As Multiheaded added, “Personal is Political” stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.
I am in a polygamous implicitly patriarchal relationships with two girlfriends with whom I’d like to start families. I consider dominance play an important part of my sexuality. Ask me anything.
My position may change in the future without notice. I’m sharing this because I think most people’s political positions on related matters are strongly governed by self-validating rationalizations and such information is relevant to trying to gauge when someone is engaged in motivated cognition.
Do you manage your time with particularly elaborate Excel macros?
(I know someone with similar tastes who is in a similar situation—one loved one pregnant by planning, the other at around the same time by accident. I think he spends his entire life [edit: apart from working the day job] just being dad.)
Do you manage your time with particularly elaborate Excel macros?
I actually do use spreadsheets and Evernote hacks to manage my time and medium term plans for the future most of the time, especially when I have a very productive period. I have in the past occasionally had week long periods where I am generally not motivated to do anything and profoundly displeased with my life and the world. In those I don’t do much of anything and let alone use the mentioned tools.
I know someone with similar tastes who is in a similar situation—one loved one pregnant by planning, the other at around the same time by accident. I think he spends his entire life just being dad.
While I know this is a hard lifestyle “just being a dad” actually sounds very appealing to me.
I think that, without the larger social and cultural structures that people call “patriarchy”, it’s incorrect—mostly connotatively, but it’s a denotative inaccuracy too—to call any given private relationship “implicitly patriarchal”. It would be like calling the relations between an officer and soldiers in a modern army “implicitly fascist”.
Meaning that even if superficially there’s a lot of similarity (e.g. if you provide financial support and it is understood to “entitle” you to companionship, you engage in d/s play on an emotional/intimate level, you’re counted upon to make decisions, etc), it’s still a perfectly voluntary, healthy relationship, absent some latent psychological issues or hidden manipulation. After all, your girlfriends wouldn’t be shamed, coerced or economically pressured if they decided to break things up or reevaluate the power balance—so there’s no “-archy” at work.
I’m only saying this because I also think that power play is a healthy and important part of most people’s sexuality, so it would be good to define it correctly, not letting… anyone frame it as immoral/pathological/inherently abusive.
You are ignoring the much of classical New Left thought in this response. As an exercise put on your Gramschian glasses and consider how in a personal relationship based on informed consent, mutual satisfaction and without much support from the rest of society patriarchy exists in a meaningful sense. Bonus points if you see how even with the first two conditions in place this might be something feminism and regular Joe would strongly object to.
latent psychological issues or hidden manipulation
-but I see where you’re coming from with this elaboration, yes.
I do indeed think that the seeming presense of informed consent and mutual satisfaction can become a cynical, ethically meaningless fake when society and culture have a chokehold on your awareness, your sense of self, your very epistemology. In regards to patriarchy and gender oppression we can see those structures in the Arab world today. I should’ve specified that in this comment I was only talking about 1st world liberal capitalism, which for all its potential insidious tendencies is contradictory enough that we can assume a degree of individual autonomy and meaningful free choice in private life. I’m not sure if you’re just playing the devil’s advocate or genuinely trying to share my views on sex and autonomy, but I must say I’m delighted :) As a further example, have you considered that matrial rape has been so pervasive and accepted in the West that first-wave feminism made very little headway against it by the turn of the century? That no patriarchal society even bothered to account for it? That it was first criminalized in 1965, after female suffrage has been achieved in every Western democracy?
I’m currently in the process founding a company I hope will be very profitable or at least profitable enough to support a large family. Barring this I shall try to find a regular job in STEM, but in that case the wives will have to go to work as well and private tutors instead of home-schooling will likely be required.
How important is economic dominance to you? Would you wish to keep full ownership of your property and finances, so that you have an implicit instrument of control and economic leverage that would give you a sense of power over your wives? If the wives were to work, would you be unnerved if together they earned more than you and you had no leverage over them? Or do you think that emotional control and force of habit would better secure your dominance?
(I’m sorry if any of this is shocking or insulting and I’m considering you in a wrong light. I’m just generally trying to see what power and control mean to you.)
What do you mean when you say that your position may change in the future without notice? I would have thought this to be something one has a relatively stable position on. Isn’t it rather unikely that you suddenly become a monogamous person and lose your interest in dominance play?
Of course they do. I interpreted the word “position” in that context to mean your values, not the way they are reflected by reality. It was a misunderstanding on my part.
Inasmuch as you relate your sexuality to your politics, do you think your framework would be good for—or is at least undervalued as a personal option by—the wider population, (and/)or are you more concerned that feminism will seek to make your lifestyle choices untenable?
(Also, whenever I need to raise my subjective status relative to yours I’m going to think of you as a Gorean. Fair warning.)
nasmuch as you relate your sexuality to your politics, do you think your framework would be good for—or is at least undervalued as a personal option by—the wider population
Yes.
(and/)or are you more concerned that feminism will seek to make your lifestyle choices untenable?
Not really. Far too few men are pursuing it for it to be a viable source of power once broken down. And my social circle has an anarchist bent already. It may become endangered by families in general being outlawed but that is decades away even in the worst case scenarios.
(Also, whenever I need to raise my subjective status relative to yours I’m going to think of you as a Gorean. Fair warning.)
Read up on them. So far Goreans are an interesting subculture but seem to be bad at political theory. Not that it much matters since politics is not how they prosper.
Are your girlfriends free to have sex with other men?
It isn’t the case for my regular current girlfriends.
I have had friendship with benefits relationships where this is the case. I certainly considered the women involved my friends, not really girlfriends however. Also in those I didn’t experiment with traditionalist patriarchal mindsets.
Do you value having sex with girls with whom you don’t want to start families?
Not really. I elaborated on how I view it a few years ago.
I am in a polygamous implicitly patriarchal relationships with two girlfriends with whom I’d like to start families. I consider dominance play an important part of my sexuality. Ask me anything.
I have seen in various places strong connections, although never to my knowledge explicitly drawn, between the espousal of (1) MDFS BDSM, (2) PUA, and (3) political positions such as your own. Are these things, in your view, three branches of one tree, the praxis of the same fundamental theory of who we are, in the domestic, social, and political spheres respectively?
Konkvistador political position is Moldbuggian if I understand it right. According to the LessWrong survey 61% of the 18 Moldbuggian’s prefer monogamous relationships while only 53% of all LessWrong people prefer them.
I didn’t calculate whether the difference is statistically signifcant but if Moldbuggians would be more into PUA I would expect their preference for monogamous relationships to be less than the overall LessWrong population.
According to the LessWrong survey 61% of the 18 Moldbuggian’s prefer monogamous relationships while only 53% of all LessWrong people prefer them. I didn’t calculate whether the difference is statistically signifcant
It isn’t, at all. Back of envelope calculation:
Standard deviation of binomial distribution not too far from 50-50 is sqrt(N)/2 = sqrt(18)/2 or about 2 out of 18 = 11%. The Moldbuggians are 8% different from all of LW answering the poll, clearly an insignificant difference.
I’m confused. What does this have to do with politics?
Of all the subjects discussed on lesswrong, the subjects related to sex are the most political in style and motivation. If I recall, this applies even to your own contributions on that subject.
the subjects related to sex are the most political in style
Ok. I think I can see how you’d get that. But a more careful classification would see that at LW the political issues have been far more closely connected to gender than sex. But it is possible that this is splitting hairs. In any event, since the edit to include the apparent thread starting comment about personal and political, this seems more clearly political in some form. (I don’t like the idea of the personal and political being that connected, but it is a commonly accepted notion.)
But a more careful classification would see that at LW the political issues have been far more closely connected to gender than sex.
On the contrary, I started with ‘gender’ but replaced it with sex because the former was simply inaccurate. Gender is discussed politically (unfortunately) but sex has been too. Including much (ridiculous) back and forth about what constitutes ‘consent’. Saying ‘gender and sex’ would have been more general and the most accurate but I went with sex because it seemed relevant to the context.
(I don’t like the idea of the personal and political being that connected, but it is a commonly accepted notion.)
I don’t like politics getting mixed up with the personal either but unfortunately that seems to be how (most) of our species work. Nearly all actions and expressions, even of personal preference or practice tend to be made as and interpreted as social-political positioning.
But taking a step back I can’t complain. It is this kind of nosy, interfering, mind-killed application of social force that allowed our selfish aggressive instincts to be channeled in a way that ultimately allowed a somewhat worthwhile civilization. (ie. Politics controlling the personal forced behavioral changes that were beneficial.)
It’s the sub who has the final say, that’s not exactly the “real power”. By most ways of calling something patriarchy, most lifestyle dom/sub relationships are patriarchal, they are just a form of patriarchy that is consensual and not immoral by my sentiments at least.
Depends on the relationship. In some relationships, the sub gives out a set of limits, and other than that the dom has free reign. In more extreme ones, there’s even a master-slave relationship, where the master definitely has power over the slave.
When a dom/sub relationship is non-abusive, it’s the sub who has the real power, which seems to contradict your “patriarchal” assertion.
When a employer and employee relationships is non-abusive, it is the employee that has the real power.
Does this sentence make sense to you? I mean it may seem plausible but when asserted if it isn’t standard economics theory we will probably want to hear an argument and some related evidence. Where is the difference between the epistemic status of this statement and yours?
I’m pretty sure the quoted sentence is popular meme in the wider BDSM community because it is compatible with the status games wider Western society plays with regards to sexual ethics and practice not because it is true (it may be). People in other words approve when something like that is said regardless if it is true or not. Not that I have much experience with their community or subculture beyond reading a few blogs.
I’m pretty sure the quoted sentence is popular meme in the wider BDSM community because it is compatible with the status games wider Western society plays with regards to sexual ethics and practice not because it is true (it may be).
The meme as both principle and practice was developed as a way of defending BDSM from the vanilla public. Employer-employee relationships are a standard part of society and need no such defence.
One might suppose that tautologically, the sentence is true of those relationships which are so conducted, and not in those that are not. But this oversimplifies things. Without the meme in the air, who would think to ask the question, “where does the real power lie?”, let alone answer it with “the sub”? But with the idea available, it becomes an option, whether taken or not, for conceptualising and structuring relationships.
I am in a polygamous implicitly patriarchal relationships with two girlfriends with whom I’d like to start families. I consider dominance play an important part of my sexuality. Ask me anything.
My position may change in the future without notice. I’m sharing this because I think most people’s political positions on related matters are strongly governed by self-validating rationalizations and such information is relevant to trying to gauge when someone is engaged in motivated cognition.
Do you manage your time with particularly elaborate Excel macros?
(I know someone with similar tastes who is in a similar situation—one loved one pregnant by planning, the other at around the same time by accident. I think he spends his entire life [edit: apart from working the day job] just being dad.)
I actually do use spreadsheets and Evernote hacks to manage my time and medium term plans for the future most of the time, especially when I have a very productive period. I have in the past occasionally had week long periods where I am generally not motivated to do anything and profoundly displeased with my life and the world. In those I don’t do much of anything and let alone use the mentioned tools.
While I know this is a hard lifestyle “just being a dad” actually sounds very appealing to me.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Sure, it’s a nice gig if you are otherwise provided for, I’d wager.
I think that, without the larger social and cultural structures that people call “patriarchy”, it’s incorrect—mostly connotatively, but it’s a denotative inaccuracy too—to call any given private relationship “implicitly patriarchal”. It would be like calling the relations between an officer and soldiers in a modern army “implicitly fascist”.
Meaning that even if superficially there’s a lot of similarity (e.g. if you provide financial support and it is understood to “entitle” you to companionship, you engage in d/s play on an emotional/intimate level, you’re counted upon to make decisions, etc), it’s still a perfectly voluntary, healthy relationship, absent some latent psychological issues or hidden manipulation. After all, your girlfriends wouldn’t be shamed, coerced or economically pressured if they decided to break things up or reevaluate the power balance—so there’s no “-archy” at work.
I’m only saying this because I also think that power play is a healthy and important part of most people’s sexuality, so it would be good to define it correctly, not letting… anyone frame it as immoral/pathological/inherently abusive.
You are ignoring the much of classical New Left thought in this response. As an exercise put on your Gramschian glasses and consider how in a personal relationship based on informed consent, mutual satisfaction and without much support from the rest of society patriarchy exists in a meaningful sense. Bonus points if you see how even with the first two conditions in place this might be something feminism and regular Joe would strongly object to.
Well, I did say:
-but I see where you’re coming from with this elaboration, yes.
I do indeed think that the seeming presense of informed consent and mutual satisfaction can become a cynical, ethically meaningless fake when society and culture have a chokehold on your awareness, your sense of self, your very epistemology. In regards to patriarchy and gender oppression we can see those structures in the Arab world today.
I should’ve specified that in this comment I was only talking about 1st world liberal capitalism, which for all its potential insidious tendencies is contradictory enough that we can assume a degree of individual autonomy and meaningful free choice in private life.
I’m not sure if you’re just playing the devil’s advocate or genuinely trying to share my views on sex and autonomy, but I must say I’m delighted :) As a further example, have you considered that matrial rape has been so pervasive and accepted in the West that first-wave feminism made very little headway against it by the turn of the century? That no patriarchal society even bothered to account for it? That it was first criminalized in 1965, after female suffrage has been achieved in every Western democracy?
Edit: spelling
How are you going to pay for this?
I’m currently in the process founding a company I hope will be very profitable or at least profitable enough to support a large family. Barring this I shall try to find a regular job in STEM, but in that case the wives will have to go to work as well and private tutors instead of home-schooling will likely be required.
How important is economic dominance to you? Would you wish to keep full ownership of your property and finances, so that you have an implicit instrument of control and economic leverage that would give you a sense of power over your wives? If the wives were to work, would you be unnerved if together they earned more than you and you had no leverage over them? Or do you think that emotional control and force of habit would better secure your dominance?
(I’m sorry if any of this is shocking or insulting and I’m considering you in a wrong light. I’m just generally trying to see what power and control mean to you.)
Did you mean “founding”?
Yes, apologies for the typos it was written on my phone.
What do you mean when you say that your position may change in the future without notice? I would have thought this to be something one has a relatively stable position on. Isn’t it rather unikely that you suddenly become a monogamous person and lose your interest in dominance play?
People do break up no?
Of course they do. I interpreted the word “position” in that context to mean your values, not the way they are reflected by reality. It was a misunderstanding on my part.
Inasmuch as you relate your sexuality to your politics, do you think your framework would be good for—or is at least undervalued as a personal option by—the wider population, (and/)or are you more concerned that feminism will seek to make your lifestyle choices untenable?
(Also, whenever I need to raise my subjective status relative to yours I’m going to think of you as a Gorean. Fair warning.)
Yes.
Not really. Far too few men are pursuing it for it to be a viable source of power once broken down. And my social circle has an anarchist bent already. It may become endangered by families in general being outlawed but that is decades away even in the worst case scenarios.
Read up on them. So far Goreans are an interesting subculture but seem to be bad at political theory. Not that it much matters since politics is not how they prosper.
Yeah, don’t worry; our timetable’s not nearly that rapid.
Are your girlfriends willing to talk to us about this subject too?
I’ll ask them. I’ve mentioned the site before but neither showed interest in spending time here so far.
Are they even allowed to? (I ask because of the “patriarchal” part. It could mean many things.) :D
Ok that made me laugh.
What is the attitude towards these kinds of relationships in Ljubljana? In particular what do your girlfriends’ families think?
Are your girlfriends free to have sex with other men?
Do you value having sex with girls with whom you don’t want to start families?
It isn’t the case for my regular current girlfriends.
I have had friendship with benefits relationships where this is the case. I certainly considered the women involved my friends, not really girlfriends however. Also in those I didn’t experiment with traditionalist patriarchal mindsets.
Not really. I elaborated on how I view it a few years ago.
What do those experiements mean specifically?
Seconded. Does this mean PUA or does it have a more long-term element?
I have seen in various places strong connections, although never to my knowledge explicitly drawn, between the espousal of (1) MDFS BDSM, (2) PUA, and (3) political positions such as your own. Are these things, in your view, three branches of one tree, the praxis of the same fundamental theory of who we are, in the domestic, social, and political spheres respectively?
Konkvistador political position is Moldbuggian if I understand it right. According to the LessWrong survey 61% of the 18 Moldbuggian’s prefer monogamous relationships while only 53% of all LessWrong people prefer them. I didn’t calculate whether the difference is statistically signifcant but if Moldbuggians would be more into PUA I would expect their preference for monogamous relationships to be less than the overall LessWrong population.
The Moldbuggian in the survey are all male.
Code:
mold<- subset(survey, survey$AlternativeAlternativePolitics==”Moldbuggian”)
length(subset(mold, mold$Relationshipstyle==”Prefermonogamous”)$Relationshipstyle) /length(mold$Relationshipstyle))
It isn’t, at all. Back of envelope calculation:
Standard deviation of binomial distribution not too far from 50-50 is sqrt(N)/2 = sqrt(18)/2 or about 2 out of 18 = 11%. The Moldbuggians are 8% different from all of LW answering the poll, clearly an insignificant difference.
I’m confused. What does this have to do with politics?
Of all the subjects discussed on lesswrong, the subjects related to sex are the most political in style and motivation. If I recall, this applies even to your own contributions on that subject.
“Politics” doesn’t mean “Obama et al”.
Ok. I think I can see how you’d get that. But a more careful classification would see that at LW the political issues have been far more closely connected to gender than sex. But it is possible that this is splitting hairs. In any event, since the edit to include the apparent thread starting comment about personal and political, this seems more clearly political in some form. (I don’t like the idea of the personal and political being that connected, but it is a commonly accepted notion.)
On the contrary, I started with ‘gender’ but replaced it with sex because the former was simply inaccurate. Gender is discussed politically (unfortunately) but sex has been too. Including much (ridiculous) back and forth about what constitutes ‘consent’. Saying ‘gender and sex’ would have been more general and the most accurate but I went with sex because it seemed relevant to the context.
I don’t like politics getting mixed up with the personal either but unfortunately that seems to be how (most) of our species work. Nearly all actions and expressions, even of personal preference or practice tend to be made as and interpreted as social-political positioning.
But taking a step back I can’t complain. It is this kind of nosy, interfering, mind-killed application of social force that allowed our selfish aggressive instincts to be channeled in a way that ultimately allowed a somewhat worthwhile civilization. (ie. Politics controlling the personal forced behavioral changes that were beneficial.)
Gender seems to have been discussed much more than sex, although I agree that sex has been discussed but to a much smaller extent.
So I haven’t seen such discussions here that I recall, but I’m curious what they were and what makes you think such issues are ridiculous.
Can you expand on this? This isn’t obvious to me.
Do you have any LW sockpuppets?
I don’t see the relevance to the topic at hand but I see no harm in answering your question. Yes I do.
I’d just like to deny here and now all rumors that I am a Konkvistador sockpuppet
Why would anyone assume you are?
What do you mean by “implicitly patriarchal”?
When a dom/sub relationship is non-abusive, it’s the sub who has the real power, which seems to contradict your “patriarchal” assertion.
It’s the sub who has the final say, that’s not exactly the “real power”. By most ways of calling something patriarchy, most lifestyle dom/sub relationships are patriarchal, they are just a form of patriarchy that is consensual and not immoral by my sentiments at least.
Depends on the relationship. In some relationships, the sub gives out a set of limits, and other than that the dom has free reign. In more extreme ones, there’s even a master-slave relationship, where the master definitely has power over the slave.
When a employer and employee relationships is non-abusive, it is the employee that has the real power.
Does this sentence make sense to you? I mean it may seem plausible but when asserted if it isn’t standard economics theory we will probably want to hear an argument and some related evidence. Where is the difference between the epistemic status of this statement and yours?
I’m pretty sure the quoted sentence is popular meme in the wider BDSM community because it is compatible with the status games wider Western society plays with regards to sexual ethics and practice not because it is true (it may be). People in other words approve when something like that is said regardless if it is true or not. Not that I have much experience with their community or subculture beyond reading a few blogs.
The meme as both principle and practice was developed as a way of defending BDSM from the vanilla public. Employer-employee relationships are a standard part of society and need no such defence.
One might suppose that tautologically, the sentence is true of those relationships which are so conducted, and not in those that are not. But this oversimplifies things. Without the meme in the air, who would think to ask the question, “where does the real power lie?”, let alone answer it with “the sub”? But with the idea available, it becomes an option, whether taken or not, for conceptualising and structuring relationships.