Do we even want to stop giving attractive people all manner of advantages in all domains of life? Sure, sometimes it may be in your best interest to claim you do, but that's a whole different matter.
Of course, the number of entries in a dictionary is more important than whether it has a torn cover, at least if you ever plan on using it for anything.
If you plan on using it to decorate your shelf, the cover is essential.
This may sound rational—why not pay more to protect the more valuable object?—until you realize that the insurance doesn’t protect the clock, it just pays if the clock is lost, and pays exactly the same amount for either clock. (And yes, it was stated that the insurance was with an outside company, so it gives no special motive to the movers.)
There's always the hope that, if enough customers pay the outside company enough, it'll be zealous and make the movers an offer they can't refuse.
That is odd, actually. Everyone I've met that I would describe as "creepy" is male.
Is it even theoretically possible to be creepy to a man? In my—very limited—experience, if a man is afraid of anything, you don't condemn the object of his fear for frightening him; you deem him a coward and a pussy, lose all respect for him and basically stop regarding him as a man. You'd better be ready for him to challenge you to a duel, or some other culturally appropriate, less formal kind of fight, though.
As far as I know, the ancestral, sexist rule is that showing fear as a man is like showing sexual desire as a woman: you never ever do it, on pain of losing everyone's respect.
Do heterosexual men ever have the experience of being extremely uncomfortable around women who are superficially be not that much different from other women that the men would find at least tolerable?
Some women have an especially intense "you pathetic loser better stay the hell away from me" seemingly permanent look on their faces, to the point that it's actually readable to me. It can be rather uncomfortable when you have responsibilities that involve interacting with them anyway.
That's as silly as suggesting that men should be more conservative in granting those favors.
They should—they should not force those "favors" on women who don't want them.
That would probably help women be less anxious about granting the wrong sexual favor to the wrong person. I'm pretty sure normal, non-socially-stunted people already do this in their own private environments, access to which is a privilege.
It is not intuitively clear to my why would be the AIDS stigma completely unjust, I was pounded into me from the age of 13 to never leave the house without carrying condoms, to me not using them is the equivalent of not using seat belts.
Are there actually parents who do that?
As far as I know, basically everyone agrees their children should be prevented from having sex for as long as possible. No, I don't know how this makes any sense, given that for as long as possible is forever—unless you get raped, I guess. At any rate, giving you condoms implies you might have sex, so it should be unthinkable.
At the end of the day, the best remedy against sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, as well as all kinds of social ills like drug use, is social isolation. As a bonus, the lack of social pressures to keep some personal hygiene and not become a fat slob, and generally a disgusting loser, helps you stay isolated. This will become a huge problem for you as an adult, of course, but then it's your problem alone—it's no longer anyone else's responsibility.
she could have "won" by making the first moves to date an attractive but passive/malleable and socially clueless boy.
Assuming one of those could even begin to compete with a jock, which I greatly doubt.
She could have really "won" by stringing along several passive/malleable/clueless boys.
That could work if she gets them to support her while she cheats on them with Elliot and he's her children's biological father, yeah.
I've promised to shut up in the comments to the other post, but since that story's been brought up here, too ...
The real question is why should she react with revulsion if he said he wanted to fuck her? The revulsion is a response to the tone of the message, not to the implications one can draw from it.
Is it, though? Is there any possible tone that would make it acceptable?
After all, she can conclude with >75% certainty that any male wants to fuck her. Why doesn't she show revulsion simply upon discovering that someone is male? Or even upon finding out that the world population is larger than previously thought, because that implies that there are more men who want to fuck her?
So the message is redundant. Therefore, the appropriate way to express it is to say nothing at all. Anything else, regardless of its tone, forces her to pay needless attention to an obvious fact and is therefore an aggression. Especially if the speaker is not so attractive that considering potential partners of his attractiveness level is actually worth her time. Especially if he's not just insufficiently attractive, but net repulsive, i.e., she'd rather not have sex ever again than have it with him. Of course, a nerdier and less sporty male classmate would be even more repulsive.
Clearly she is smart enough to have resolved this paradox on her own, and posing it to him in this situation is simply being verbally aggressive.
Or a way to test him, and he obviously failed.
No, certainly not merely.
I wonder what counts as not merely.
But the whole "Flowers for Algernon" ending seemed a bit extreme...and out of place.
I didn't even realize it was supposed to be a horror story. She basically did what should have been expected from biology: she chose a high-quality mate who can afford to profess irrational nonsense on the handicap principle, and will most likely breed with him and be happy. It's only sad to those who would like her to be prevented from doing what she wants, for whatever selfish reasons.
I only learned it at an embarrassingly late age, but the canonical counter to such an argument is to challenge the arguer to tell that to the invulnerable guy to his face.