Bill’s take on the debate in 1.5 minutes:. “Trump told lie after lie after lie. . . he wouldn’t have gotten away with it if Joe Biden had been there.” As for Biden, “I’ve seen beauty pageant contestants answer questions better.”
Here’s Bill’s 10-minute monologue, in which he delivers a mock TED talk (with appropriate attire and gestures) telling young men how to find women using his “G.A.M.E.” strategy. And yes, it’s very sound, especially because Maher’s had a ton of experience.
Maher is right about how to increase chances with the ladies! But I wouldn’t date Maher, even though I find his intelligence attractive. He’s never been married, right? He doesn’t strike me as being interested in a longterm relationship. Also, smokes too much weed.
He’s rich. But, hypothetically, would he have a baby with me? My guess is that he’s too self-interested to want children. For that reason alone, even though I’m too old to have babies of my own, I wouldn’t bother dating Maher. He simply doesn’t signal the capacity to invest in anything but the bachelor life.
But he’s right about how to get a date.
+1
Feel the same. I wouldn’t date him either. Self absorbed.
Super funny/smart guy though.
Yeah. And Maher has access to models, actresses, and intellectuals. He has more opportunities to meet people than most on Earth. Yet still he hasn’t bonded enough to do more than casually date, or at least that’s what he communicates. What a shame! It makes me a little sad in the way that I feel when I discover that talented, attractive actors are gay (e.g., Zachary Quinto). Maher might as well be gay. Undateable.
Maybe people will say it’s because he hasn’t met the right woman. Perhaps. But it seems his standards are higher than mine, and that’s saying a lot.
Ironically, maybe he’d have a better shot with you or me, Rosemary. That is, maybe he’d have a better chance with women who are discriminating and skeptical like him, though I get the sense that he likes the very pretty and sweet who don’t ask questions. I could be wrong about that.
Someone should give him my number and see how long it takes for him and I to get in a fight. (That’s my attempt at humor, though I kind of wish that were possible to test.)
+1
😂 We could gang up on him?
Maher has problems with commitment. He pretty much says so. He seems to think he’ll get bored with the same woman. And. I don’t think he likes “strong” women; that’s my sense of him.
Regarding children, I vaguely recall him expressing a general distaste for them on more than one occasion. I could be mistaken.
This exchange between you two is fascinating and illuminating. I almost feel I am eavesdropping,
Women are choosy. Men compete for them and many will not succeed in mating at all, being deemed unworthy by the choosy. In the past most male-female pairs would form by “settling” if a man had a job and wasn’t excessively violent and if the woman wasn’t economically self-sufficient or wanted children no matter what. But still, more men fail to become deliberate fathers than women fail to become mothers.
Before the invention of The Pill forced women to become promiscuous if they wanted to get dates, most men did not regard pre-marital sex as something they could expect to get in the normal course of growing up. (I think of the hundreds of thousands of men in military service who died virgins in their early twenties during the World Wars.). Smart women held out for the ring to protect themselves against being abandoned pregnant. Men with little to offer a woman who has other options for financial security and childbearing — she can fall back on the state if all else fails —should not be surprised, disappointed, or resentful that getting a single woman to have sex with them is not a straightforward matter of putting your intentions out there and upping your G.A.M.E. Young men need to be taught to lower their expectations that free sex is something they all can expect to enjoy. Not for nothing is it called “getting lucky.”
(This isn’t saying that women ought to be chaste. Only that men need to understand that they may all appear that way as far as they as sexual suitors are concerned.)
+1
Thanks for a great comment. Have you read Louise Perry’s “The case against the sexual revolution”.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Sexual-Revolution/dp/1509549994
Quote:
“Ditching the stuffy hang-ups and benighted sexual traditionalism of the past is an unambiguously positive thing. The sexual revolution has liberated us to enjoy a heady mixture of erotic freedom and personal autonomy. Right?
Wrong, argues Louise Perry in her provocative new book. Although it would be neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back to a world of pre-60s sexual mores, she argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hypersexualised culture represent more loss than gain. The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn – where anything goes and only consent matters – are a tiny minority of high-status men, not the women forced to accommodate the excesses of male lust. While dispensing sage advice to the generations paying the price for these excesses, she makes a passionate case for a new sexual culture built around dignity, virtue and restraint.
This counter-cultural polemic from one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary feminism should be read by all men and women uneasy about the mindless orthodoxies of our ultra-liberal era.”
It’s an interesting (heterodox) perspective, and definitely worth the read. She’s a fascinating character.
I really like Louise Perry. Unfortunately for her book sales I don’t generally buy a book when I agree with all the author’s arguments. I might make an exception in her case, though. Give it to my grandson, maybe.
There are many reasons offered as to why Gen. Z has stopped having sex and I don’t think it’s just that porn makes men not want to try hard enough, although likely a factor. One reason may simply be that the decline of marriage has eroded the only sanctuary where sex can occur safely for both men and women, Ms. Perry’s main argument I think. “Dating” (the euphemism for recreational sex) is, we now know, fraught with danger for both sexes; it was, after all, only after the dissemination of the automobile that after-dark dating replaced chaperoned courting following introduction by mutual friends, the social norm for centuries. (The invention of the safety bicycle in the 1890s allowed a young man for the first time in history to visit a woman in the next village even if he couldn’t afford a horse and still be back home in time for evening farm chores. If she had a bicycle, too, they could evade her chaperone, find a handy meadow, and create a scandal. This was good for the rural gene pool. But the motel — “motor hotel” — and the drive-in theatre lay in the future.)
On-line dating is a fraud whose death is overdue. (Men have to pay to keep their profiles visible on top of the lava field for more than a few hours, and most men will get not a single swipe right, never mind a date.). The women are all competing for the top 20% of men, ignoring the rest. Most of those women have no hope of landing and marrying a high-status man (like Mr. Maher, maybe?) but he may find them attractive enough for an easy one-night stand when nothing better is on offer. This causes them to over-estimate their own status to where they won’t give the other 80% of men a look, the very men who in real life would make good marriage partners being motivated by their modest status to make one sexual relationship work. And so they remain single and bitter cat hoarders, with toxic role models on Tik-Tok and Instagram, instead of looking in the mirror and settling.
There is a trope that moderately attractive women befriend fat women in order to make themselves look better by comparison in bars. The job of a man’s “wingman” is to chat up the fat girl so his companion can devote his attention to the main target without making her hate him for ignoring her friend. Even this admittedly cynical strategy, which can work out in the money for all four, fails on line.
Divorce laws intended to give women with children or no career a better deal after marriage breakdown have the effect of making a man wary about entering into marriage in the first place, especially when neither he nor any of his friends or family know anything about his girlfriend’s character or background and what she will do if she becomes disaffected. Few couples who’ve gone through the process of making a pre-nuptial agreement that curtails the future wife’s legal rights still like or trust each other enough to want to go through with getting married. The uncertain prospect of sex may not be worth the risk. This would imply a rational calculation, contradicting the notion that men are led around by their penises like a little boy trying to walk a big dog. Pornography in this light may simply reduce the cost of doing without a sexual relationship.
+1
Brilliant comment. Thank you.
“On-line dating is a fraud whose death is overdue. ”
Yes.
Who knows? Maher may be a lonely dude. Most women won’t settle for a quickie, unless the sex is transactional. Being funny and smart is not enough, in the end we (most of us) want to be with someone who will cherish us.
And if Louise Perry is successful (in her “advocacy”), being smartly dressed and looking “manly” won’t be enough. 😊
Holy false dichotomy Batman!
Not just here, but false dichotomies (MAGA or woke, oppressed or colonizer, etc.) are a real problem.
Note also that “only consent matters” contradicts “women forced”.
Surely anything between consenting adults is OK?
I’m very sceptical of arguments blaming porn for various things. In the last 20 years, availability of porn has increased by many orders of magnitude. If it had any real effect, it would be more obvious.
What I find really bizarre is the claim that some men become trans because they happened (maybe by accident) to watch some trans porn.
I assume the comment (above) is a response to Leslie’s?
No, *anything* between consenting adults is not OK. An 18 year old woman consenting to be filmed in a porn-laced snuff film is not “OK”. Yes, that’s an extreme example, I chose it to make the point.
More on “consent” (accents are mine)
+++++++++++++++++++++++
“Consent Was Never Enough
A generation of Americans have tried a new form of sexual morality and haven’t just found it wanting—they’ve found it profoundly harmful.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/04/sexual-consent-culture-christine-emba/676570/
Quote:
====
“Last month The Washington Post ran one of the most powerful and important essays I’ve read in a long time. Christine Emba wrote a blistering critique of modern sexual morality built almost entirely around consent—the idea that all things are permissible so long as consenting adults enthusiastically participate.
The essay begins with the story of “Rachel,” a young woman whom Emba spoke to over a cup of coffee in D.C.:
Rachel (a pseudonym) reeled off a list of unhappy encounters with would-be romantic partners: sex consented to out of a misguided sense of politeness, extreme acts requested and occasionally allowed, degrading insults as things unfolded—and regrets later. “It’s not like I was being forced into anything or that I feel unsafe, but it’s not … good. And I don’t like how I feel afterwards.”
Emba continued:
Young Americans are engaging in sexual encounters they don’t really want for reasons they don’t fully agree with. It’s a depressing state of affairs—** turbocharged by pornography**, which has mainstreamed ever more extreme sexual acts, and the proliferation of dating apps, which can make it seem as though new options are around every corner.
As I read Emba’s essay, I immediately remembered a previous piece by Michelle Goldberg, in The New York Times. She described how “sex-positive feminism is falling out of fashion,” and she began like this:
In her new book, “The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century,” the philosopher Amia Srinivasan, who is quickly becoming one of the most high-profile feminist thinkers in the English-speaking world, describes teaching Oxford students about second-wave anti-porn activism. She assumes her students, for whom porn is ubiquitous, will “find the anti-porn position prudish and passé.” They do not. Rather, they’re in complete agreement with assertions that could come straight from Andrea Dworkin.
“Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real? I asked. Yes, they said,” writes Srinivasan. She continues, “Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalization of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.” (Emphasis added)”
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The effects of the wide-spread (bad pun) availability and access to porn has been studied. And, yes, more study/research is needed.
*Compulsive Internet Pornography Use and Mental Health: A Cross-Sectional Study in a Sample of University Students in the United States
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7835260/*
(1)
Quote:
“Results
———
Our results indicate that 56.6% of those surveyed reported lifetime pornography use, with a significantly higher proportion of males than females reporting such use. The majority of students reported accessing pornography through internet-related technologies. Additionally, 17.0, 20.4, and 13.5% of students reported severe or extremely severe levels of depression, anxiety and stress, respectively, with compulsive pornography use significantly affecting all three mental health parameters in both sexes. Exploratory Factor Analysis identified three factors suggesting emotional coping, dependence and preoccupation for the mCIUS items and three factors reflecting interoceptive, impotent, and extrinsic characteristics for the EmSS items. Regression analysis indicated that various demographics, items pertaining to reduced control and social impairment, and other variables pertaining to pornography use predicted mental health outcomes. Faith, morals and personal motivation were the primary variables reported to help reduce pornography use.”
(2) Pornography Consumption and Cognitive-Affective Distress:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10399954/
Quote:
“According to recent studies, the growing consumption of Internet pornography mainly in male population becomes an increasing problem, which is closely linked to compulsive sexual behavior. Some findings also suggest that Internet pornography consumption might represent a defense mechanism against excessive stress, which enables to cope with stressful events, helps in mood regulation, and decreases depression and anxiety. Users of online pornography involved in these activities also reported that their self-exposition to pornographic material may create guilty feelings and internal conflict in themselves with respect to their own “involuntary” sexual behavior, which suggest that psychosocial stress and possibly traumatic experiences may play a significant role in Internet pornography addiction. Taken together, these findings show that stressful experiences, anxiety, and depression are strongly related to pornography consumption. In addition, conflicting emotional experiences as well as identity problems significantly increase vulnerability to addictive sexual behavior and pornography consumption.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
There’s more. I cited 2 (of many) studies.
I’m curious, how do you envision the increased availability of and access to porn being *obviously* detrimental (or non-detrimental) to a healthy society? There are plenty of signs in various sources of data, however, only a study (or preferably several) can conclude deterministically. There are no “obvious” signs other than the anecdotal – of which there are plenty.
Neither Leslie nor I made the claim that some men become trans because they happened to watch some trans-porn, although studies DO show that porn addiction can lead to identity-questioning issues.
Enjoyed the TED talk. Advice makes sense to me, but I’m Bill’s age-
As usual, Maher is right on point. I just felt a feeling of sadness and melancholy we have come to as a nation when watching the debate. One is a pathological liar, narcissist…and the other a decrepit man who looks like he will not make it past the next four years, leaving us with Kamala Harris. I will still vote for Biden…but only because I see what an existential threat Trump is.
If you want to bone, put down the phone. Great advice!
+1