I think your “mental muscle” analogy is interesting: you are suggesting that exercising mental grievance or ressentiment is unhealthy for relationships, and is part of why men red pill men have an “uphill battle.” You argue that love is incompatible with resentment. You also argue that certain terms “demonstrate” particular unhealthy and resentful mindsets, or lead to “objectification” which is tantamount to not viewing others as people.
I share your concern that some red pill men have toxic attitudes towards women which hamper their relationships. I disagree that language like “sexual access” is sufficient to demonstrate resentment of women, and I explained other reasoning behind that language in my previous comment where I discussed operational sex ratio, polygyny, and other impersonal forces.
My other argument is that views of relationships operate at different levels of explanation. There are least 3 levels: the macro level of society, the local level of your peers and dating pool, and the dyadic level of your interpersonal relationships. Why can’t someone believe that dating is a brutal, unfair, dog-eat-dog competition at the macro or local level, but once they succeed in getting into a relationship, they fall in love and belief in sacrifice, like you want? It’s also possible to have a grievance towards a group of people, like bankers, but still respect your personal banker as a human being.
A metaphor that is useful for understanding the mating market at the societal or local level can be emotionally toxic if you apply it at the dyadic level. If you believe that the current mating market results in some men lacking sexual access at the macro level, that’s a totally correct and neutral description of what happens under a skewed operational sex ratio and polygyny. If you tell your partner “honey, you’ve been denying me sexual access for the past week,” then you’re being an asshole.
In the past, men and women of the past held beliefs about gender roles and sex differences that would be considered scandalously sexist today. It seems implausible that our ancestors didn’t love each other. People are good at compartmentalizing and believing that their partner is special.
Your theory about concepts leading to resentment and resentment being a barrier to relationships could be true, but I think it’s much more likely that you have the causal relationship backwards: it’s mostly loneliness that causes resentment, not the other way around. For instance, in the case of a skewed operational sex ratio, some people are just going to end up single no matter how zen their attitudes are.
Even if there is a risk of alienation from understanding sex differences, and sexual economics, I still think it’s better to try to build an epistemically accurate view of relationships, and then later make peace with any resentment that is a by-product of this understanding.
It seems like the only alternative is to try to mentally avoid any economic, anthropological, or gender-political insight into dating that might cause you to feel resentment: blinkering your epistemic rationality for the instrumentally rational goal of harmonious relationships.
There’s also a genuinely open question of how big sex differences are: if sex differences are smaller than I think, then I’m probably harming my relationships by being too cynical, but if they are larger than I think, then I’m naive and risk finding out the hard way. I really doubt that relationships are the one place where Litany of Tarski doesn’t apply.
It sounds like your current relationship attitudes are bringing you success in your relationship and that terms like “objectification” are more helpful to you than “sexual access.” That’s totally fine, but other people have different challenges and are coming from a different place, so I recommend suspending judgment about what concepts their mindsets entail and why they are single. If you believe that toxic attitudes towards women are correlated with their concepts, then that’s plausible, though it’s a different argument.
To go a bit more meta, I would argue that a lot of the resistance towards men developing inconvenient conclusions about sex ratio, polygyny, sex differences, etc… is not because these ideas are necessarily harmful to male-female relationships, but because they are harmful to feminist narratives about male privilege. It is morally reprehensible how feminists use their own grievance-based concepts of “objectification” to reject any macro-level analysis of male-female dynamics that might be unflattering towards women. It’s just far too convenient how sociological, economic, and anthropological arguments that would be acceptable in any other circumstance are dismissed as denying women’s humanity or personhood. I think you should be just as skeptical towards feminist grievance concepts as you are towards red pill grievance concepts.
I think your “mental muscle” analogy is interesting: you are suggesting that exercising mental grievance or ressentiment is unhealthy for relationships, and is part of why men red pill men have an “uphill battle.” You argue that love is incompatible with resentment. You also argue that certain terms “demonstrate” particular unhealthy and resentful mindsets, or lead to “objectification” which is tantamount to not viewing others as people.
I share your concern that some red pill men have toxic attitudes towards women which hamper their relationships. I disagree that language like “sexual access” is sufficient to demonstrate resentment of women, and I explained other reasoning behind that language in my previous comment where I discussed operational sex ratio, polygyny, and other impersonal forces.
My other argument is that views of relationships operate at different levels of explanation. There are least 3 levels: the macro level of society, the local level of your peers and dating pool, and the dyadic level of your interpersonal relationships. Why can’t someone believe that dating is a brutal, unfair, dog-eat-dog competition at the macro or local level, but once they succeed in getting into a relationship, they fall in love and belief in sacrifice, like you want? It’s also possible to have a grievance towards a group of people, like bankers, but still respect your personal banker as a human being.
A metaphor that is useful for understanding the mating market at the societal or local level can be emotionally toxic if you apply it at the dyadic level. If you believe that the current mating market results in some men lacking sexual access at the macro level, that’s a totally correct and neutral description of what happens under a skewed operational sex ratio and polygyny. If you tell your partner “honey, you’ve been denying me sexual access for the past week,” then you’re being an asshole.
In the past, men and women of the past held beliefs about gender roles and sex differences that would be considered scandalously sexist today. It seems implausible that our ancestors didn’t love each other. People are good at compartmentalizing and believing that their partner is special.
Your theory about concepts leading to resentment and resentment being a barrier to relationships could be true, but I think it’s much more likely that you have the causal relationship backwards: it’s mostly loneliness that causes resentment, not the other way around. For instance, in the case of a skewed operational sex ratio, some people are just going to end up single no matter how zen their attitudes are.
Even if there is a risk of alienation from understanding sex differences, and sexual economics, I still think it’s better to try to build an epistemically accurate view of relationships, and then later make peace with any resentment that is a by-product of this understanding.
It seems like the only alternative is to try to mentally avoid any economic, anthropological, or gender-political insight into dating that might cause you to feel resentment: blinkering your epistemic rationality for the instrumentally rational goal of harmonious relationships.
There’s also a genuinely open question of how big sex differences are: if sex differences are smaller than I think, then I’m probably harming my relationships by being too cynical, but if they are larger than I think, then I’m naive and risk finding out the hard way. I really doubt that relationships are the one place where Litany of Tarski doesn’t apply.
It sounds like your current relationship attitudes are bringing you success in your relationship and that terms like “objectification” are more helpful to you than “sexual access.” That’s totally fine, but other people have different challenges and are coming from a different place, so I recommend suspending judgment about what concepts their mindsets entail and why they are single. If you believe that toxic attitudes towards women are correlated with their concepts, then that’s plausible, though it’s a different argument.
To go a bit more meta, I would argue that a lot of the resistance towards men developing inconvenient conclusions about sex ratio, polygyny, sex differences, etc… is not because these ideas are necessarily harmful to male-female relationships, but because they are harmful to feminist narratives about male privilege. It is morally reprehensible how feminists use their own grievance-based concepts of “objectification” to reject any macro-level analysis of male-female dynamics that might be unflattering towards women. It’s just far too convenient how sociological, economic, and anthropological arguments that would be acceptable in any other circumstance are dismissed as denying women’s humanity or personhood. I think you should be just as skeptical towards feminist grievance concepts as you are towards red pill grievance concepts.