Deliberate Consent Violation

Silhouette, much of your post strikes me as an evolutionary just-so story, and one that ostensibly explains only a caricature of human sexual differences. Human mating patterns haven’t always and everywhere resembled those most prominent in the modern west, and alternative strategies can find stable equilibriums:

  1. In some cultures, women have been expected to be sexually active with multiple men through pregnancy, and this makes sense as a strategy for the woman, because paternal confusion means a greater likelihood of paternal investment from multiple men. It makes sense for the actual father if it means that his offspring have additional support. Bonobo sexual politics use similar promiscuity for group bonding, which benefits the individuals so long as it benefits the group.

  2. Pair-bonding is a viable strategy for both partners. Humans are predominantly a k-species, bearing few offspring at high expense, so paternal investment is rewarded by increasing the success of the fewer offspring. The same strategy is used in other pair-bonding species. But pair bonding isn’t the only form of human sexual bonding. Harems are common in many cultures, and some cultures are effectively communal in their parenting.

  3. In many human cultures, women are more highly ornamented than men, but it isn’t by any means universal. In western culture, women’s sexual signaling is more flamboyant. In the middle east, women don’t sexually signal at all.

Human sexual politics are heavily influenced by culture and other ‘nurture’, and they vary significantly over space and time. Moreover, the connection between sex and behavior/preference within a cultural context is often weaker than your description makes it seem. Human preferences form overlapping distributions, so that while there are some overall trends, it is not very predictive of the preference of a particular man or woman (controlling for e.g. culture, wealth, health, etc.).

Evolutionary game theory is way more complicated than you and Ecmandu are making it seem.

To be fair, confronting the sane with their faults is also not usually an effective way of getting them to acknowledge and correct their faults.

Carleas,

You are by far the most congenial poster on ILP.

I don’t want to offend your long well thought out post, but I fear I must …

We are a sex dimorphic species.

There are laws that objectively get triggered for sex dimorphic species. They are immutable.

Sexual signaling from men in a sex dimorphic species is a sex crime.

It’s also the only thing that works.

This causes obvious problems in the psychologies of humans. Problems that are better done away with.

I understand all the investment arguments.

What my motto here is, is “better communication for better outcomes”

We’re not doing that, I’m trying.

As far as mowk is concerned …

Monk is taunting me to be evil.

I’m not taking the bait to prove myself … thankfully there are posters here who actually understand that.

There are sexually dimorphic species with very different reproductive strategies, e.g. sometimes the males are larger, sometimes the females are larger; sometimes the males fight each other, sometimes the males fight the females; sometimes the males are parasitic, sometimes they’re the primary provider, sometimes they take turns.

In humans, sexual dimorphism is relatively minor. As I mentioned, on most dimensions, the distributions between men and women overlap. And across cultures, you find many different strategies and equilibriums for dealing with what consistent differences there are. Human evolutionary strategy seems to vary in ways not observed in other species, so it’s not clear how applicable observations from other species are, but even if they were, strategies comparable to many other species can be seen in different humans groups and employed by different human individuals.

What are you assuming is the unit of selection? I’d argue that human group selection is significantly greater than in other species, and that human individual specialization is a part of that, so that diverse strategies work for individuals in human groups.

I don’t think that’s true. You are making claims based on a … unique set of metaphysical premises. To the extent that your argument depends on those premises, it is as unsupported as they are.

I don’t think you will be surprised to learn that your experiences are quite far from those of almost all other people. While that isn’t decisive, it does seem to put the burden on you to support a version of the world that you alone experience over the version of the world on which many others largely agree.

Carleas,

I’ve pointed out that in the human species that they have sex dimorphism, they have weapons and combat training dimorphism and they have rape dimorphism (much easier for a man to rape a woman than a woman a man).

What this means is that ALL women show a relative discomfort from men for sexual signaling than men do from women. It’s a species fact.

If the only thing that works is to send discomfort to eventually become comfort, you have a no means yes relationship RELATIVE to the other sex.

But this is observably false. Some men are particularly meek and timid, some women are bold and fearless. The distributions overlap. You’re taking something that’s true of the center of a distribution, and treating it as though it applies to every individual in the distribution.

There’s actually a reason for this!

Men who are on the ‘timid’ end are terrified of showing any minutiae of sexual attraction that they feel, for fear of violating the approach escalation law…

Highly sensitive males.

The law still stands.

Note that you’re acknowledging that observation contradicts your initial hypothesis, and you’re trying to add an epicycle to explain why. Also note that you’re again pointing to something (sex drive) that observably varies greatly between individual men: we can observe that some men have no sex drive, and some men’s sex drive doesn’t point towards women.

I’m sure you can keep adding epicycles, but I think they will all make the same mistake of treating every member of a diverse set as though they have the average attributes of the set.

The set in question is approach escalation …

Even the meek who women throw themselves at are displaying a modicum of sexual signaling …

Not because of their consciences , but because of their naivety, their ignorance.

Now move a person in like myself and it changes the game radically.

But don’t you see how this is an obvious caricature? You’re summoning some archetype from a teen movie and treating it like it plays a significant role in sex relations in the whole human species.

Human sexual politics are lots and lots and lots of different things. They’re friendly and rivalrous and hateful and competitive and spiteful and mean and tender and beautiful and ugly and transactional and communal and willing and unwilling and painful and happy and basically any adjective you come up with you can find an example of a human sexual relationship that embodies it. It isn’t simple and one dimensional the way you’re describing it. Neither are the participants.

You’ve reduced all of it to two center-the-bell-curve myths and extrapolated from there, but that interaction describes almost none of the interactions you’re trying to describe. Effectively all men are more X or less X than the average man, effectively all women are more X or less X than the average woman. Effectively all couples, all courtships, deviate from the average-man-and-average-woman coupling and courtship you’re theorizing about.

It’s over fo ya, E. you got the goddamn site administrator on your ass now.

kick his ass, sea bass!

Let’s take a popular example of who we’d all assume is a pretty meek celebrity…

James Taylor …

You see, the problem is, he uses ornamentation (music) and he married.

I can’t tell you how many times my heart has been shattered by giving up behaviors that brought me joy, but which were ornamentations (sexual signaling), so that I could theoretically have a consensual relationship with a woman.

You have conjured in your mind that males who aren’t abusive can be with women sexually.

You’re wrong.

This one dimension is absolute.

You’ve violated it, so you’re not really in a position to talk about yourself.

I’ve read all the same stuff as you carleas, all the different cultures etc…

You can always find male sexual signaling that is not reciprocal.

This is not a variable sociologists tend to look deeply at. I do.

If I can start raising those antennas, sociologists will realize that this is a law in our species, thus far.

Also, carleas,

Like I’ve said several times, it’s not the humans I’m furious with. It’s the deities.

Fuck! I wear a jacket with a brand name because mother bought it for me. Most homeless people don’t even have a choice as well, they wear what keeps them warm and dry.

I’m not fucking perfect. But I know a lot of deities who think that they are, and I’m more perfect than them.

I see the world as it is. Zero sum. I see that, not as a gift, but as something to grieve …

That makes me more perfect. I’m going to concentrate that ‘perfection’ to the best of my ability to end the zero sum nature of existence.

Ultimately, I have to live with myself, that’s the one person I can’t get away from.

I couldn’t live with myself if I were like most people on earth… it would haunt me mercilessly.

I’ve had enough of that in my life.

I take human sexuality dead seriously. I don’t play games with it, I have no pretenses swirling in my head about it. I know what I know and I obey to the best of my ability (which is pretty good ability).

Now you’re calling James Taylor a rapist too?

This man has seen fire and he’s seen rain. He’s seen sunny days that he thought would never end. He’s seen lonely times when he could not find a friend. And you’re calling him a rapist. Unbelievable. You’ve reached a new low, man.

I feel like you’re burying the lede on this. The existence of multiple deities that you personally know is a much, much bigger claim than whatever you’re trying to prove about sex signaling.

I mean that sincerely. It kind of doesn’t matter whether your sex signaling claims follow from it because it’s a really really big assumption that many don’t accept. Hell, I’ll concede that whatever you want to conclude follows from the ontology you’re describing, but I reject that ontology. Where does that leave us?

It doesn’t leave us anywhere but it does lead us somewhere.

The change of letters in your addressing me, don’t appear to be a fat finger mistake. The ‘W’ and the ‘N’ are quite far apart on the keyboard. Odd this notion of Monk and Evil showing up at the same time.

Thanks Carleas, I was asking him to demonstrate the powers he claimed he had. But the idea it was to be evil; was Ecandu’s interpretation of the events. As if Ecmandu believes he is evil and all that is preventing him from having the perception of this fact is his resistance to its use. I wouldn’t wish to think that a “talent” I possessed is “evil”, and the only way for ‘me’ not to be “evil”, is not to express the talent. Further, I don’t think I would go about bragging I possessed the talent, skill or ability in the first place. That would seem to be an admission of the “evil” itself.

Ecmandu, It is almost as if you are stating, hey look everyone. I have this evil power, but I’m not going to use it, so I must not be evil.

Your word Ecmandu, not mine.

I wouldn’t use that language as a description of you Ecmandu, I would not describe you in that manner and it was not in my intention to taunt you into being it.

That is a descriptor you and you alone are responsible for.

That is language other people use and I frankly don’t agree with it in any stretch of my imagination. I waffle over the notion of a deity, whether of many or one, or less, exist at all. It would follow then that I don’t believe in an opposite to that property. Way out there at that level dualism falls apart. If it doesn’t exist way out there it doesn’t exist anywhere. I could be wrong, I agree. But that isn’t my belief.

So, no, I most certainly was not taunting you to be evil or do evil things. I was simply asking you for a demonstration of a talent you claimed. I can take no credit for how it was characterized in your mind.

Mowk, apologies, it was autocorrect.

So here’s the deal.

I have no idea how much of my powers are innate or because of avatar/possessions.

All the weird things you see in movies and t.v. Have a certain element of truth to them.

I still remember when I was 14.

This buddy and I decided to rent every horror movie in a video store alphabetically.

We thought they were fucking hilarious. We’d make all manner of jokes about them and laugh our asses off. None of it’s real, right?

When it actually happens to you, it’s not funny anymore.

When I think of my life back then… that was a form of heaven. Wow, how ignorant I was.

I’ve seen a lot of professor Xavier type shit (xmen movies) in my life, and not in a good way, and it extends further than that.

I have many theories about why so much focus is on me personally, but I always come up empty.

Am I being trained to take power? But why?

If another being is using its power through me (and I’m very familiar with possession by now), all it has to do is vacate me and I can’t prove shit.

One of the sins in Buddhism is lying about your powers. I guess they don’t know about that loophole.

Stop there for now.

We did not give our consent to being born. And most of us will not give our consent to dying. As for the consents violated or not in the middle what does it ultimately matter if we live in an essentially meaningless world?

They are all no less existential contraptions configured and then reconfigured into one or another intellectual contraption in our heads.

[size=50]Unless of course I’m wrong.[/size]

This is like saying that the leading cause of death is birth! It’s also the leading cause of life, like this, it is also the leading cause of consent.

You can’t have a consent if you just simply aren’t

Okay, but how does this make the points I raise go away? Unless of course I am wrong.

It’s just that unlike you, I would never be so foolish – arrogant? unbalanced? – as to embrace a philosophical assessment of consent as anything other than an intellectual/existential concoction. You know, given the gap between what any particular one of us thinks we know about it and all that can be known about it given a comprehensive understanding of existence itself.

And, if a God, the God was around to give His consent to that, who or what consented to the existence of God?