Elon is like walking life lesson of many things - like “maybe money doesn’t always guarantee the happiness”, “maybe don’t do too much ketamine” etc lol
I thought of it when I saw a boy asking his mom “What does Elon do?” in the subway lol
Such a good question kid, I actually wanna know the answer!
Here's a funny thought: as for me, I think I'm doing alright. Not perfect. Lots of things I wish were different in my personal sphere. However I would not trade places with Elom for a trillion dollars. And in some wishy-washy handwavey sense, he allegedly is worth that much! Still true.
It's bad enough to be at the emotional state when you would go to AI with that prompt, but being public about it is pathetic. He's either actively cultivating an incel following or is completely lacking in self-awareness.
As someone with a diagnosis, I wouldn't be surprised if he were legitimately autistic; he shows a lot of signs of it. (And plenty of "self-diagnosed" people online are people who eventually get a legitimate diagnosis - where it's more akin to, say, how most trans people who go through medical transition spend a few years exploring their gender identity in other ways before getting to that point. Though of course there are also a lot of flagrant liars, and someone like Elon has no reason resources-wise he can't get the real thing.) But I am still very tired of him using it as an excuse for his asshole behavior.
a) Plenty of us spend years and years of working on our more annoying traits. Even before I got my actual diagnosis, I put in a lot of time and energy into working on my social skills, and I know very few adult autistic people that is not true for (at least, of the ones who are "high-functioning" or "low-support-needs"; I'm not talking about the people who are so disabled they're dependent on other people caring for them).
b) Autistic people are also capable of being just plain assholes just as much as anybody else. The very few adult autistic people I mentioned above who haven't done some social skills work? They are those people. And that's so clearly what's going on with someone like Elon Musk. Some people who do that shit are lying about being autistic, but some are also autistic but also jerks. (I knew a woman in one of my fandom groups online who had a real autism diagnosis but also was constantly making people uncomfortable with creepy, pushy behavior and her refusal to consider any feelings but her own. She professed a genuine desire to "learn social skills" but would always revert back to her previous behavior even after the moderators gave her hours of help; basically, she just wanted to run roughshod over everyone else's feelings and needs and use her diagnosis as an excuse. She eventually got banned from the group and then spent months online "calling us out" as evil and exclusionary and ableist for doing so, despite most of the people who took the most issue with her being autistic or another type of neurodivergent themselves - I mean, online fandom group, lol. Anyway, that woman was #ActuallyAutistic, but more importantly, actually asshole!)
Like, people were fucking using his autistic identity to excuse his Nazi salute. There's nothing about autism that makes you raise your hand up in the air like that, even in a moment of "excitement," nor fail to recognize what that gesture is going to look like! (We are, in fact, capable of reading history books! In fact, probably MORE academics are autistic than not.) Come on!!!!
Eh, he’s just the latest reminder that the Romans were onto something when they’d assign a slave to walk behind a triumphant general whispering “remember, thou art mortal” during his victory parade.
Infinite Scroll had an article today where he said that Marc Anderssen has basically had his brain turned to mush by too much time online, and now thinks in memes. My take is that Elon is experiencing the exact same thing.
I always say that "being bullied in high school" is like anything with high school - there's a "statute of limitations" on how long into adulthood you can use it as your primary motivation until it starts being pathetic and On You. Especially when you consider just how many people fall into the "was bullied in high school" category. It's like the darker, sadder flip side of why we think it's cringe to coast on being a "former gifted kid" or the high school QB/head cheerleader into your 30s.
Exceptions obviously if the bullying was particularly violent+constant or something, but in general I think for most people, if it's an ongoing motivation for decades into adulthood, there was/is other stuff going on.
(Also, so many men like him talk about it like it is an exclusively male phenomenon that women can never understand, like none of us were ever bullied, and I just want to say....uh.... Hollywood famously made a movie about the specific ways that women bully each other in high school that was so popular they made it into a musical and then made another movie based on that musical!)
I joke that I don't need to talk about my IQ / being a Ravenclaw / being a "recovering gifted kid" or whatever because I have a PhD and that speaks for all of that. (Though, boy, some of the real dumbasses out there with PhDs....)
I dunno. I kinda feel like if Elon Musk COULD have a normal relationship with a woman he'd be doing it by now. I have a friend sort of like that - never married but has gone through more girlfriends than I can count. He seems to genuinely want a rewarding relationship with a woman, a "true companion", but to my eyes he's already had at least 3 and walked away from each of them. He just doesn't know how to do it....
I love that the “what men actually want” trad example is… Miranda Kerr, a past Victoria’s Secret angel and girlboss skincare company founder. Really serving housewife normalcy, for sure.
I thought that, too! Their dream trad wife made a fortune by dressing in lingerie for a mass produced catalogue. Back in the day, young boys who couldn't access porn could always steal their mom's Victoria's Secret catalogue. I suppose these days that does seem wholesome.
The Fae discourse and "sighs in toddler" is gold, Jerry, gold!
As for Sydney Sweeney, she and her team knew exactly what questions were coming (they are often given a list and there's a back and forth on what to cut and what to keep) and gave approval on the final cut/edit that went out. Annoying leftist as that woman was, Sydney was not ambushed by that question. Her face when answering is the greatest meme in the past few years though, so I'll take it :)
Did the list include all the hemming and hawing and concern trolling and dancing around the issue and doing anything but just straight up asking the question? It’s that, as much as the question itself, that people are reacting to I think.
This is what I know from working in the industry but I guess Sydney could be powerless about how she’s presented in a feature like this. Maybe she’s not a superstar who can negotiate what she wants. In which case I’m sad for her and hope she gains more power and can present herself exactly as she wants someday in the future.
Is that a GQ/celebrity interview thing? I’m genuinely asking, I’m not in either industry but I’ve heard exactly the opposite about journalistic interviews and even stuff like “The Daily Show” - once you agree to be on the record you’re kind of at their mercy for what they decide to include or cut.
That’s how it used to be a long time ago. Not in the internet era where power systems have democratized. Stars don’t need talk shows to broadcast their fun selves to audiences anymore.
“Billionaire industrialist can’t get a girlfriend so designs a sex bot instead” is such an well-trodden science fiction plot trope that I’m astonished to see Elon Musk doing it in real life,
I mean, does he know what happens at the end of _Ex Machina_ ?
Deepseek R1 helpfully suggests _Stepford Wives_ or _Blade Runner 2049_ as analogous to Musk’s current situation. (I would have come up with those examples, too)
Part of the problem here is that an AI sexbot like Ani will know the plot of all those movies.
Nobody's going to take a swing at the "F**k like a pornstar" bit? Fine, I'll jump on the grenade. In the style of Matt Yglesias "13 Thoughts on..." here are some thoughts on wives doing it like pornstars.
1. Savanna said "f**k like a pornstar". You don't have to Look like a pornstar to do that, plus women in porn come in a pretty wide variety of forms from what I can tell these days. The "lose 70 lb" comment doesn't track, except possibly for Mitchell..
2. I know what Savanna is getting at with her comment, but at its base "f**ing like a pornstar" involves a wardrobe, a makeup artist, a set; at the end the star walks away and rejoins her normal life. Jumping to "F**ing like a pornstar" with no crew and from inside your normal life is a much bigger lift. Pro tip for the guys: take her out of the house. The "dirty weekend" phenomenon. "Hot hotel sex" is a cliche for a reason...
3. audrey and dumpster fire are being a bit snarky here. There's nothing unchristian about a married woman having an interest in good sex with her husband, and that includes learning how to make sex sexier. Having said that, both of them have a point: when a young woman has been told all her life that her body is a temple and men want to defile it, then she marries and she's supposed to satisfy her man's carnal desires....that's kind of a big leap. You don't have to read many advice columns to recognize that a lot of women - and men - are not making that leap. A shocking number seem to have little idea of how their bodies actually work. Feels like the way to have a satisfying relationship is to do some of the basic training before you get there..
4. To pull @darthcaro into this, it strikes me that women could benefit their relationships by watching and internalizing more porn, and men could benefit their relationships by reading and internalizing more romance lit. Learning what the other likes and desires should cut both ways...
5. A bit off-topic, but Littles? This is a thing??
On 5, Ms. Rachel does explicitly refer to her audience as “Littles” (as in the titles of her original videos were “Songs for Littles”). But uh, obviously her original meaning did not include adult fetishists.
I personally wish they still made movies with good sex scenes. Those scenes were made for a mass audience of people on dates, so they were made to be hot for both men and women. I think gender relations were somewhat better when culture wasn't so divided between them.
There does seem to be a big divide between porn - explicit sex with no buildup whatsoever, which plays way more to men than women I'd guess - and the sort of complex romantic films that women might find engaging, but sexual encounters are absent or done very timidly. And that sort of film in general seems less common than even a decade ago. CHH noted some exceptions in recent times: "Bridgerton", the "Fifty Shades" films (side note: did "Fifty Shades" play better on the page or on screen?), I'd add "The Buccaneers" - though two of those were series that dropped on streaming channels rather than in theaters. "Netflix and chill" is definitely a thing, but if you have a complicated family life the "chill" part might be difficult at home, and you're probably not watching TV on someone's couch as part of an early date. Less broadly useful as date material.
And that circles back to your point. Films with sexually suggestive scenes that aren't porn are not common these days. Meanwhile, the romantic/erotic literature field is massive. Why doesn't more of that get translated to film?
I'm over here because I want to make a brief comment about CHH's article "Is This Trad Stuff Just BDSM?". CHH finds it more than surprising that Lori Alexander could marry her husband despite that she "wasn't physically attracted to him" and "didn't really get along with him," and, then, after 20 years (how could she wait that long?) find, I'm not sure what to say here since CHH or Lori is not specific, she found joy or "love" in her marriage.
There is a whole lot that interests me here. Let me first remind everyone that the notion of romantic marriage is fairly rare, and perhaps fairly recent. I haven't tried to research the history. Marriage has traditionally - by that I mean for most of human history - been about procreation and family, especially extended families. It's a community building project. That's more than foreign today. I'd suggest that it's almost unheard of. No, I don't want to say that. CHH and many here are definitely pro-family, but I hope you get my gist. We have largely fractured families. That's not new. You have to get out of cities, in my experience, to see anything different.
I've been married for 35 years. I married, as is becoming very common, very late, almost 44, my wife 37. My experience is that whatever reason you thought you married your spouse for when you got married is not what you think after being married for a very long time. If your marriage lasts a lifetime, and mine will, the relationship gets so melted and melded into each other that it couldn't possibly be repeated in one lifetime. I'm sure that there are many variants of this intimate union. It is founded, I'd suggest, on the irrevocable commitment from the beginning that it last until "death do we part." I'm not certain how common that is today. At this point in our lives, we hardly if ever have sex. I'm not even certain that I could say that we have a sexual relationship. (Yes, I've responded to CHH's request for the sexual habits of "older" people.)
So, while the attitudes that Lori expresses, as given to us by CHH, I can somewhat understand, even if my wife and I don't necessarily subscribe to all of those listed. I'd suggest that if you marry because you are "attracted" to your spouse, you are likely to be ultimately disappointed. In the end, something more must grow and bind you together. That's what I think Lori discovered through patience and being married for other reasons, reasons not given to us here.
I'll end with this (hoping for some comment) with the following. I'm reading a book titled "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self" by Carl Trueman. I don't expect many here to be familiar with this book. This is not the first scholarly work I've read on the subject. What makes his take different from others is that this is a very recent book and he is focused on the "very recent" (meaning 2020's) understanding of the self. He claims at one point that "we" today are all Freudians in the sense that we believe that "genital eroticism" is the "central point of life." "The purpose of life, and the content of the good life, is personal sexual fulfillment." Without this "sexual fulfillment" we cannot be happy. I wrote in the margins of the book: "This is difficult to believe."
I have two comments to make in this regard. First, Carl Trueman is a 58-year-old Christian. That leads me to think that his perspective may be tilted both by his age and his Christian perspective. And second, I have been surprised by comments of those in their late twenties and early thirties that suggest to me that some kind of radical shift has taken place since the rise of the so-called "sexual revolution" of the sixties that I was part of. And this shift has the feel of something like what Trueman is referring to. I can assure you through immediate and intimate experience of those crazy days in the late sixties this is not what we were capable of. We talked about "free love," but almost no one could actually do it. We were still the children of our parents. Sexual relationships were bound by commitments, responsibility, and all the kinds of things that Freud and many since then have regarded as "repressive." As such, sex could never be regarded without a hint of guilt as "free" or "casual." BTW, this is why Freud was ultimately a pessimist: civilization ultimately requires that we be unhappy.
So, my question here is whether I have completely missed something. Is it really possible that many (it's never all) people no regard "sexual fulfillment" as essential for a "happy" life. If that is the case, I just wonder what they think as they begin to grow old, and then, what is worse, older. Do they now think that life is over and they have nothing to live for?
You wrote "My experience is that whatever reason you thought you married your spouse for when you got married is not what you think after being married for a very long time." I have to disagree. I think the reasons I married my wife are the reasons I love her still. We have both changed - in good and bad ways - over the years, but that.....essence I felt when we first dated is still there. A lot more has grown around it, but at heart what I loved in the beginning is what I love now. And so at 70 we still have sex and we still go on adventures. That's who we were early on and that's who we are today.
You also wrote: "Marriage has traditionally - by that I mean for most of human history - been about procreation and family, especially extended families. It's a community building project. That's more than foreign today. I'd suggest that it's almost unheard of." You're right - the notion of marrying because you LIKED someone, found her/him complementary, desired the person is a recent development. But to be precise, the historical norm wasn't about building community as much as building dynasty - that extended family. Community can be built in other ways, and we're still mapping the contours of what that looks like in the modern world. I also have to point out that what you reference is really about 'recorded' human history, which is a small part of overall human history. Those earlier humans almost certainly lived very different lives, which we can only glimpse in recorded accounts of "first nations" peoples around the world, and in the cultures of the rare hunter/gatherer groups that still exist today. Those glimpses suggest that ideas about "family" and "community" were probably shaped differently from what the later agricultural societies thought important and proper.
As for sexual fulfillment, that's always been important. Human, like all mammals, are wired to seek and mate with the best match for them. In historic times this desire - especially for women but also to an extent for men - was pushed aside by the "commodities trading" of traditional marriage. 'Sexual fulfillment' is really a part of PERSONAL fulfillment, the idea of using ones skills and desires in the way you think best, of making a life that you define. For women especially it was the quantum leap from 'commodity' to full actor in society. But you were dead-on about the 'free love' '60; I was a kid during that, but dating in the '70s I saw the echoes - and the fall-out. You're right; it's harder than you think to escape the culture you grew up in. More than that, the idea of 'free love' was naive, as if actions could have no consequences. I firmly believe it's possible (see China's Musuo culture), but I also believe it's quite difficult in our culture.
Anyway, interesting and thought-provoking comment.
Just want to say I loved your point about history vs recorded history! I think that's something that gets overlooked by people on all sides of the argument who use history to make their point.
Years sgo I read an interesting book entitled Sex At Dawn, which delves into the topic of what sex, relationships, family, community might have worked in prehistoric groups. Not the best written, but interesting. The bibliography was also enlightening.
I think you're on to something, sensing a change in the zeitgeist of romantic relationships, but I think the specific case of "sexual fulfillment" is just one instance of a general change.
From my view, a few things have changed:
- There's less external pressure forcing relationships to stay together from the outside.
- There's more internal pressure pushing relationships apart, due to a mismatch between what we expect from a relationship (my best friend, my lifelong sexual partner, and someone who will provide unconditional love and heal my childhood wounds - I think this exaggeration represents an extreme end of a spectrum of expectations, but you could expect somewhat less and still be in deep crud) and what we actually get (another imperfect human being with his or her own ideas).
So in the best case both people in a couple could grow and reinvent what the relationship is to have deeper meaning, and that could come from their own love of each other and commitment. And in the worst case, each one could say "this sucks, it's obviously my partner's fault, f--- this I'm out."
Re: sexual fulfillment, I think if it comes from a place of gratification, yeah, that's gonna feel hollow and empty in old age...as would any other simple pursuit of gratification. If it comes from a place of deep connection and meaning, then perhaps it can grow and evolve in age appropriate ways.
As someone who's been with my wife for over 25 years now, quite a bit of this resonated with me. The state of my relationship today has very little to do with how attractive we found one another in our thirties.
That said, we are biological beings and sex and attraction are important and I don't think we would have gotten to where we are today if we didn't have that in place from the start to give us space to build a deeper connection that can last for decades.
I promise every one. The porn star sex stops when you have 8 minutes and three l+ children you have to get it over with before they wake up. Also “sex or bed” is a real choice after kids
I also just...I have to ask what precisely is *meant* by "porn star sex". Because I feel like it's being used as a proxy here for "does what the husband wants regardless of her own comfort" but that could be wrong.
It's also kinda fascinating as I really doubt there's much of a correlation between men cheating/looking at porn at how porn-star their wife is.
Variations/frequency The point was your sex life will take a hit after children no matter how good it was before. Probably more so if it was really good before.
Afternoon dalliances? Lol, there's 3 kids at home and bluey only works so well
Morning? The kids wake up early. Good luck
5pm after work on a stressful day? Ha, it's dinner time fool
9pm? Sex or sleep. Umm, we both choose sleep a lot more than we used too
I don't want to get too much into my sex life but we used to do most of the above. We do not anymore and it's not from lack of want/attraction. it's 99% the kids.
Well yes, the full-value porn film sex is pretty much limited to those weekends when the grandparents have the kids, and yes, sleep deprivation is very real after kids (and we only had one! Three+; you guys are SERIOUS...). But it doesn't have to stop if you two really want to keep that aspect of your life going.
We still do fine. Pre kids we did great. We have an infant and two toddlers who currently keep trading off in their sleep regressions. The oldest has mostly figured it out.
Well that's good. My daughter's younger child refused to sleep alone for like 18 months - would just cry and cry if left alone in a crib. They finally had to just say "enough" and gut it out for a week before the kid finally began sleeping alone. That kind of thing can disrupt a LOT...
I encountered Lori years ago and couldn't believe what I was reading. She seemed to hate her husband and get off on forcing herself to have sex with him and cater to him. Like through gritted teeth. I always found her more of a kink account than some serious religious, traditional wife. However, CHH is probably right and Lori is utterly serious about her miserable life.
“Women should tell other women to f—k their husbands like a pornstar” is grammatically ambiguous. My first read had me thinking I am supposed to tell other women to f—k my husband. No thanks!
Elon Musk is the epitome of that "Men will do anything but go to therapy" meme
Elon is like walking life lesson of many things - like “maybe money doesn’t always guarantee the happiness”, “maybe don’t do too much ketamine” etc lol
I thought of it when I saw a boy asking his mom “What does Elon do?” in the subway lol
Such a good question kid, I actually wanna know the answer!
"Maybe supposedly high IQ people can be really stupid"
Here's a funny thought: as for me, I think I'm doing alright. Not perfect. Lots of things I wish were different in my personal sphere. However I would not trade places with Elom for a trillion dollars. And in some wishy-washy handwavey sense, he allegedly is worth that much! Still true.
Not very many such cases.
I think plenty of us who could be doing a lot better financially still wouldn't trade places with Elon for a million dollars.
It's bad enough to be at the emotional state when you would go to AI with that prompt, but being public about it is pathetic. He's either actively cultivating an incel following or is completely lacking in self-awareness.
I have a feeling that it started as a latter (lacking self awareness) and realized his actions generates an insane engagement from them…
I recall he recognizes him to be autistic so lacking self awareness is not a total surprise ig…?
People who self-diagnose on the internet as being austic are frequently just inconsiderate assholes.
"You can't yell at me for emptying your medicine cabinet during your party! I have self-diagnosed OCD."
As someone with a diagnosis, I wouldn't be surprised if he were legitimately autistic; he shows a lot of signs of it. (And plenty of "self-diagnosed" people online are people who eventually get a legitimate diagnosis - where it's more akin to, say, how most trans people who go through medical transition spend a few years exploring their gender identity in other ways before getting to that point. Though of course there are also a lot of flagrant liars, and someone like Elon has no reason resources-wise he can't get the real thing.) But I am still very tired of him using it as an excuse for his asshole behavior.
a) Plenty of us spend years and years of working on our more annoying traits. Even before I got my actual diagnosis, I put in a lot of time and energy into working on my social skills, and I know very few adult autistic people that is not true for (at least, of the ones who are "high-functioning" or "low-support-needs"; I'm not talking about the people who are so disabled they're dependent on other people caring for them).
b) Autistic people are also capable of being just plain assholes just as much as anybody else. The very few adult autistic people I mentioned above who haven't done some social skills work? They are those people. And that's so clearly what's going on with someone like Elon Musk. Some people who do that shit are lying about being autistic, but some are also autistic but also jerks. (I knew a woman in one of my fandom groups online who had a real autism diagnosis but also was constantly making people uncomfortable with creepy, pushy behavior and her refusal to consider any feelings but her own. She professed a genuine desire to "learn social skills" but would always revert back to her previous behavior even after the moderators gave her hours of help; basically, she just wanted to run roughshod over everyone else's feelings and needs and use her diagnosis as an excuse. She eventually got banned from the group and then spent months online "calling us out" as evil and exclusionary and ableist for doing so, despite most of the people who took the most issue with her being autistic or another type of neurodivergent themselves - I mean, online fandom group, lol. Anyway, that woman was #ActuallyAutistic, but more importantly, actually asshole!)
Like, people were fucking using his autistic identity to excuse his Nazi salute. There's nothing about autism that makes you raise your hand up in the air like that, even in a moment of "excitement," nor fail to recognize what that gesture is going to look like! (We are, in fact, capable of reading history books! In fact, probably MORE academics are autistic than not.) Come on!!!!
Eh, he’s just the latest reminder that the Romans were onto something when they’d assign a slave to walk behind a triumphant general whispering “remember, thou art mortal” during his victory parade.
Infinite Scroll had an article today where he said that Marc Anderssen has basically had his brain turned to mush by too much time online, and now thinks in memes. My take is that Elon is experiencing the exact same thing.
I actually have empathy for him after reading the NYTimes piece about his father. His brain is permanently broken from such a fucked up childhood.
Oh wow I googled it and that is def fuckef up…
I also remember him being bullied in high school too and I used to think that was his defining motivation but looks like there’s more to it…
I always say that "being bullied in high school" is like anything with high school - there's a "statute of limitations" on how long into adulthood you can use it as your primary motivation until it starts being pathetic and On You. Especially when you consider just how many people fall into the "was bullied in high school" category. It's like the darker, sadder flip side of why we think it's cringe to coast on being a "former gifted kid" or the high school QB/head cheerleader into your 30s.
Exceptions obviously if the bullying was particularly violent+constant or something, but in general I think for most people, if it's an ongoing motivation for decades into adulthood, there was/is other stuff going on.
(Also, so many men like him talk about it like it is an exclusively male phenomenon that women can never understand, like none of us were ever bullied, and I just want to say....uh.... Hollywood famously made a movie about the specific ways that women bully each other in high school that was so popular they made it into a musical and then made another movie based on that musical!)
Soooo trueeee!
Like it feels so absurd that any adult is bragging about his IQ like that’s the proof of their human net worth lol
(Not saying IQ is useless fwiw
I joke that I don't need to talk about my IQ / being a Ravenclaw / being a "recovering gifted kid" or whatever because I have a PhD and that speaks for all of that. (Though, boy, some of the real dumbasses out there with PhDs....)
Love seeing Matt Y dunk on Elon like that.
Some men are just begging to be posterized, they are born with a silver Jordan in their mouths, and Elon checks that box thoroughly.
I dunno. I kinda feel like if Elon Musk COULD have a normal relationship with a woman he'd be doing it by now. I have a friend sort of like that - never married but has gone through more girlfriends than I can count. He seems to genuinely want a rewarding relationship with a woman, a "true companion", but to my eyes he's already had at least 3 and walked away from each of them. He just doesn't know how to do it....
This is a great weekly antidote to logging back into my Twitter account
Username-comment synergy
I love that the “what men actually want” trad example is… Miranda Kerr, a past Victoria’s Secret angel and girlboss skincare company founder. Really serving housewife normalcy, for sure.
I thought that, too! Their dream trad wife made a fortune by dressing in lingerie for a mass produced catalogue. Back in the day, young boys who couldn't access porn could always steal their mom's Victoria's Secret catalogue. I suppose these days that does seem wholesome.
I wonder a good chunk of “repeal the 19th” ppl are the ones *fantasizing* about domestic abuse but cannot do it bc they cannot date anyone…
The Fae discourse and "sighs in toddler" is gold, Jerry, gold!
As for Sydney Sweeney, she and her team knew exactly what questions were coming (they are often given a list and there's a back and forth on what to cut and what to keep) and gave approval on the final cut/edit that went out. Annoying leftist as that woman was, Sydney was not ambushed by that question. Her face when answering is the greatest meme in the past few years though, so I'll take it :)
Idk I feel like she always looks like that though
That’s true too.
Did the list include all the hemming and hawing and concern trolling and dancing around the issue and doing anything but just straight up asking the question? It’s that, as much as the question itself, that people are reacting to I think.
Yes of course but Sydney had final approval on the edit. She knew.
Do we actually know that for sure? I didn’t think any sort of editorial control or veto authority was a standard feature of interviews.
In any case you’re right that both people are playing a part… but then again both are presumably playing it in a way they think makes them look good.
This is what I know from working in the industry but I guess Sydney could be powerless about how she’s presented in a feature like this. Maybe she’s not a superstar who can negotiate what she wants. In which case I’m sad for her and hope she gains more power and can present herself exactly as she wants someday in the future.
Is that a GQ/celebrity interview thing? I’m genuinely asking, I’m not in either industry but I’ve heard exactly the opposite about journalistic interviews and even stuff like “The Daily Show” - once you agree to be on the record you’re kind of at their mercy for what they decide to include or cut.
That’s how it used to be a long time ago. Not in the internet era where power systems have democratized. Stars don’t need talk shows to broadcast their fun selves to audiences anymore.
“Billionaire industrialist can’t get a girlfriend so designs a sex bot instead” is such an well-trodden science fiction plot trope that I’m astonished to see Elon Musk doing it in real life,
I mean, does he know what happens at the end of _Ex Machina_ ?
Deepseek R1 helpfully suggests _Stepford Wives_ or _Blade Runner 2049_ as analogous to Musk’s current situation. (I would have come up with those examples, too)
Part of the problem here is that an AI sexbot like Ani will know the plot of all those movies.
That What Guys Actually Want photo is of Miranda Kerr. Bold move to suggest men want lingerie supermodels.
Nobody's going to take a swing at the "F**k like a pornstar" bit? Fine, I'll jump on the grenade. In the style of Matt Yglesias "13 Thoughts on..." here are some thoughts on wives doing it like pornstars.
1. Savanna said "f**k like a pornstar". You don't have to Look like a pornstar to do that, plus women in porn come in a pretty wide variety of forms from what I can tell these days. The "lose 70 lb" comment doesn't track, except possibly for Mitchell..
2. I know what Savanna is getting at with her comment, but at its base "f**ing like a pornstar" involves a wardrobe, a makeup artist, a set; at the end the star walks away and rejoins her normal life. Jumping to "F**ing like a pornstar" with no crew and from inside your normal life is a much bigger lift. Pro tip for the guys: take her out of the house. The "dirty weekend" phenomenon. "Hot hotel sex" is a cliche for a reason...
3. audrey and dumpster fire are being a bit snarky here. There's nothing unchristian about a married woman having an interest in good sex with her husband, and that includes learning how to make sex sexier. Having said that, both of them have a point: when a young woman has been told all her life that her body is a temple and men want to defile it, then she marries and she's supposed to satisfy her man's carnal desires....that's kind of a big leap. You don't have to read many advice columns to recognize that a lot of women - and men - are not making that leap. A shocking number seem to have little idea of how their bodies actually work. Feels like the way to have a satisfying relationship is to do some of the basic training before you get there..
4. To pull @darthcaro into this, it strikes me that women could benefit their relationships by watching and internalizing more porn, and men could benefit their relationships by reading and internalizing more romance lit. Learning what the other likes and desires should cut both ways...
5. A bit off-topic, but Littles? This is a thing??
That's all I got.
On 5, Ms. Rachel does explicitly refer to her audience as “Littles” (as in the titles of her original videos were “Songs for Littles”). But uh, obviously her original meaning did not include adult fetishists.
I personally wish they still made movies with good sex scenes. Those scenes were made for a mass audience of people on dates, so they were made to be hot for both men and women. I think gender relations were somewhat better when culture wasn't so divided between them.
There does seem to be a big divide between porn - explicit sex with no buildup whatsoever, which plays way more to men than women I'd guess - and the sort of complex romantic films that women might find engaging, but sexual encounters are absent or done very timidly. And that sort of film in general seems less common than even a decade ago. CHH noted some exceptions in recent times: "Bridgerton", the "Fifty Shades" films (side note: did "Fifty Shades" play better on the page or on screen?), I'd add "The Buccaneers" - though two of those were series that dropped on streaming channels rather than in theaters. "Netflix and chill" is definitely a thing, but if you have a complicated family life the "chill" part might be difficult at home, and you're probably not watching TV on someone's couch as part of an early date. Less broadly useful as date material.
And that circles back to your point. Films with sexually suggestive scenes that aren't porn are not common these days. Meanwhile, the romantic/erotic literature field is massive. Why doesn't more of that get translated to film?
I am always surprised when I see Alfalfa from Little Rascals talking like that.
I'm over here because I want to make a brief comment about CHH's article "Is This Trad Stuff Just BDSM?". CHH finds it more than surprising that Lori Alexander could marry her husband despite that she "wasn't physically attracted to him" and "didn't really get along with him," and, then, after 20 years (how could she wait that long?) find, I'm not sure what to say here since CHH or Lori is not specific, she found joy or "love" in her marriage.
There is a whole lot that interests me here. Let me first remind everyone that the notion of romantic marriage is fairly rare, and perhaps fairly recent. I haven't tried to research the history. Marriage has traditionally - by that I mean for most of human history - been about procreation and family, especially extended families. It's a community building project. That's more than foreign today. I'd suggest that it's almost unheard of. No, I don't want to say that. CHH and many here are definitely pro-family, but I hope you get my gist. We have largely fractured families. That's not new. You have to get out of cities, in my experience, to see anything different.
I've been married for 35 years. I married, as is becoming very common, very late, almost 44, my wife 37. My experience is that whatever reason you thought you married your spouse for when you got married is not what you think after being married for a very long time. If your marriage lasts a lifetime, and mine will, the relationship gets so melted and melded into each other that it couldn't possibly be repeated in one lifetime. I'm sure that there are many variants of this intimate union. It is founded, I'd suggest, on the irrevocable commitment from the beginning that it last until "death do we part." I'm not certain how common that is today. At this point in our lives, we hardly if ever have sex. I'm not even certain that I could say that we have a sexual relationship. (Yes, I've responded to CHH's request for the sexual habits of "older" people.)
So, while the attitudes that Lori expresses, as given to us by CHH, I can somewhat understand, even if my wife and I don't necessarily subscribe to all of those listed. I'd suggest that if you marry because you are "attracted" to your spouse, you are likely to be ultimately disappointed. In the end, something more must grow and bind you together. That's what I think Lori discovered through patience and being married for other reasons, reasons not given to us here.
I'll end with this (hoping for some comment) with the following. I'm reading a book titled "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self" by Carl Trueman. I don't expect many here to be familiar with this book. This is not the first scholarly work I've read on the subject. What makes his take different from others is that this is a very recent book and he is focused on the "very recent" (meaning 2020's) understanding of the self. He claims at one point that "we" today are all Freudians in the sense that we believe that "genital eroticism" is the "central point of life." "The purpose of life, and the content of the good life, is personal sexual fulfillment." Without this "sexual fulfillment" we cannot be happy. I wrote in the margins of the book: "This is difficult to believe."
I have two comments to make in this regard. First, Carl Trueman is a 58-year-old Christian. That leads me to think that his perspective may be tilted both by his age and his Christian perspective. And second, I have been surprised by comments of those in their late twenties and early thirties that suggest to me that some kind of radical shift has taken place since the rise of the so-called "sexual revolution" of the sixties that I was part of. And this shift has the feel of something like what Trueman is referring to. I can assure you through immediate and intimate experience of those crazy days in the late sixties this is not what we were capable of. We talked about "free love," but almost no one could actually do it. We were still the children of our parents. Sexual relationships were bound by commitments, responsibility, and all the kinds of things that Freud and many since then have regarded as "repressive." As such, sex could never be regarded without a hint of guilt as "free" or "casual." BTW, this is why Freud was ultimately a pessimist: civilization ultimately requires that we be unhappy.
So, my question here is whether I have completely missed something. Is it really possible that many (it's never all) people no regard "sexual fulfillment" as essential for a "happy" life. If that is the case, I just wonder what they think as they begin to grow old, and then, what is worse, older. Do they now think that life is over and they have nothing to live for?
You wrote "My experience is that whatever reason you thought you married your spouse for when you got married is not what you think after being married for a very long time." I have to disagree. I think the reasons I married my wife are the reasons I love her still. We have both changed - in good and bad ways - over the years, but that.....essence I felt when we first dated is still there. A lot more has grown around it, but at heart what I loved in the beginning is what I love now. And so at 70 we still have sex and we still go on adventures. That's who we were early on and that's who we are today.
You also wrote: "Marriage has traditionally - by that I mean for most of human history - been about procreation and family, especially extended families. It's a community building project. That's more than foreign today. I'd suggest that it's almost unheard of." You're right - the notion of marrying because you LIKED someone, found her/him complementary, desired the person is a recent development. But to be precise, the historical norm wasn't about building community as much as building dynasty - that extended family. Community can be built in other ways, and we're still mapping the contours of what that looks like in the modern world. I also have to point out that what you reference is really about 'recorded' human history, which is a small part of overall human history. Those earlier humans almost certainly lived very different lives, which we can only glimpse in recorded accounts of "first nations" peoples around the world, and in the cultures of the rare hunter/gatherer groups that still exist today. Those glimpses suggest that ideas about "family" and "community" were probably shaped differently from what the later agricultural societies thought important and proper.
As for sexual fulfillment, that's always been important. Human, like all mammals, are wired to seek and mate with the best match for them. In historic times this desire - especially for women but also to an extent for men - was pushed aside by the "commodities trading" of traditional marriage. 'Sexual fulfillment' is really a part of PERSONAL fulfillment, the idea of using ones skills and desires in the way you think best, of making a life that you define. For women especially it was the quantum leap from 'commodity' to full actor in society. But you were dead-on about the 'free love' '60; I was a kid during that, but dating in the '70s I saw the echoes - and the fall-out. You're right; it's harder than you think to escape the culture you grew up in. More than that, the idea of 'free love' was naive, as if actions could have no consequences. I firmly believe it's possible (see China's Musuo culture), but I also believe it's quite difficult in our culture.
Anyway, interesting and thought-provoking comment.
Just want to say I loved your point about history vs recorded history! I think that's something that gets overlooked by people on all sides of the argument who use history to make their point.
Years sgo I read an interesting book entitled Sex At Dawn, which delves into the topic of what sex, relationships, family, community might have worked in prehistoric groups. Not the best written, but interesting. The bibliography was also enlightening.
I think you're on to something, sensing a change in the zeitgeist of romantic relationships, but I think the specific case of "sexual fulfillment" is just one instance of a general change.
From my view, a few things have changed:
- There's less external pressure forcing relationships to stay together from the outside.
- There's more internal pressure pushing relationships apart, due to a mismatch between what we expect from a relationship (my best friend, my lifelong sexual partner, and someone who will provide unconditional love and heal my childhood wounds - I think this exaggeration represents an extreme end of a spectrum of expectations, but you could expect somewhat less and still be in deep crud) and what we actually get (another imperfect human being with his or her own ideas).
So in the best case both people in a couple could grow and reinvent what the relationship is to have deeper meaning, and that could come from their own love of each other and commitment. And in the worst case, each one could say "this sucks, it's obviously my partner's fault, f--- this I'm out."
Re: sexual fulfillment, I think if it comes from a place of gratification, yeah, that's gonna feel hollow and empty in old age...as would any other simple pursuit of gratification. If it comes from a place of deep connection and meaning, then perhaps it can grow and evolve in age appropriate ways.
As someone who's been with my wife for over 25 years now, quite a bit of this resonated with me. The state of my relationship today has very little to do with how attractive we found one another in our thirties.
That said, we are biological beings and sex and attraction are important and I don't think we would have gotten to where we are today if we didn't have that in place from the start to give us space to build a deeper connection that can last for decades.
I promise every one. The porn star sex stops when you have 8 minutes and three l+ children you have to get it over with before they wake up. Also “sex or bed” is a real choice after kids
I also just...I have to ask what precisely is *meant* by "porn star sex". Because I feel like it's being used as a proxy here for "does what the husband wants regardless of her own comfort" but that could be wrong.
It's also kinda fascinating as I really doubt there's much of a correlation between men cheating/looking at porn at how porn-star their wife is.
Variations/frequency The point was your sex life will take a hit after children no matter how good it was before. Probably more so if it was really good before.
Afternoon dalliances? Lol, there's 3 kids at home and bluey only works so well
Morning? The kids wake up early. Good luck
5pm after work on a stressful day? Ha, it's dinner time fool
9pm? Sex or sleep. Umm, we both choose sleep a lot more than we used too
I don't want to get too much into my sex life but we used to do most of the above. We do not anymore and it's not from lack of want/attraction. it's 99% the kids.
Oh yeah for sure. I meant "what is meant by porn star sex" to be directed at the tradwives talking about it, not at you!
Well yes, the full-value porn film sex is pretty much limited to those weekends when the grandparents have the kids, and yes, sleep deprivation is very real after kids (and we only had one! Three+; you guys are SERIOUS...). But it doesn't have to stop if you two really want to keep that aspect of your life going.
We still do fine. Pre kids we did great. We have an infant and two toddlers who currently keep trading off in their sleep regressions. The oldest has mostly figured it out.
Well that's good. My daughter's younger child refused to sleep alone for like 18 months - would just cry and cry if left alone in a crib. They finally had to just say "enough" and gut it out for a week before the kid finally began sleeping alone. That kind of thing can disrupt a LOT...
Yep. The sleep thing can drive you insane. In more ways than one.
I encountered Lori years ago and couldn't believe what I was reading. She seemed to hate her husband and get off on forcing herself to have sex with him and cater to him. Like through gritted teeth. I always found her more of a kink account than some serious religious, traditional wife. However, CHH is probably right and Lori is utterly serious about her miserable life.
“Women should tell other women to f—k their husbands like a pornstar” is grammatically ambiguous. My first read had me thinking I am supposed to tell other women to f—k my husband. No thanks!
Fae stole that whole bit from Letterkenny!
"My NAME is GAY."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c7w3hjjuLg
Love this perspective! Your take on Twitter discourse is alway so sharp, like your previous insights on content creation.