knew this wasn't true because I would look around Walmart and see couples of all sorts of ages and levels of attractiveness. But I would project that even the least attractive of the men were just settling for the women as all of these men would leave their wives if a more attractive woman came along. Like if there was a guy who was a 1 who has a female partner who's a 6... he's still just temporarily settling for the 6 and is going to leave her for a 10 if a 10 shows him some attention. And I'm sure that was probably true for about 30% of them, as that wouldn't be the most uncommon thing in the world. I knew that if I, as a 20-25 year old woman, went up to some 50 year old guy with a wife... there was probably a 50% chance that he'd be willing to cheat on his wife with me, and a 25% chance I could get him to leave his wife for me. So, I also had these bits of evidence that seemed to support my fears that men are not capable of love. And I would keep looking around for evidence to support this hypothesis. And there was a really intense fear that it was true... and I was projecting that fear onto the uncertainty and blanks that I had relative to the male subjective experience (because I have never experienced the internal subjective experience of being male and having a male body). And I was projecting certain elements of female sexuality onto them... as (for me) sexual desire and romantic love always go together. But men don't age out of it and it's mostly personality based, so it can grow over time. So, I was projecting that element of my own internal subjective experience onto men... where I was thinking that men will lose both sexual desire and love at once, once I age out of peak sexual desirability age. It was like this impossible sense of "Men can be loved their whole life by a woman... but women can only be loved by a man until she's 30. Past that the man is just settling." But the reality is that men tend to love from a place that's quite detached from sexual desire which tends to be more from a desire to selflesslessly give to the one he loves and to be a part of her life. And men's experience of sexual desire is more purely physical... and doesn't take that much to ignite. And because of that, men are capable of loving longterm and maintaining a sufficient amount of sexual desire for their partners as they age. It's just that the love element and desire element are separate... which enables him to be more detached from his own gratification desires in a romantic relationship, which is actually a good thing. But that's abstract for me (and for women in general), since love and desire have always come together and have been a major part of pair-bonding and merging. And the desire element comes more from the subjective experience of him as an individual. But through interacting with many men and reading men's perspectives on the internet and working with male clients that I've learned how men actually operate... and it filled up the blank projection screen of men's internal subjective experience that I used to project my fears onto with things that were more accurate to the way men actually operate relative to love and desire. This is why I always try to share my own internal subjective experiences of desire and love on here... because I see the same tendencies to project fears into the uncertainty of the female subjective experience of men, when there is nothing there to fear. And I feel like if the men who worry "What if women aren't really capable of love and can only love the top-hierierchy guy?" were to experience the internal subjective experience of how a woman comes to love and desire an average man, that these fears would drop away and make it a lot easier for them to connect with women.

100% When a man is afraid that "women only go for the top 20%", this tends to arise from his own knowledge that he would leave his partner if a better looking woman came along. And he is projecting that tendency onto women as a group because he can't fathom of a different way to see dating/relationships because he hasn't yet experienced loving a particular woman... so he cannot fathom of a woman loving him as a particular man. Instead, he tries to find logic within the way that he operates relative to women... which is to see them as fungible pretty faces that he will leave for a prettier pretty face if one shows him the attention. But this creates an extreme anxiety for him as he imagines a woman doing the same thing to him... and recognizes "If all women operate towards me like I operate towards them, I will either just be settled for and resented for being an inferior male specimen and/or left for the Chads who are superior to me as a male specimen." If one lives by the sword of objectification, they also dies by the sword of objectification.

I am talking about love and desire as well... which tend to come as one and the same thing for women. The deeper the level of intimacy a woman feels with a man, the deeper her desire for him grows. And the desire women feel towards a man in these instances isn't about a man having some objectively attractive quality... or about the sum of his parts. So, it is not like the desire that men experience when they look at breasts. It's a more heart-centered and deeply erotic desire for merging and a swooning, melting-away feeling. And you cannot get that unless you feel like you want to merge with a very specific guy. So, for women... love and sexual desire are always deeply intertwined, and they both operate to deepen one another. But love and desire tend to come separately for men where he can have "Ooh nice figure. I want to fuck her." level of sexual desire towards a woman he's meh about... and love a woman he feels little sexual desire for if he's already deeply pair-bonded to her. And so men tend to project the separation between love and desire onto women... where love and desire come together for women and deepen over time, as long as her emotional needs are met in the relationship and emotional rifts are worked through. So, that's where the disconnect is... the projection of male tendencies onto women and an assumption that the male MO is just the way humans operate. Women don't operate like men. But this projection of male mating dynamics onto women happens because you haven't experience what it is to be a woman whose love and desire are inseparable and who feels desire mostly as an expression of deepening levels of love towards a specific guy as a personality. You are instead assuming that women's sexual desire comes through trying to find the highest guy in the hierarchy like you would feel the "Ooh sexy. Want to fuck her." desire for a woman who has a pretty face or a nice figure. But that appreciation of the man's positive objective qualities only mean something through the lens of his personality and the deepening of intimacy with that particular guy. So, while male sexual desire comes from a woman as exactly the sum of her parts and male love finds the desire element irrelevant as long as the basic level of attraction is there... female desire and love comes from experiencing and riding the wave of a particular man as greater than the sum of his parts.

I don't think most women find random sex humiliating... just a bit under-stimulating and uninteresting for the level of risk that's involved. Like, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Back in my single days, I've had one-night-stands, and I'm not embarrassed about it. I just didn't find those experiences very interesting or gratifying because the emotional satisfaction was lacking. And I think that's how most women would relate to those kinds of experiences as long as she felt like she made that decision to have sex from a sovereign place and she doesn't subscribe to a value system that assigns a lot of shame to female sexuality or to sexuality in general. But I don't really think very many women create a positive identity narrative based on how many men are giving them attention... regardless of what the value judgment on those men is. My experience has been that, while there can be an identity based in something like beauty and style which relates to male attention in a round-about way, the male attention element isn't easily woven into a positive identity story. And that's because male attention (including but not limited to sex) is just something that women can expect and it's very common to get. Once you get past a certain age (like 13 or 14), you have already detached your identity from male attention because you realize how impersonal and common it is. It's less common that an an adult woman would puff up her identity by thinking "Look at how many men are interested in me." Like on the rare occasion you hear an adult woman bragging about that, it's showing a kind of naiveté about the meaning of male attention that most women learn when they're in their teens.

It's actually not too common for women to put a lot of value in the ability to get sex whenever because the risks are high and the rewards are low to moderate... as sex with random men doesn't really give women what they really want from sex (which is the emotional experience of being close to a lover). And we also can't build much of a positive identity around getting male attention because getting male attention doesn't mean anything positive about ourselves... it's just what men do. So, if you're aware (like most women are) that approaching women and wanting to have sex with women is just what men do, access to sex with many men can't really be used to inflate your ego if you get easy sex with a man. If anything, there's a collective positive identity erosion around women who have sex with a lot of men. So, while a man might think of his number of sexual partners as something that adds sometime positive to his identity story... it doesn't operate the same way for women. Instead, it is either identity-neutral or identity-negative. Also, men tend to have lower risks and higher rewards from sex with random women. So, men value access to sex with man women more than women value access to sex with many men, because it's genuinely enjoyable for men and gives them the benefits they're looking for from sex.

No worries. I just had to specify that I wasn't agreeing with that element of the post... because I was expressing agreement for the rest of it. More of an "preserving my own identity" kind of concern. But yes, definitely a lot of insecurity and self-flagellation in these kinds of perspectives as its reflective of a common fear of "Any woman who is interested in me is just settling and waiting for someone better to come along." or "Women will never like me because I'm just an average guy. They are just lacking options and settling out of loneliness and being rejected by the Chads. And of course a woman who's attracted to me would be defective and therefore rejected by the Chads." Really, the issue is just that they've never been a woman who's madly attracted to an average guy before. So, they can't fathom of it.

That's just incorrect. But it's reflective of a major insecurity that many men have that women don't actually love them and are always going to want to leave them for some better guy. And if a woman likes an average guy, she's just settling and deeply sexually unsatisfied... and that she will leave the "sexually unsatisfying average man" until a "more sexually satisfying alpha man" comes along. But this is not reflective of how pair bonding operates from the female perspective. Women fall in love with a man's personality first and foremost. And when she feels sexually attracted to a guy, she wants to have sex with his personality. From the female perspective, there is love and bonding... and men are more than just their value signifiers and more than the sum of their parts. And women are far more motivated to bond with someone on the basis of the unique quirks of personality rather than to seek out some kind of ideal male specimen who happens to sit on top of some hierarchy. I always think these fears come from the fact that the guys who fear it would leave their average looking girlfriend if some super-model-type started showing them attention. And that is true for a lot of guys that they don't really feel that deep love of a woman's personality, and so women are like fungible and that it's better to leave the average ones for the more attractive ones. But that's only for men who haven't experienced real pair bonding before... and it takes a lot of maturing for a man to get where a woman already is naturally in this way. Women tend to get really attached to the men that they're with and bond with them on the basis of their personality, which can't be replicated by another human being. As a woman, I can tell you that I've been madly attracted to a guy who might be a 5 in the eyes of society and felt absolutely nothing towards men who might be a 10 in the eyes of society. And that's because it's all about his personality and how he makes me feel. And on that level, he is irreplaceable because he is the only one of him in the world. That's how pair bonding works from the female perspective. It's not, "Let me settle with this trash average guy because I can't get any better... until some Chad who will have me comes along." If a woman is with you and she really like you, she likes you for who you are. And only women who themselves are really immature and shallow are thinking of relationship with men from a "bring me a better model" perspective.

This isn't specific to Islam, but there are some benefits to following a religion. It's just up to the individual person as to whether those benefits are worth the costs. One of the main benefits to following a religion is limitation... and a sense that God is an all-knowing authoritarian father that is always 100% correct and is setting the rules and limits for people. (And this is a viewpoint on God where God is understandable and fits in your pocket) This meets a need for certainty... as well as a need for social cohesion with others that belief in the exact same cosmology... and a sense that we don't need to know it all because we can just trust in the all-knowing father. And it allows us to externalize the burdens of uncertainty and personal responsibility onto this all-knowing father who we can trust to always be right. And with limitation, we are more easily able to create and hold onto meaning in a universe that is empty of inherent meaning. And we can get the sense that we're on the right track if we just follow the rules. It also gives us the sense that our institutions are real and built on a foundation of certainty and are ordained by God. For me (and seemingly for you), these benefits are not worth the costs. And I would not be able to keep my mind bounded to a narrow set of dogmas. And my mind would always end up straying like a lamb from the flock to go dance around in uncertainty-ville no matter what. But for many people, their needs are met by having these limitations imposed upon them and the certainty is comforting... and it gives them a platform through which to live their lives without gnawing questions of existential meaning as those questions are already answered by God in the big book of answers.

I wouldn't put it in those terms, as I wouldn't call people human trash and pick on people with a lower IQ. But this is indeed more reflective of the dating reality more than any of the other posts on this thread. It's nonsense to think that only the top 20% of guys are getting female attention. People who believe this need to just go to Walmart or the airport and look with their eyes and they will see that there's no such dynamic going on... and that there are plenty of guys who are solid 1s who have a girlfriend.