There are many movies and documentaries about female prostitutes. While some focus on women forced into prostitution against their will, most of the rest vaguely imply that the female prostitutes are exploited by their male customers. The message seems to be “Don’t they see that the money they gain is just not worth their loss of intimacy, self-respect, etc.?”
Street hookers need protection, since it's a risky business.
The person theorizing about the positive effects of prostitution on violence may be implicitly holding something like a "bare branches" theory, which is wrong.
On the incentive of women to oppose prostitution (just as workers oppose scabs) see Baumeister et al's Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions. I'm refraining from linking to avoid tripping any spam filter, but you can find it online.
I think that the best explanation for the length of you comment is that you haven't had a long term relationship with a prostitute. I did. It was fun for both of us. Lots of fun. It made us both happy. Happiness is a great destination. On the other hand, that could just be my cognitive bias.
Umm ... women already are designed this way. Human females are unique in that they both desire and receive pleasure from procreative acts (including penetration) when they are not fertile. In fact nobody knows another use for the clitoris other than the fact that is it there to make a female feel good.
So why is it that we don't have women running around wanting to be pleasured all the time? Why do we get these kinds of comments from very intelligent and well respected men: "Men tend more to seek simple no-strings sex and polygamy, while women more seek emotional stroking and hypergamy. "?
Regarding empirical evidence, I fail to see how the second paragraph of commenter Mercy’s above comment is blame shifting.
We're on the same page here. But I would never proceed to engage an offending woman in logical debate until I've rubbed her nose in her misdeed and she has apologized. I love to chat with polite people, but I ruthlessly protect my time from being taken up by the poorly-mannered. I encourage other men to uphold similar standards.
If a women uses a rhetorical flourish that may shift blame for a misdeed real or imagined onto a man, it follows that any argument she presents whether related to said rhetorical flourish or not fails?
No. The blame-shifting argument itself fails no matter the evidence or what follows.
As you mentioned my reading comprehension is poor, so I am relying on your continuing patience to help better my understanding of your writing. Hopefully in time my understanding will rise to the level that we can engage in substantive and not merely semantic discussion.
So you’re [sic] position is that a sufficient large quantity of men are defenseless in the face of women’s ability to avoid both blame and responsibility?
Yes. Worse, some men enable it in a misguided attempt to curry favour with the egg-bearing sex (I include these men in the "slow and dimwitted" category).
If this is so, is it only fear of other women that keeps women from completely ignoring law, social norms, etc. like Glaucon’s ring?
Who says women don't ignore laws with relative impunity? You appear unaware of the kid-glove treatment women get in courts.
Women habitually break my standards of social etiquette, but I'm afraid I can't say they break the social norms of the slow and dimwitted majority, because the norm is to allow bad behaviour. Although, as the link above suggests, women are probably less likely to grant pussy passes than men.
As a transhumanist, I firmly believe in technological solutions to social problems. We could use genetic engineering to alter the nature of women so that they experience pleasure, rather than distress, by being sexually penetrated by men.
As a consequence, women would start consenting to sex with men for the sake of the sex itself, rather than out of coercion (rape) or socioeconomic dependency (prostitution, marriage).
So my understanding of pushover as used here is imperfect.
Women are experts at shifting blame and squirming away from responsibility of all kinds, and many men are often too slow and weak-brained to put those attempts down with the ruthlessness required.
So you're position is that a sufficient large quantity of men are defenseless in the face of women's ability to avoid both blame and responsibility?
If this is so, is it only fear of other women that keeps women from completely ignoring law, social norms, etc. like Glaucon's ring?
Fair point. I misinterpretted your rhetorical flourishes as implying that because the commenter was a woman that male readers should assume her argument is not worth examining.
Regarding empirical evidence, I fail to see how the second paragraph of commenter Mercy's above comment is blame shifting. It seems rather close to asserting that the empirical evidence Robin is citing presents an incomplete picture of the situation.
Perhaps it is just because I ignored Mercy's expression of disappointment.
Do I understand your proposition correctly?:
If a women uses a rhetorical flourish that may shift blame for a misdeed real or imagined onto a man, it follows that any argument she presents whether related to said rhetorical flourish or not fails?
As you mentioned my reading comprehension is poor, so I am relying on your continuing patience to help better my understanding of your writing. Hopefully in time my understanding will rise to the level that we can engage in substantive and not merely semantic discussion.
Your reading comprehension is poor and your understanding of ad hom is bad.
I'm happy to discuss empirical evidence under many circumstances. However, if a woman tries to blame you for one of her failings, you prove yourself slow and dimwitted if you analyze the evidence she presents. Her "argument" was faulty from the get-go, and no evidence could prove it either way.
Let me use an actual example of ad hominem to illustrate an instance where evidence is not needed to dismiss an argument. If I were to say to you, "you are a scoundrel and an asshole and therefore you are wrong," you needn't consider whether it is actually true that you are a scoundrel and an asshole. My attempt at argument fails even before we get to the evidentiary stage.
I noted one particular area where men are pushovers. You reinterpreted my comment as a claim that men are incapable of competing in the entire social arena.
Prostitution was legal or at least prohibitions against it legally and socially were poorly enforced throughout much of history. Violent death and war were also more common...more regular parts of people's lives then.
Arguably the correlation is positive then between prostitution and violent-death-per-thousand-people...
...but like many correlations I suspect that any claims to causality are mostly spurious.
So if we ignore the ad hominem bandying around...do you have any particular objection to using empirical data as counter-evidence to refute an empirical claim?
I mean there's always abandoning any pretense of falsifiability and us all becoming metaphysicians.
Your example of a propagating successful strategy appears to require a sufficiently large population of individuals unable or unwilling to offer meaningful push-back.
But you may not be arguing that this is necessary despite:
nice offensive social maneuver without encountering any meaningful pushback.
And earlier:
many men are often too slow and weak-brained to put those attempts down
I might refer to Lewis Carrol to better understand your nuanced arguments:
'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"''But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.''The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.''The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they're the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'
If every guy could get regularly laid by a decent looking women without much trouble, women wouldn't be able to get us to do all the shit we do. Hence, prostitution is illegal.
I often wonder if we would see a dramatic decrease in violence and war fever if men could simply get laid instead of releases it out in those manners, but they woman wouldn't get nice dinners on Valentines day and all that other crap in exchange for laying on their backs.
Street hookers need protection, since it's a risky business.
The person theorizing about the positive effects of prostitution on violence may be implicitly holding something like a "bare branches" theory, which is wrong.
On the incentive of women to oppose prostitution (just as workers oppose scabs) see Baumeister et al's Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions. I'm refraining from linking to avoid tripping any spam filter, but you can find it online.
I think that the best explanation for the length of you comment is that you haven't had a long term relationship with a prostitute. I did. It was fun for both of us. Lots of fun. It made us both happy. Happiness is a great destination. On the other hand, that could just be my cognitive bias.
Men get off easier and have a higher sex drive. Everyone knows woman enjoy sex, but they don't want it as often and aren't as easily satisfied.
Umm ... women already are designed this way. Human females are unique in that they both desire and receive pleasure from procreative acts (including penetration) when they are not fertile. In fact nobody knows another use for the clitoris other than the fact that is it there to make a female feel good.
So why is it that we don't have women running around wanting to be pleasured all the time? Why do we get these kinds of comments from very intelligent and well respected men: "Men tend more to seek simple no-strings sex and polygamy, while women more seek emotional stroking and hypergamy. "?
Cultural programming i would guess.
Regarding empirical evidence, I fail to see how the second paragraph of commenter Mercy’s above comment is blame shifting.
We're on the same page here. But I would never proceed to engage an offending woman in logical debate until I've rubbed her nose in her misdeed and she has apologized. I love to chat with polite people, but I ruthlessly protect my time from being taken up by the poorly-mannered. I encourage other men to uphold similar standards.
If a women uses a rhetorical flourish that may shift blame for a misdeed real or imagined onto a man, it follows that any argument she presents whether related to said rhetorical flourish or not fails?
No. The blame-shifting argument itself fails no matter the evidence or what follows.
As you mentioned my reading comprehension is poor, so I am relying on your continuing patience to help better my understanding of your writing. Hopefully in time my understanding will rise to the level that we can engage in substantive and not merely semantic discussion.
Huzzah!
So you’re [sic] position is that a sufficient large quantity of men are defenseless in the face of women’s ability to avoid both blame and responsibility?
Yes. Worse, some men enable it in a misguided attempt to curry favour with the egg-bearing sex (I include these men in the "slow and dimwitted" category).
If this is so, is it only fear of other women that keeps women from completely ignoring law, social norms, etc. like Glaucon’s ring?
Who says women don't ignore laws with relative impunity? You appear unaware of the kid-glove treatment women get in courts.
Women habitually break my standards of social etiquette, but I'm afraid I can't say they break the social norms of the slow and dimwitted majority, because the norm is to allow bad behaviour. Although, as the link above suggests, women are probably less likely to grant pussy passes than men.
Violent war being common through history seems to be based on a lot of factors, chief among them resource competition in a scarce world.
The current post WWII era of "peace" is mostly a function of rapid technological change.
As a transhumanist, I firmly believe in technological solutions to social problems. We could use genetic engineering to alter the nature of women so that they experience pleasure, rather than distress, by being sexually penetrated by men.
As a consequence, women would start consenting to sex with men for the sake of the sex itself, rather than out of coercion (rape) or socioeconomic dependency (prostitution, marriage).
Ah, thank you for the clarification, P.
So my understanding of pushover as used here is imperfect.
Women are experts at shifting blame and squirming away from responsibility of all kinds, and many men are often too slow and weak-brained to put those attempts down with the ruthlessness required.
So you're position is that a sufficient large quantity of men are defenseless in the face of women's ability to avoid both blame and responsibility?
If this is so, is it only fear of other women that keeps women from completely ignoring law, social norms, etc. like Glaucon's ring?
Fair point. I misinterpretted your rhetorical flourishes as implying that because the commenter was a woman that male readers should assume her argument is not worth examining.
Regarding empirical evidence, I fail to see how the second paragraph of commenter Mercy's above comment is blame shifting. It seems rather close to asserting that the empirical evidence Robin is citing presents an incomplete picture of the situation.
Perhaps it is just because I ignored Mercy's expression of disappointment.
Do I understand your proposition correctly?:
If a women uses a rhetorical flourish that may shift blame for a misdeed real or imagined onto a man, it follows that any argument she presents whether related to said rhetorical flourish or not fails?
As you mentioned my reading comprehension is poor, so I am relying on your continuing patience to help better my understanding of your writing. Hopefully in time my understanding will rise to the level that we can engage in substantive and not merely semantic discussion.
Your reading comprehension is poor and your understanding of ad hom is bad.
I'm happy to discuss empirical evidence under many circumstances. However, if a woman tries to blame you for one of her failings, you prove yourself slow and dimwitted if you analyze the evidence she presents. Her "argument" was faulty from the get-go, and no evidence could prove it either way.
Let me use an actual example of ad hominem to illustrate an instance where evidence is not needed to dismiss an argument. If I were to say to you, "you are a scoundrel and an asshole and therefore you are wrong," you needn't consider whether it is actually true that you are a scoundrel and an asshole. My attempt at argument fails even before we get to the evidentiary stage.
I noted one particular area where men are pushovers. You reinterpreted my comment as a claim that men are incapable of competing in the entire social arena.
Prostitution was legal or at least prohibitions against it legally and socially were poorly enforced throughout much of history. Violent death and war were also more common...more regular parts of people's lives then.
Arguably the correlation is positive then between prostitution and violent-death-per-thousand-people...
...but like many correlations I suspect that any claims to causality are mostly spurious.
So if we ignore the ad hominem bandying around...do you have any particular objection to using empirical data as counter-evidence to refute an empirical claim?
I mean there's always abandoning any pretense of falsifiability and us all becoming metaphysicians.
Your example of a propagating successful strategy appears to require a sufficiently large population of individuals unable or unwilling to offer meaningful push-back.
But you may not be arguing that this is necessary despite:
nice offensive social maneuver without encountering any meaningful pushback.
And earlier:
many men are often too slow and weak-brained to put those attempts down
I might refer to Lewis Carrol to better understand your nuanced arguments:
'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"''But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.''The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.''The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they're the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'
If every guy could get regularly laid by a decent looking women without much trouble, women wouldn't be able to get us to do all the shit we do. Hence, prostitution is illegal.
I often wonder if we would see a dramatic decrease in violence and war fever if men could simply get laid instead of releases it out in those manners, but they woman wouldn't get nice dinners on Valentines day and all that other crap in exchange for laying on their backs.