On the current open thread, Yarara left a comment on his experience with girls who shared stories of abuse or attempted abuse. Here is a brief excerpt:
I would say perhaps 1 out of every 5 or 6 girls I have slept with has shared one such story of attempted or actual abuse (roughly 50% stories are attempted abuse and the other 50% actual abuse) not at first, but usually after having slept a few times together.
This is a rather interesting aspect of picking up women, and I don’t at all mean this in a morbid way. In fact, I would be surprised to hear any guy who has had far more sexual partners than the average saying that he never or hardly ever encounters such women. In my experience, it is not uncommon to meet such women. Yet, the numbers Yarara reports are not representative of women in general. Instead, the following seems to be the case:
1) You will have more success with women who are more outgoing. You won’t the first guy she goes home with. In fact, I would not all all be surprised if the average number of sexual partners of women who have one-night stands or who engage in casual relationships was significantly higher than of more conservative women. Well, it’s implied in the wording, but I’m thinking of large multiples. A conservative woman may have one or two boyfriends before marrying. On the other hand, a bona fide slut will easily have sucked over a dozen cocks dry by the time she hits 21.
2) Promiscuity correlates with some rather undesirable — speaking of long-term partners — personality traits. Indeed, some promiscuous women are turned on by dangerous men. Thus, they dramatically increase the chance of physical or sexual abuse. Heck, to mention a few of my crazier stories: I once pulled a girl home who slipped into some rather bizarre role-play during foreplay, and wanted me to get aggressive with her. Some other woman even told me to hit her as hard as I could as the sight of bruises on her body would turn her on. (No, I didn’t do either of them that kind of favor. The latter I didn’t even fuck as I really wasn’t all that keen on giving her the power of putting me in jail.)
The combination of crazy & promiscuous leads to all kinds of undesirable outcomes for women. As they get around, your odds of getting involved with a genuinely damaged woman are thus increased.
So far, I have been speaking of more or less normal women. Yet, there is also an aspect of emotional manipulation which I encountered with women on the bipolar spectrum, so I would like to conclude this post with a warning.
Crazy women have their fair share of crazy stories to tell. What makes those women so alluring is that they “love-bomb” you in the initial stage of a relationship (this is a red flag!), and during that time, their batshit insane alter ego is kept well under wraps. It will come out eventually, and you may get a first glimpse when, for instance during an intimate moment such as pillow talk, she “opens up”, and tells you some real or imagined stories of her horrible encounters with men in the past, which may very well be a gross distortion of facts. If you enjoy living life on the edge, feel free to probe when a genuinely crazy woman tells you about an ex-boyfriend who allegedly raped her while they were in a relationship, or inquire how she even managed to end up in the kind of situation she just described. Just scratching on the surface of her carefully constructed facade may be enough to turn her into a monster at a moment’s notice.
If you are Captain Save-A-Ho, maybe because you have barely gotten laid in your life and now you have a chick in bed who seems way hotter than what you think you deserve (and fucks like a porn star), then you are in real danger as she will use her messed up past to make you “care” for her. Your protective instinct may be a genuine liability in that case. A much safer way of proceeding is that whenever a woman “opens up” and tells you an unpleasant story like that, she is completely disqualified for a relationship. Start plotting your exit, and ask yourself why you didn’t notice any of the undoubtedly countless red flags beforehand.
Crazy women are usually great to have sex with as they are usually up for anything and have minimal inhibitions. The problem is that many guys do not understand that they have a “best before” date of 12-24 hours in the future. A fair number of guys have learned way more than they ever planned to on Borderline Personality Disorder because initially, it all seemed so wonderful………
Some other red flags these crazy girls have that I’ve noticed are a loud boisterous laugh, have many gay friends, doesn’t have any hobbies but counts leisure/travel as one, and are people pleasers.
Having many male friends is likewise a red flag.
@Aaron: why?
I usually interpret them as more straight forward chicks.
There is something about the concept of rape that I never understood.
I might be a huge asshole here, but sex without collaboration from the woman’s side seems quite unfeasible to me from a pure technical point of view. Heck, just consensual fucking for the first time is not always a smooth ride, let alone with a resisting partner.
So during rape maybe they freeze up in fear and stop resisting, sort of accepting the victim role. Or maybe… there is some pleasure involved in it from their side? Then again, raped women seem too damaged psychologically to have liked it, unless… I mean it’s an enormous amount of guilt being carried around – guilt that they actually liked the experience, hence sort of an “emotional arrangement”, a displacement, to say it was a horrible experience.
I don’t know…
These are very politically incorrect views, but maybe you can say how you see this.
I am just going but what I have read, but rape victims often do not resist much. The majority of rapes are “date rapes”, rather than being jumped by some random attacker, so again there is less likelihood a woman would go “mortal combat”. In the case of acquaintances, if the woman lies there motionless, silent and with her head turned during the event, I would be pretty nervous about arguing later that there was implied consent.
If I don’t remember incorrectly girls do infact get horny when raped and possibly experience some pleasure as well. This as far as I know is some of what makes it so psychologically difficult for them to deal with the experience afterwords.
And also be aware that if a woman experiences pleasure in such an incident, this is not the same as the woman liking the experience (but of course there are probably nuts out there that would acutally like such an experience but this would likely be the rare exception)
Keep in mind that some girls actually take their own life as a result of having been raped….
Also rape fantasies are one of the most common sexual fantasies amongst women (which does not mean that they acutally want to get raped…).
(In real rapes), if the victim stops resisting it is because of the threat of violence or harm. In other words the rapist makes her choose between immediate death or ceasing the resistance. So she surrenders and stop resisting. Or it can be due to the absolute shock (freezing out of being shocked/afraid for her life etc etc)
So in essence she becomes like a corpse. And the rapist is doing the equivalent of penetrating a living corpse.
This is why true/real rapes are so rare. For someone to want to rape a person is just as insane as someone wanting to penetrate a corpse. Except even worse, because you’re hurting a real human being.
(True rape) is a truly sick and twisted thing. Which is why it’s so rare. It require a similar mental disorder to wanting to skin cats and torture people alive. It requires a sick/twisted mind.
It’s why the populace has such a vile distaste for it, and when people hear “rapist” the entire community wants to hang him from a tree. A valid reaction for the “true rape” described above.
I also would agree with deeming it rape when a person can’t consent (because they’re unconcious etc). It’s the same thing, penetrating a corpse.
However, feminists have hijacked the term to mean all sorts of things. It was first expanded to include “sex under duress”. This is where a woman chooses to have sex under pressure of something other than physical harm (kind of like blackmail).
The logic goes “well she can stop resisting because the threat is of a different nature, it doesn’t have to be threat of physical force”… So let’s deem it rape with any sex that is had under the condition of something. “Have sex with me, or you will be fired”.
And then they kept expanding it to where any sex not had for the purest of motives is “rape”. If she had sex because she was trying to impress you. Rape. If she had sex because she felt internal fear that you’d dump her for not putting out – rape. If she had sex to impress her friends that she banged the cute guy first – still rape, because societal pressure… because like societal pressure totally equivalent to knife under throat.
Or to tie back to resistance – any sex had between two people who felt any resistance of any kind, shape or size before or after the sex is also “rape”.
So if you ask a woman to have sex and she says no, but you ask a second time tomorrow and she says yes, it’s still rape, because she had resisted the day before.
So in this feminist logic the only scenario where sex is not rape is when a woman throws herself at you on first sight and has no other motive other than devouring your hot male body.
Be careful though with claims/stats on rape, you never know which definition they used. Is it rape-rape (the definition used for 100,000 years), or is it one of the many new expanded versions.
I agree with this as the delineating factor. If the other person isn’t participating, it’s not sex… And only a sick/twisted mind would want to do it.
What man can possibly get horny pretending to have sex with a non-participating person? (i.e. the equivalent of “sex with a corpse”)?
Be careful there… Whenever you read info on rape, you gotta ask “but which of the 1000 definitions of rape is this about”?
Feminists muddy the waters on purpose. When you read “women enjoyed it” – is this where someone forced penetration on her and she lay down as a motionless corpse? I doubt that.
Or is it where she had consensual ravishing sex with a little hard-to-get resistance upfront, and he was persistent.
The delineating factor is that in the second scenario she consensually participated in the act (she wasn’t a motionless corpse). It isn’t rape according to her, but to a feminist analyzing the situation (oh she resisted at first, therefore it’s rape, even though she enjoyed it and participated after caving into his persistence).
Do you believe that most women fantasize about being a motionless non-participating corpse as someone penetrates them? (i.e. actual real rape) I doubt that’s the case.
I can believe that a lot women have a fantasy of “surrendering to a hot guy”, where she resists but he’s so persistent that she gets wet and horny and bangs him. That’s not a rape fantasy. That’s a seduction fantasy, but feminists deem it rape.
Again, this is due to feminist muddying the waters and blurring the definitions.
“Be careful there… Whenever you read info on rape, you gotta ask “but which of the 1000 definitions of rape is this about”?”
As a result of the topic being taboo even amongst professionals there seem to be pretty much only one study looking into the topic, I don’t have access to the study but an article quotes from the study:
“….Levin and van Berlo found that victims report evidence of physical arousal in as many as 21 percent of rape cases, even when they also report violence and high levels of fear and mental distress.”
article: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-body-reacts-sexual-assault/
the study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8448601_Sexual_arousal_and_orgasm_in_subjects_who_experience_forced_or_non-consensual_sexual_stimulation_-_A_review
How common or rare this is in actual rape cases would be anybody’s guess, it seems impossible to get any clear idea given the lack of research, but here is a study looking into a closely related topic:
Some researchers hypothesize that the physiological arousal/lubrication could be the female body’s strategy to avoid injury to the sexual organs vether the intercourse is wanted or not:
“If this hypothesis is correct, women should show genital responses to any cues suggesting sexual activity, even unappealing cues that involve nonconsensual sex and extreme violence. Fifteen men and 15 women listened to fourteen 2-min audiotaped narratives that depicted an interaction between a man and a woman and that varied factorially according to the presence of consent, violence, and sexual activity [All narratives were told from a woman’s perspective and read by a woman]. The results support the preparation hypothesis: Men showed the greatest genital arousal in response to narratives depicting consensual, nonviolent sex, whereas women showed similar responses to all the narratives involving sexual activities, including those describing a sexual assault.”
reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21189352
One could of course hypothesize otherwise as well, the study restults in any case are interesting.
One point to take into acount in all of this is that female sexual arousal is in research most commonly interpreted as being divided into physiological and psychological arousal. Example: In one study the participants was shown a film of two copulating bonobos (ape). Females reported no sexual arousal, while their genitals “reported” sexual arousal… (the guys experienced zero sexual arousal of any cind…).
While for men physiological and psychological sexual arousal seem to generally be much more closely related.
“Do you believe that most women fantasize about being a motionless non-participating corpse as someone penetrates them? (i.e. actual real rape) I doubt that’s the case.”
In one of the most recent studies on the topic, 24% of women reported rape fantasy of specifically sex while being incapacitated….
reference: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/slightly-blighty/201508/womens-sexual-fantasies-the-latest-scientific-research
Somewhat related:
Adding the sentence; “Mary Ann found herself overcome with passion, wich sent her reeling into a violent orgasm”, to the end of a rape story got females “relatively highly aroused”. Descriptions used in the rape story: forcefully crushed, terrified, paralyzed, and forced. Her reactions consisted of: screaming, panic paralysis, and a frenzy of tears.
This was self-reported sexual arousal.
And this particulary study was from the beginning of the eighties when I assume sexuality was more taboo than now…
reference: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/malamuth/pdf/80jpsp38.pdf
Do note that arousal and enjoyment are separate phenomen. Connected, but still separate. Your genitalia can be aroused without you being involved in an enjoyable activity.
The male equivalent of genital-arousal is having an erection… You need it to have enjoyable sex. But the fact that you have an erection doesn’t mean you’re enjoying what’s happening.
To me the explanation about “minimizing damage” seems the most plausible. The organs arouse and lubrication kicks in to reduce the physical damage of the rape. (Evolutionary logic?) goes: “since she’s surrendered anyway, no point to also getting more damage from the act, so it lubricates/arouses”
Since men experienced forced sex in other ways (butt-rape for example), they wouldn’t have evolved the response to get an erection while being raped (arousal). You need an arousal (erection) if you’re the one doing the penetrating.
Yes, I attempted to make almost the same point in my initial comment, but it seems we use different definitions of “pleasure” and “enjoyment”.
These points and (in my mind) some missing nuances seem quite central to the topic discussed so I will therefore attempt to elucidate my view/interpretation.
My understanding of “pleasure” is simply “stimultaion of hedonic hotspots” (note the difference between these and for example nucleus accumbens wich was previously thought to be one of the main pleasure centers of the brain (although nucleus accumbens do contain hedonic hotspots as well)).
My understanding of “enjoyment” includes a more meta-cognitive (and meta-emotional) evaluation of ones external and internal experience (including other thoughts,feelings and sensations) wich in sum results in a state of “enjoyment” if and only if we conclude something in the lines of “fuck yeah, this is great”. Stimulation of hedonic hotspots are central here but in my opinion is entirely insufficient on it’s own in achieving what we call “enjoyment”. Note the difference in complexity of pleasure and enjoyment… and that pleasure is an entirely limibically based experience (using the above definition) while enjoyment includes more concious parts of the brain as well… (simplified of course)
The sexual organs seem to be very much “linked up” with the hedonic hotspots so that stimulation of the sexual organs seem likely to stimulate the hedonic hotspots irrespective of the specific circumstances, wanted or unwanted. The context will likely influence the intensity of the stimultaion of the hedonic hotspots (through stimulation of the genitalia) but it seems to me unlikely that they will not be stimulated at all even in the context of a rape- hence my original comment “and possibly experience some pleasure as well”
As for enjoyment, it seems unlikely that any woman would enjoy (using the above definition) such an experience unless this is a real nutter…
So then it’s a non-point isn’it ? Why does it matter if they can feel pleasure? If you get gay gang-rapped by MS-13, you will also feel pleasure due to the fact that prostate stimulation is pleasurable to a male…
What’s the point in pointing it out though? Women can feel pleasure in rape? Ok, so will you if your prostate is rubbed against your will…
A lack of distinction between pleasure and liking was relatively central to parts of the original comment made by Neutralrandomthoughts. I didn’t “bring it up”, I attempted to add a distinction in order to clarify that it is unlikely that a woman ever enjoys being raped.
“So then it’s a non-point isn’it ? Why does it matter if they can feel pleasure?”
Because (at least some) girls getting physically sexually aroused and possibly also experiencing some pleasure seems to be central to why rape fucks girls psyches up so much, compared to other types of trauma, as I pointed out in my first comment. Wondering about the psychological damage in the context of rape and the nature of it, was also central to parts of the original comment made by Neutralrandomthoughts.
And yes- parts of this likely applies to male rape victims as well.
Hey What, ’bout your Psychology Today article about rape fantasies, you forgot a very important paragraph there:
When these female fantasies are erotic in character, the male protagonist is always described as highly attractive or otherwise desirable.
Oh, what a coincidence! They don’t get wet by the mental image of getting gang raped by Jamal, José and their gang, but getting gang raped by Chad and his football team. Women are submissive by nature, specially with men they find physically attractive.
Where did it all go wrong? Conservative women used to be the majority and has turned a total 180 where the traditional values are deemed as outdated. Even men today have easily accepted women’s promiscuity as a right of passage. On top of women’s impossible demands of men, we are told to see her skeletons in her closet as experiences that have shaped her to be the strong woman she is today. After all her demands are met (6 figures with a 6 pack) why throw it all away to someone whose made a habit of making sure she ends up two timing you
@Alek Novy , well the number of rapes in the EU is rising fast, one could say there is a whole “culture“ out there who enjoys it..
There’s this interesting “relationship” that the alt-right has with rape definitions.
– When they’re battling feminists in the west, they understand that the scary stats are coming from shifting definitions.
– But they want to exaggerate how bad Muslim immigration is (to for example) Sweden, they have no problem adopting the most liberal definitions of rape.
It’s hard to tease out how much of those “rising numbers of rapes” are coming from immigration, and how much from ever-expanding definitions of rape. Both are happening concurrently.
Sweden is the same country that’s pursuing Assange as a “rapist” for regret rape, and “the condom slipped” rape.
Their rape rates would have expanded anyway without the immigration, so it’s hard to tease out how much of the increase is due to ever-expanding definitions and how much is owed to immigration.
Interesting opinions everyone. Thanks for calling attention to the issue Aaron, I was surprised that it barely got any responses in the open thread.
I do not dispute you points in the post above, but in most of the cases I was describing abuse or abuse attempts that happened when the girls were underage, and were not a consequence of being promiscuous or more outgoing. I do have stories too of outgoing girls who got themselves into sketchy situations, including one who jumped out of a moving car to escape a guy she had been dating, who had apparently drugged her and was taking her somewhere.
Anyway, I did not clarify that enough in the original post because I did not want the topic to focus on child sexual abuse.
It would not surprise me that the girls in question turned out damaged in their adult lives as a consequence of the abuse, but in my limited sample the results were all over the place. Thats why I wanted to compare notes with other guys around here.
A couple of them vere visibly, psychologically damaged by actually occuring abuse (between ages 7 to 13), but they were not turned to promiscuity but to the contrary, it was very difficult for me to get laid with them, they had difficulty opening up (one of them actually thanked me for overcoming her resistance and getting her open up to sex in a positive way again!). On the other hand, another one abused at young age by teenage boys (family friends) didnt show any psychological consequences during the many years I knew her.
I am pretty sure none of the girls telling me these stories have been trying to manipulate me emotionally so far, but I know the danger and I keep an eye out for it. Also I do know firsthand of a case of attempted rape story (no, wasnt dating her), which turned out to be almost certainly false, I suspect she was trying to get out of a job application her parents were pushing on her.
As for the topic of girls being turned on by rape, it has been shown in controlled experiments (by controlled, as in sensors monitoring vaginal lubrication!) that women are aroused by rape fantasies, more than they would admit. Apparently because it plays to their desire for dominant, masculine men. This was way before the whole 50 Shades of female porn became a global bestseller, which only reinforces the point of most women being aroused by being dominated.
I have played out the rape fantasy a few times, and it was almost always the girls idea. One girl even was aroused by firearms, so we played out the fantasy of me raping her at gunpoint (not loaded). But the line separating fantasy from reality was always clear.
Was she a motionless non-participant just getting penetrated and laying still/simply not resisting? If not, i don’t define this as a rape fantasy but a domination fantasy.
These sensors only measure arousal, not enjoyment. If I inject you with erection medicine and then having horses climb on top of you, it will measure as you having arousal. Did you enjoy it?
@Alek
No, she wasnt motionless, she feigned resistance. Indeed it would be a domination fantasy rather than rape in the sense you are defining it, although i think most people would not bother to make that distinction.
As to measuring arousal, I hope you are not in charge of any actual research LOL
But seriously, no disagreement here, at no point did I imply women enjoyed actual rape.
The experiments I referred to did not include drug induced arousal, if I remember properly, test subjects were shown images and/or verbal descriptions of different sexual scenarios, including rape. They had a button or something to self-report their level of arousal, and sensors to monitor actual bodily responses (cant remember for sure right now, but I think they measured other parameters too besides lubrication). When it came to rape, there was a noticeable discrepancy between the self-reported arousal and what the sensors registered, the latter being higher.
I will see if I can look it up again, its been quite a few years since, but it was an interesting piece of research.
Considering the fact that I come from a family tree of scientists and researchers in both natural and social sciences… as well as being formally trained myself (I became an entrepreneur instead of continuing the academic pursuit thing)…
I am formally trained in both doing research, have done it as an undergrad, and excelled in research methodology classes.
Here’s what I can tell you. Social science research is BS. You can change the methodology to get whatever result you want. And who decides the method? You do.
What do you base the method on? Your own definitions. And what do you base the definitions on? Whatever you want.
You can define that X means Y… That’s why evopsych can produce research that produces the exact opposite result than research in gender studies. And an anthropologist in germany comes up with the opposite result than a psychologist in France.
Because the researcher (and/or their peers) decide what X means.
And? This discrepancy can be interpreted literally 55 different ways.
It can be interpreted to mean anything from “patriarchy confirmed” all the way to “women secretly enjoy rape”, to any of a bunch of other interpretations.
I’ve seen it, alongside with thousands of other studies. No need to look it up. It literally means nothing, like most social “science” research. It’s literally meaningless.
Because like you’ve they’ve fallen for feminist’s successfully blurring the lines of “rape” and “domination”.
Congratulations to contributing to the problem.
To give you a further example you have never considered, because you don’t know just how much of research is BS (assumptions, guesswork, arbitrary decisions)…
Who decided how the sensors work? Was it the almighty international body on arousal sensor calibration? Had it been established for 220 years and came up with the readings over 140 years of experimentation?
What you don’t get is that when you read “oh the sensors said x”, you’re assuming it’s like hard science… like when in physics an instrument reads something.
In physics measuring instruments were calibrated and decided with tens of thousands of people agreeing on how it works.
This “arousal reading sensor” could be the work of a lonely geek guessing things. How does it work? Well, someone decided that “if the xyz sensors reads abc, then this means give a reading that there was a % increase in arousal”.
Has anyone confirmed that the formula this sensor uses, the assumptions it makes are agreed upon by everyone? I doubt it. It’s not like where everyone agrees what a kilogram or kilometer is. Just because it involves an electronic gadget, don’t confuse it with hard-science.
Interesting talk from this lady here. She goes into women’s token resistance etc…
https://youtu.be/9SpVVsOUsLo?t=24m45s
I learned about it from this guy:
^
Social science not science?
Get outta here.
Look up how science works, and compare that to “social science”, you moron.
In a nutshell: social science can’t be deemed as science since many of their findings and result are hard to replicate in a reliable way. Also, they can be influenced by any bias that the researchers may have. If you still can’t see anything wrong in this, you’re hopeless.
But judging by the fact that your nickname is SeducingPsych, I’ll have to guess you’re just a PUA shill.
Philosophical grounding of scientific psychology was set by Wilhelm Wundt with the idea of using empirical tests to disprove or strengthen philosophical speculations. Speculations which survive empirical tests have much higher weight than they would have otherwise. Education in psychology therefore has dual nature, one part consists of learning theories and the other consists of learning how to conduct empirical tests with high degree of methodological quality. This is what is supposed to differentiate social sciences from traditional philosophical speculations.
In my opinion problem lies not in the discipline itself but the institutions and people doing the research. There is not enough emphasis on psychometrics and learning how to use logic properly therefore the discipline attracts intellectual mediocrities which corrupt the entire scientific endeavour precisely because it has to contend with validity issues much more than STEM disciplines do. If the level of rigor was increased so that only people with 120+ IQ could earn the degree then psychology would become much more prestigious discipline.
Excellent comment! Note that it would be very easy to turn psychology into a high-IQ discipline. You would only have to require undergrads to pass courses in mathematical statistics at the same level as what you encounter in STEM fields instead of watered-down bullshit like “statistics for social scientists”. Throw in a proper Calculus I/II sequence, and you’ll weed out all the space cadets and SJW morons.
Great comment Skepdick. And yes, most (intelligent) critiques of social science are only critiquing the real-world implementation. We’re not saying “Social science cannot be scientific (ever)”. Of course it can be.
It’s just that in reality it’s not.
@Alek
Regarding rape and dominance: read again. I am not contributing to any problem, I just agreed with you. I said people will generally fail to make that distinction between rape and dominance fantasies. Probably because people dont usually imagine a rape as you describe it when they fantasize about it. Many women reported fantasizing specifically about rape, the fact that women picture themselves being “raped” by hot guys rather that Quasimodo betrays that this is likely a dominant fantasy.
The comment about research was clearly tonge-in-cheek response to your comment about measuring arousal with viagra and horse rape,
Ive been around Sleazys blog and forum long enough to know how you like to rant. I generally agree with what you say. As a matter of fact, I agree with almost everything you have posted above. But I also think you are barking up the wrong tree here.
It looks like you intend to talk down on me on matters of social science and make sweeping assumptions about what I know and what I ignore, which means you are unaware of my posting history. I have stated elsewhere that I did in fact study social sciences at the graduate and post graduate level, and I hold a part time teaching position at a university, so I have been well aware of everything you mention and more for over a decade. And in fact I do agree with you that a large chunk of social science is BS (which is why I steered clear from research as a career path as well and went into industry), as well as substantial parts of science in general. I have posted links to Ioannidis, Sokal, and articles on the crisis of reproducibility in science. I even criticized Ekmans microexpressions crap in the forum a few weeks ago. I am deeply suspicious of political science and economy, have little respect for psychology and sociology, and nothing but contempt for any kind of gender or ethnic studies.
But being aware of the shortcomings of social science does mean we have to be skeptical about the knowledge it generates, not dismiss the whole enterprise out of hand.
If you understand all of these things, then why did you fawn over those sensors as having any actual meaning of any kind? As if though they’re an instrument in physics or chemistry?
If you understand how measurements/units work, you would know there’s no way that those sensors are anything to fawn over. Have you heard of the international body on determining the unit of measurement for arousal?
@Alek
I wasn’t fawning about anything, sorry if it came across that way. English is not my native language, but I am usually good enough at it that I am confident that I got my point across.
I mentioned that study because it tied in to the previous comments of “What?” and “Neutrarandomthoughts” on rape, specifically about the apparent dissonance between women feeling some sort of arousal regarding rape, at least in their imagination, and the actual phenomenon of rape. And that this could be, perhaps, part of the explanation why rape messes up women psyches so much (not arguing that male rape, which is a real and widely ignored phenomenon, doesn’t mess up men’s psyches as well, but that seems to be a different beast entirely, so lets focus on female rape for now).
I havent had time to look it up again, honestly, but when I mentioned sensors I think I remember they were monitoring vaginal lubrication, and perhaps heart rate too (I might be misremembering here, it has been a few years. In any case, what was measured were bodily reactions associated with sexual arousal). The point was that the experiment suggested women felt more arousal, as evidenced by their bodies reactions, than they were reporting, evidencing a gap between reported preferences and behaviour of their bodies.
AS you said, this could be interpreted in 55 possible ways. Theoretically, you could come up with a potential infinite number of causes for it, there is no denying that, but in the real world, only a handful of them will be plausible. A logical chain of causation should connect phenomenon A (independent cause(s) to B (dependent variable). That chain of causation can be followed and used to generate new hypotheses and predictions to test. Those plausible explanations will hint to (perhaps) further experiments that may confirm or discard some of the hypotheses. Or maybe not. That is the curse of working with social sciences. Unlike atoms or elements, human beings are just too complex and too unpredictable, and societies even more so. The possibilities of experimenting are limited.
I’ve had this argument with economists a few times. Econometrics often makes them look like they have a hard science on their hands, but their predictions are almost as good as a witch doctors.
So social sciences cannot be evaluated on the same standards than natural sciences. Everyone familiar with the subject will know that. You mentioned everyone can make up their own definitions, that is true, especially if the researcher is ideologically motivated, but you have to lay out your working definitions when you operationalize your hypotheses, so other academics looking at your work will know if they are comparing apples to apples, or to oranges, grapes, corn or iron ore.
Is it good? No, just like democracy, it’s the best we could do for now.
PS: on second look, I didn’t link to Alan Sokal here, that was in another forum. But everyone reading should google up on the Sokal prank on the Social Text journal in 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Just a side note: I think better forms of government than modern democracy would be direct democracy, where you limit the vote to exclude leeches and morons. The Ancient Greeks did something like that. Presumably even better is leadership by a smart dictator.
The debate about the best form of government is at least as old as civilization itself, and we still have no definitive answer – probably never will. All forms of government we have tried, historically, had their drawbacks. The direct democracy you mention is generally not feasible given the size and population of most modern nation-states. Some measures can be ocassionally put to direct democracy mechanisms like referendum or recall votes (like Brexit for example) but it is impractical to run a government like that on a day to day basis.
Qualified vote (leaving out leeches, gimmegrants and such) has been done in the past but it would be very difficult to reintroduce today, it would open a whole new can of worms. Most supreme courts in the west would block such initiatives on constitutional grounds.
A more worrying consideration is that while you and I might agree on restricting voting rights for some groups we deem pernicious to society, if a day comes that such a debate actually takes place, it is not hard to imagine how we could end up on the losing side. Picture a feminst led initiative to strip voting rights from groups like “women haters”, “rape culture apologists”, “rape culture denialists”, “patriarchy enablers”, “right wing extremists”, etc… Could running this blog and/or commenting on it (in particular on a thread regarding rape and sexual abuse!) in the far future be used to disqualify someone from excercising the right to vote authorities?
Does its sound far-fetched? Yes, but not as much as I would like to think. Could the debate of free speech vs hate speech be foreshadowing future debates about other rights we consider inalienable? So regarding vote, I prefer not to open that can of worms entirely. Our ancestors are probably rolling in their graves about things we consider normal today, which were considered unthinkable once upon a time.
There is not much doubt that an illustrated despot (or dictator, king, prince, kaiser, you name it) would be better at governing that a corrupted democracy but, as european history with such despots can attest, the success of this kind of system tends to live and die with the despot in question, no reliable system of transition of power exists. The accumulated powers that a despot can use for good (assuming he is both smart and benevolent) can be readily misused in destructive ways as soon as the wrong guy gets to power (and “wrong” depends, to a large degree, of each persons own political preferences).
Democrats in the US are learning this the hard way, they were mute about Obamas increasing use of executive orders to circumvent Congress, now Trump can just as easily roll back a lot of Obama’s policies by means of executive orders as well. So all of a sudden they have rediscovered the value of separation of powers.
More important than democracy in itself (which is a system for electing a government), is the embracing of constitutional liberalism and cultural enlightenment values. In the west we tend to conflate both, but they are quite distinct. Constitutional liberalism is supposed to prevent the abuse of power by the government in control of the state. Also, autocratic societies that embrace liberalism usually move to expand democracy over time, but the reverse is not necessarily true.