Cat, are you (or another instructor) planning any more trips to Europe? I’m sad to have missed out on your previous class!
henryaj
Karma: 80
Great idea! I’m tempted to chop these up and put them into a mailing list—I feel they would be more useful in a one-quote-a-day format than in one big block.
Argh—just had a little twinge when I saw that you were born in 1989. You’re the same age as me, but have done so much more!
Congratulations on reaching your goals. Reading this has reminded me that I ought to do the same.
We have social norms of … rewarding each other for doing good things (and a “gem economy” for this purpose)
I must hear more about this.
Sounds excellent. WIsh I could make it, but I’ve got a family thing to attend to that day. Next time, for sure!
I’m intrigued by this – comfort zone expansion strikes me as a very good idea, if done carefully; I’m thinking of things like Rejection Therapy, ‘daygame’ (making conversation/flirting with strangers in daytime settings, taking care not to become a harasser) and just generally being social.
In my forays with talking to strangers—an ongoing experiment!—I’ve found that Londoners are actually mostly very friendly, just with a veneer of coldness that needs breaking. I suspect this is true for people in most big cities, and is an adaptation to avoid the usual array of charity muggers, panhandlers and the like they encounter on an hourly basis.
What kind of activities are you planning?
Great post! Those are both sources I really like. Some of Mark Manson (writer of PostMasculine)’s old material on Practical Pickup is good as well.
(I actually have written a long post meditating on this stuff that I’ll be posting in a few days on LW Discussion, so look out for that. :P)
Did this ever get posted? I’d happily read through the draft and give you some feedback, if you like.
Nthing the “you are an inspiration” sentiment expressed here. This has reminded me that you should ‘always be shipping’; always be doing stuff and making stuff.
What’s your working environment like? You mention doing work for SI; is that at their offices or at home? I’ve been flirting with the idea of working part-time to pursue other projects in my spare time but I’m not sure I could hack being in a home office all day.
(And, if you don’t mind me asking, how do you bankroll all this? Do you have a ‘day job’ per se?)
One of the parts of this study involved quizzing men and women on their likelihood of accepting sex from a stranger using pictures of either an attractive or an unattractive person of the opposite sex to see if that affected the subject’s likelihood of accepting the proposition, and found:
For the proposition by the attractive person, women were at 4.09 [out of 7] to 4.16 for men — just about a tie.
Which seems to suggest that, in this particular domain—sex with an attractive partner—men and women are equally desirous. It’s the perceived danger (and lower sexual prowess) that the female subjects imagine come with the average proposer that makes them less likely to accept the offer than men.
This seems inconsistent with the notion that women are innately less desirous of sex than men; rather that they have more to lose from a casual encounter (as has been said) so are more guarded when accepting such a proposition.
My understanding is that testosterone, gram for gram, affects the female body more potently than it does the male body. So bringing up a female’s testosterone level to that of a male might not be dose-equivalent.
Or to put it another way: men’s and women’s physiologies are different. I’m not sure it’s safe to assume that someone who has transitioned from female to male through hormone replacement is identical (and so directly comparable) to someone who was born male, so I’d question the validity of comparisons made between the two.
Filled in the form a moment ago.