I'm sorry about your pain, but I don't think LessWrong is the right place for this post, as it cuts too closely to identity politics to be productively discussed.
It's one thing to argue that non-consensual celibacy is painful; that's a fact that's often neglected when talking about sexual dynamics. It's another to frame the issue as a situation entirely perpetuated by women who are resisting for trivial reasons. That casts women as malicious, when that's not a universal or common case.
Like NancyLebowitz said, why is it acceptable to leave out the costs that women face in this dynamic?
If your point is that some sexual assaults are the product of desperation and tragedy, I agree. That doesn't make them acceptable, and you seem like you're implying that.
I'm not really sure what you're hoping to accomplish here. The fable isn't framed in a way that accurately represents reality. The sympathetic arguments you're making could be made without euphemism. The story falsely equivocates refusing sex as maliciously refusing to save someone's life.
If you're hurting, I'm sorry. I have sympathy for people who are unable to be sexually active and have few or no solutions. This, however, is bad framing at best, and harmful at worst.
I'm not really sure what you're hoping to accomplish here. The fable isn't framed in a way that accurately represents reality. The sympathetic arguments you're making could be made without euphemism. The story falsely equivocates refusing sex as maliciously refusing to save someone's life.
Given that the author has, in other comments, mentioned suicidal tendencies... I'd suggest the equivalence might be real to them.
Shrug I dunno. I find this poorly written, and poorly thought out, and fails to touch much at all in me; granted, my moments of compassion are few and far between.
But the hostile response is disproportionate to what was actually written, to the point where I must conclude that this piece has successfully made its readers feel deeply uncomfortable, and the hostility is a rationalization to cover that discomfort.
That's fair, I suppose. I do feel accused of callously ignoring a population of people for whom I have a great deal of sympathy. I think my criticisms stand, but I guess I could have been kinder.
I want to engage and think about this more, but I'm not sure I can have this conversation without feeling hostile.
Which is why the anti-politics rule exists, I think. Because most people can't disengage enough. The downvotes are perfectly fair, otherwise any authentic-enough political crying fit would be a heckler's veto on the anti-politics rule, which would just become politics by another name as people tried to decide what qualified as authentic.
But people should view stuff like this as... exercises in recognizing and overcoming their biases. Not excuses to attack wrongthought.
The metaphor doesn't even make sense, assuming it's about sex. If the burning branch represents virginity, then it would be possible to pay a girl to free the boy from the branch, but it would not be possible for another girl to put him under again. If the branch represents "having regular sex", then it would be possible for a girl to put him under the branch again, but it would also mean that the girl given the gold nugget has to be given a continuous stream of gold nuggets or she would also put the boy under the branch again.
Also, dragging someone under the burning branch to free yourself doesn't make sense even as rape. Rapists do not turn other people into virgins.
I made one reply to this, and later deleted it. Then, I made another reply, and deleted that one as well.
I feel mind-killed and I can't tell who else is mind-killed. I'm just going to take this in stride as a time-appropriate refresher course on why we don't discuss politics.
This post just doesn't really reflect real life. Well, not for all sides involved.
If anyone got to the pq-system part of GEB, can we get some various interpretations here? Because what I think the burning branches are, apart from crude violations of the laws of physics, are basically defeatism on the boy's part.
You might not like reading it but I ran a search and it seems like to only have been posted here and despite being a badly written story that doesn't really reflect reality I think that you have one thing going and that is story-writing and you shou...
I, for one, like my moral assumptions and cached thoughts challenged regularly. This works well with repugnant conclusions. Hence I upvoted this post (to -21).
I find two interesting questions here:
How to reconcile opposing interests in subgroups of a population of entities whose interests we would like to include into our utility function. An obvious answer is facilitating trade between all interested to increase utility. But: How do we react to subgroups whose utility function values trade itself negatively?
Given that mate selection is a huge driver o
I don't think that it valid to hide politically incorrect thought on LW behind metaphars. If you want to make a point make it directly and hopefully cite statistics to back it up.
... a fascinating world, exactly as written. Seeing that the lifting of the branch seems like a totemic thing, a ritual absolutely structuring the society, would it not be logical that: 1) spouses lawfully married to each other can covertly negotiate that the wife lift a branch off a boy badly in need, which would bind him to them as a servant until a girl willing to have him comes along, but most probably for life? 2) incest is not an offence so much as a favor? 3) girls generally have more chance at entering and staying in the workforce? 4) it is preferable to have more girl children, as possible negotiation material?
As has been said, there's no need to view this as bad goth poetry.
A bit heavy-handed and overspecified. For this style of narrative, you should identify and address the root of the social phenomenon you're writing about, and wrestle with that, instead of translating it as literally as possible into an arbitrary metaphor.
I'm interested to know if anyone would have considered voting this up if the attempted rape portion of the metaphor had been omitted and the story had been ended just before then?
I wouldn't upvote this in any case, as it doesn't belong here as it stands.
With some thorough editing, and a lot of boiling down, it could turn into an insightful discussion of the blind spot so many people have where social needs are concerned; that education or internet are something like a basic human right, but sexual satisfaction, which is far more primal and necessary to us, isn't. It's a necessary blind spot in ideologies which treat needs as rights to be satisfied by other people, because it's full of ugly truths about those ideologies.
But I doubt the insightful post would be received well, either. Perhaps I overestimate people, but I suspect most people have an inkling of the currents running under the surface, here.
Why isn't there another forest that traps girls?
Why aren't there some people immune to falling branches?
Why can't some boys be freed by boys?
But more generally, why bend over backwards to invent some convoluted justification for rape?
Utterly absurd allegory--there's no actual parallel. Obviously a lot of involuntarily celibate people are unhappy, but prostitution does nothing to cure this. Their problem isn't lack of sexual release--they can always masturbate. The source of their unhappiness is the lack of emotional intimacy and requited love, which prostitution can't solve--it's just assisted masturbation.
Don't push this all on the girls! Any boy could dress up as a girl convincingly enough to fool the magic and lift the branch himself. The only reason they did not was because they would take a similar status hit as the girls would for giving away their magic for free.
(More practical advice from an unwillingly celibate lesbian who is as disgusted with the idea of getting touched by dudes as you: learn to masturbate, and/or seek ways to relieve or avoid other types of stress that exacerbate the problem.)
I mean, charitably speaking, I imagine that the second-to-last paragraph could easily have been an argument from consequences, rather than rape apology.
The parable doesn't really characterize the boy as right, rather as desperate. I don't think that it's unreasonable to make an argument that some rapists are desperate for sex, nor that if fewer men were desperate for sex, there'd be less rape. Not saying it's true necessarily, but that it's at least arguable. That doesn't mean women should be forced into sex, of course, but it could still be true at the...
I quite understand the point author is making or a feeling that he has, which could be described by this one sentence: It is so easy for women to give sex and so important for men to get sex, that for women not to give it to men is just plain cruel. Everything is OK with this reasoning except one thing - assumption that it is easy for women to give sex. It is actually hard. Now this might not be obvious or intuitive from a man point of view, but you can get to this conclusion if you consider evolution. When evolution took place, to have sex with a man for...
Well, that wraps it up. This post, and some of the asinine comments to it, have persuaded me that I have no further use for this site.
Interesting. The cynics are jumping ship.
But no. If Richard leaves because a heavily-downvoted article and the comments trying to direct its author to think a little bit deeper offends his sensibilities, that of course is his choice, but it says little about the forum as a whole. Like Ilya, I don't overly mind him, but he's also not a critical piece of the infrastructure; they both did little constructive work, and the forum is oversaturated with people willing to tell low-status members what they're doing wrong anyways, with nobody saying what they're doing right.
People who are inclined to be disgusted by the "low end" might do well to remember there are people watching them from further ahead still, as they berate their "lessers" for not being so advanced as themselves. You look forward, to those who are where you aspire to be - do you want them telling you how disgusting and backwards you are? Will being shoved backwards help you forwards?
No community will survive the impulse to spit on those still climbing up in lieu of a helping hand.
(1) The last two paragraphs need to be changed immediately. Currently, it puts rape in a sympathic perspective. If you don't change it, I think moderators should delete this post.
(2) If we ignore the last paragraphs, the parable is not badly written and matches the lived experience of many members of this community. It is a message that needs to be heard.
(3) That said, Less Wrong is not the right forum for this content. It is important to have a general purpose rationality forum, and it cannot survive association with perspectives that are this taboo and...
I was expecting an ending where the devil comes into town and sells him a magical crimson pill for the low low cost of his soul. The boy gains demonic powers and gets the burning branch off but commits enough devilry in the process that the cultural norms have been violated even further than before and everyone is left unhappy and unsatisfied with the situation.
Thanks for the fable. It was a nice reading!
I tried to pattern-match the metaphor against many things; I failed. Could you please provide the key to the metaphor, as I sense there's hidden meaning underneath this story?
I don't want to guess a false meaning.
The burning is the unsatisfied desire for sex, and lifting the branch is offering sex. At the end of the story, the boy goes to prison for attempted rape. I presume you were joking in saying that you did not recognize this, or that you simply intended to say that you consider it a bad analogy.
In any case, I agree that such an analogy is pointless, and that is why I downvoted the post.
OP Upvoted.
It's been stated elsewhere that a long standing member of the LW community was leaving because of this post. Well, to counterbalance that, I'm also strongly considering leaving LW, but it's not because of the OP. It's because of these comment threads.
In particular, the comments have shown me just how far the LW community has fallen. I'd really rather not be around people who both get offended so easily and are so willing to mindkill themselves should the slightest opportunity present itself. FYI, the OP isn't about you. It's not about your ...
The overwhelming majority of comments in this thread have little to do with the topic and are meta-discussions that people have strong opinions about. These have almost nothing to do with identity, their pet projects, or what they personally stand for. Discussions like these cropping up in an unfavorable thread aren't surprising to me at all and are fairly standard non-political topics for strong disagreement on a forum. The consensus opinion on the thread seems to in fact be that it wasn't well written, doesn't necessarily accomplish its purpose, was overbearing, and should be downvoted as not really relevant to LW.
For anyone just coming into the mix, the main comment threads are:
The upvotes/downvotes in the thread, Eugine, and keeping around annonymous public accounts
How the thread doesn't really belong here
Moderator actions and the overall role of moderation on LW (which makes up over 37% of the thread's comments).
The overall harmfulness of the article and arguments back and forth about it
What makes you think they're taking it personally? Is it just the fact that they're taking it seriously and getting cross about it? (It seems to me that one can perfectly well get cross about something without taking it personally.) Or is there something else?
If you think the parable is advocating anything else you don't like, that, again, says more about you than me.
No, it just says that you don't understand the effect of your writing or a clueless about modern culture.
The news of last weeks are about how Rossy is pro-rape because of one article he pretends to have intentend to be satirical calling for the legislation of rape on private property.
Not denouncing writing like that has a high cost for a community like this because it affects people who come to this community and read the article.
I think the best action from your end if you really claim not to intend to communicate the message that readers of your article understood would be to simply delete the article.
are about how Rossy is pro-rape
First, it's Roissy, not Rossy. Second, it's not Roissy at all, it's Roosh.
Not denouncing writing like that has a high cost for a community
What are we, in Maoist China? You feel the need to reaffirm your loyalty by denouncing (!) writings which deviate from the Party line?
Once upon a time, in a lonely little village, beneath the boughs of a forest of burning trees, there lived a boy. The branches of the burning trees sometimes fell, and the magic in the wood permitted only girls to carry the fallen branches of the burning trees.
One day, a branch fell, and a boy was pinned beneath. The boy saw other boys pinned by branches, rescued by their girl friends, but he remained trapped beneath his own burning branch.
The fire crept closer, and the boy called out for help.
Finally, a friend of his own came, but she told him that she could not free him from the burning branch, because she already free'd her other friend from beneath a burning branch and he would be jealous if she did the same deed for anyone else. This friend left him where he lay, but she did promise to return and visit.
The fire crept closer, and the boy called out for help.
A man stopped, and gave the boy the advice that he'd get out from beneath the burning branch eventually if he just had faith in himself. The boy's reply was that he did have faith in himself, yet he remained trapped beneath the burning branch. The man suggested that perhaps he did not have enough faith, and left with nothing more to offer.
The fire crept closer, and the boy cried out for help.
A girl came along, and said she would free the boy from beneath the burning branch.
But no, her friends said, the boy was a stranger to her, was her heroic virtue worth nothing? Heroic deeds ought to be born from the heart, and made beautiful by love, they insisted. Simply hauling the branch off a boy she did not love would be monstrously crass, and they would not want to be friends with a girl so shamed.
So the girl changed her mind and left with her friends.
The fire crept closer. It began to lick at the boy's skin. A soothing warmth became an uncomfortable heat. The boy mustered his courage and chased the fear out of his own voice. He called out, but not for help. He called out for company.
A girl came along, and the boy asked if she would like to be friends. The girl's reply was that she would like to be friends, but that she spent most of her time on the other side of the village, so if they were to be friends, he must be free from beneath the burning branch.
The boy suggested that she free him from beneath the burning branch, so that they could be friends.
The girl replied that she once free'd a boy from beneath a burning branch who also promised to be her friend, but as soon as he was free he never spoke to her again. So how could she trust the boy's offer of friendship? He would say anything to be free.
The boy tried frantically to convince her that he was sincere, that he would be grateful and try with all his heart to be a good friend to the girl who free'd him, but she did not believe him and turned away from him and left him there to burn.
The fire crept closer and the boy whimpered in pain and fear as it spread from wood to flesh. He cried out for help. He begged for help. "Somebody, please!"
A man and a woman came along, and the man offered advice: he was once trapped beneath a burning branch for several years. The fire was magic, the pain was only an illusion. Perhaps it was sad that he was trapped but even so trapped the boy may lead a fulfilling life. Why, the man remembered etching pictures into his branch, befriending passers by, and making up songs.
The woman beside the man agreed, and told the boy that she hoped the right girl would come along and free him, but that he must not presume that he was entitled to any girl's heroic deed merely because he was trapped beneath a burning branch.
"But do I not deserve to be helped?" the boy pleaded, as the flames licked his skin.
"No, how wrong of you to even speak as though you do. My heroic deeds are mine to give, and to you I owe nothing," he was told.
"Perhaps I don't deserve help from you in particular, or from anyone in particular, but is it not so very cruel of you to say I do not deserve any help at all?" the boy pleaded. "Can a girl willing to free me from beneath this burning branch not be found and sent to my aide?"
"Of course not," he was told, "that is utterly unreasonable and you should be ashamed of yourself for asking. It is offensive that you believe such a girl may even exist. You've become burned and ugly, who would want to save you now?"
The fire spread, and the boy cried, screamed, and begged desperately for help from every passer by.
"It hurts it hurts it hurts oh why will no one free me from beneath this burning branch?!" he wailed in despair. "Anything, anyone, please! I don't care who frees me, I only wish for release from this torment!"
Many tried to ignore him, while others scoffed in disgust that he had so little regard for what a heroic deed ought to be. Some pitied him, and wanted to help, but could not bring themselves to bear the social cost, the loss of worth in their friends' and family's eyes, that would come of doing a heroic deed motivated, not by love, but by something lesser.
The boy burned, and wanted to die.
Another boy stepped forward. He went right up to the branch, and tried to lift it. The trapped boy gasped at the small relief from the burning agony, but it was only a small relief, for the burning branches could only be lifted by girls, and the other boy could not budge it. Though the effort was for naught, the first boy thanked him sincerely for trying.
The boy burned, and wanted to die. He asked to be killed.
He was told he had so much to live for, even if he must live beneath a burning branch. None were willing to end him, but perhaps they could do something else to make it easier for him to live beneath the burning branch? The boy could think of nothing. He was consumed by agony, and wanted only to end.
And then, one day, a party of strangers arrived in the village. Heroes from a village afar. Within an hour, one foreign girl came before the boy trapped beneath the burning branch and told him that she would free him if he gave her his largest nugget of gold.
Of course, the local villagers were shocked that this foreigner would sully a heroic deed by trafficking it for mere gold.
But, the boy was too desperate to be shocked, and agreed immediately. She free'd him from beneath the burning branch, and as the magical fire was drawn from him, he felt his burned flesh become restored and whole. He fell upon the foreign girl and thanked her and thanked her and thanked her, crying and crying tears of relief.
Later, he asked how. He asked why. The foreign girls explained that in their village, heroic virtue was measured by how much joy a hero brought, and not by how much she loved the ones she saved.
The locals did not like the implication that their own way might not have been the best way, and complained to the chief of their village. The chief cared only about staying in the good graces of the heroes of his village, and so he outlawed the trading of heroic deeds for other commodities.
The foreign girls were chased out of the village.
And then a local girl spoke up, and spoke loud, to sway her fellow villagers. The boy recognized her. It was his friend. The one who had promised to visit so long ago.
But she shamed the boy, for doing something so crass as trading gold for a heroic deed. She told him he should have waited for a local girl to free him from beneath the burning branch, or else grown old and died beneath it.
To garner sympathy from her audience, she sorrowfully admitted that she was a bad friend for letting the boy be tempted into something so disgusting. She felt responsible, she claimed, and so she would fix her mistake.
The girl picked up a burning branch. Seeing what she was about to do, the boy begged and pleaded for her to reconsider, but she dropped the burning branch upon the boy, trapping him once more.
The boy screamed and begged for help, but the girl told him that he was morally obligated to learn to live with the agony, and never again voice a complaint, never again ask to be free'd from beneath the burning branch.
"Banish me from the village, send me away into the cold darkness, please! Anything but this again!" the boy pleaded.
"No," he was told by his former friend, "you are better off where you are, where all is proper."
In the last extreme, the boy made a grab for his former friend's leg, hoping to drag her beneath the burning branch and free himself that way, but she evaded him. In retaliation for the attempt to defy her, she had a wall built around the boy, so that none would be able, even if one should want to free him from beneath the burning branch.
With all hope gone, the boy broke and became numb to all possible joys. And thus, he died, unmourned.