Aha! A contradiction to feminism it hurts me so.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Now now, don’t worry. I’m not here for a massacre on feminsim. Krossie said something that intrigued me. (maybe paraphrased)

Novelty obviously. Christmas presents are just not the same without the wrapping. Anticipation can enhance the the possible gift. It’s why we gamble.

But guilt. AHA!

Here I picture women waking up in a bed with a man and wondering why the hell they did this. Although I don’t deny the fact that women take part of the blame, I immediately think a notion of anger toward the man in every one of these occasions. Especially where alcohol is involved.

When a man finds a girl who’s drunk (impaired), then has sex with her, which she later regrets, how am I not supposed to regard this as rape??

But there’s the paradox. I suspect a lot of women like this strange little history of men that they should have never been with. I am very confused to why. We psychologically utterly foreign men can dislike the outcome of the relationship just like the bad investment at the stock market. But do we enjoy regretting the relationship? Sure, whatever! Just as much as we enjoy our cold water hot and our forward walk backward.

So I’m not here to ra-ra down with women ideologies or demand this perfectly logical justification. I’m just wondering.

You really love it, don’t you? Men you regret are part of what you live for.

2

:laughing: Krossie, you let the cat out! darn now they all know our dirty little secret.

:laughing: Gaia, its not the men we regret that sweetens our memory of that event. Really its not.

3

Our mutual dislike for each other keeps us together… :laughing:

4

What have I started !?!?

  • To be honest i was speaking absolutely from my own limited white boy perspective and its actually the wrongness of the filthy, impure, low down dirty aspect to decent sweaty, smelly sex that is one of its attractions for me! And, to some extent, I must owe this pleasure to me Catholic roots much as I despise them!

To the rest I’m a bit confused - regret has a certain amount of pathos and romance to it?

  • Yes

Some women do like absolute bastards of men?

  • Yes - I guess its their right to choose - I can see how bookish dreamy sorts could potentially become remarkably boring after they have played you there entire coldplay selection?

kp

5

…And there’s also no end of reductionist/dawkinist types here who will now give us sound evolutionary biological reasons for women preferring the nasty boys?

kp

6

That would be too smart for our league, Kross.

7

Smart I dunno?

But I can hear them rustling in the distance…

kp

8

I just go for non-Western women; they haven’t been infused with narcissism.

9

I’ll play.

People latch on to powerful people, especially if their archetype of a powerful person is abusive and careless. There are likely evolutionary reasons for this, or at least a just-so story to make it fit, but it’s a pretty widely recognized phenomenon. Something along the lines of “babies that grow attached to powerful people tend to survive because they cling to their parents more readily”. Just so.
On the converse side, there is a certain amount of power to be had by choosing to be used, as opposed to letting someone else choose for you. By making the decision to be reckless, one can take the reigns (or feel as though they’ve taken the reigns) of their sexual destiny.

The two sides are related, one as latching on to power, and the other as a rationalization that says people latch on to power to empower themselves. I find a lot of social interaction, especially when it comes to sex, is about power.

10

I do too. Western women are too masculine (sometimes).

Asian women, for example, have enhanced feminine traits. They are passive, take care of their physical appearance, and are highly dependent.

Because of these traits, they have certain advantages and disadvantages (to me personally).

The problem with Western women is that most of them have “forgotten” how to be women…

Ironic and funny (considering they demand equality)… :laughing:

11

I am convinced that everything in life is about power.

12

And another thing!

If women want “equal” status with men, then we shall treat them like men. Heterosexual men will reject them for more feminine women!

A “butch” lesbian is headed in the wrong direction in terms of being seen as attractive like a woman. Feminism fights an uphill battle!

13

C’mon, this is reminiscent of that incredibly crass notion that if a woman gets raped she is asking for it.

Enjoy the regret of sleeping with someone you shouldn’t have? Um, no.

Embarrassed, definitely. Feeling stupid, for sure. But I don’t know anyone who has relished sleeping with the wrong guy.

Unless I’m misinterpreting what you mean by “men that they should have never been with.” I’m not saying a woman wouldn’t enjoy a one-night stand with a guy she wanted to be with, but then there’s no regret.

Enjoy feeling bad they slept with a loser? No.

14

Right. the only thing that really gives that memory sweetness is the lesson learned. Thankfully I was a quick learner and retained the couple of lessons I took. And still do, I cherish the hard lessons, not the loser or the time spent.

15

Oh its all heading down a depressingly predictable direction eh?

For the record I personally like loud, fun. brash argumentative women and quiet people of either sex annoy me a bit…

But each to their own…

kp

16

Fortunately for you kp, the loud, fun, brash, and argumentative women are only going to get louder, more fun, more brash, and more argumentative!

(Not so fortunate for me, because I enjoy my “quiet” time … which is all the time I think.)

17

Groovy!

:slight_smile:

18

Its hardly reductionist if its the truth, the term reductionist is absurd.

Its not ‘dawkinist’ to accept gene-eye-view as the level of selection, it has massive massive evidence and is accepted by most *biological scientists today, besides oldschool people like E.O wilson, who are sitll nonsensically parroting about group selection, or idiots like lewtonin and etc. Most scientists accept it not because its consensus science, but because most people realize the evidence is over-whelming for the claim.

People make ridiculous claims about the adaptations of females and why females like X, so the claims deserve criticism. I haven’t met one person that useed the word ‘reductionism’ in biology, that knew even the basics of biology. Its mainly used, every single time i’ve seen it used, by people against highly established scientific principles, with nothing other than the emotional tactics of incoherent labels.

theres nothing reductionist about combining sciences like behavorial genetics, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, studies on biases and heuristics, neurogenetics, genetics etc.

None of it is reductionist in any sensical sense and if it is, well reduction is a good thing and it becomes absurd to critisize it.

  • richard dawkins.

Explain to me exactly and coherently what reductionism is, who engages in it within scientific circles, why its incorrect and so forth.

19

Well first off I was being slightly tongue in cheek. A genetic/biological explanation is certainly an explanation at one level. Whether it satisfies people or accounts for the full cultural/psychological forces at work in human society which has more than just the biological in it is a different question!

and then…

Oh jaysus “the” truth is back! (will we ever we the back of it - talk about the most irrelevant concept in either philosophy or science) - here Cyrene you might enjoy this battle - especially towards the end where we get down to emergence - I think emergence and complex system theory point to limitations in pure and absolute reductionism - lets not even get to whether there’s some absolute truth that that can be grabbed!

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=148128

And here a quote from a fairly good explanation of complex systems theory and why classic reductionism just CANNOT model many things!

(what is “classical reductionism” - OK I made it up so here’s a definition - I would say simply the Laplacian idea that if you knew the starting position of every particle and its direction you could precisely predict the future behaviour of the system you were looking at)

[i]Traditional physics has attempted to find fundamental laws at the smallest granularity possible. However, it is now known that because of the nature of interactions at very detailed granularity, it can be computationally intractable to predict behaviour of aggregate systems. Water, for instance, is best described (under most conditions) with fluid flow equations which describe aggregate behaviour with relatively simple (non-linear) equations. Attempting to describe it as an aggregate wave function of 10^26 interacting quantum particles is totally impossible. Instead complex systems theory attempts to describe systems at a natural granularity that allows for tractable prediction of behaviour.

One of the fundamental notions in complex systems is the notion of emergent behaviour. That is, from a system with a large number of actors with simple rules, can emerge complex behaviour. This is an echo of the notion of a Metasystem transition which was expressed by the cyberneticists. Some of the earliest descriptions of emergent behaviour actually comes out of the Austrian school of economics and can be seen in the writings of Ludwig Von Mises, where he describes the aggregate behaviour of capitalism being as a type of optimisation which arises as a result from self interested actors.

[/i]

20

A philosophical/scientific explanation possible or desirable?

OK lets break this down more.

Lets assume that what Gaiaguerrilla was getting at in his original post was that some women seem to prefer, on balance, bastards *

(Assumption 1)

Lets further assume that while there maybe no absolute transcendent universal “truth” there may be truths and that philosophy and science are operators to get at these truths
(An interesting idea of Badiou’s though I’m in no way committed entirely to his Maoist/maths ontology!)

(Assumption 2)

Lets further assume that there is an external world that can be measured, there are two real biological, human genders men and women and “unbiased” measurers and techniques etc etc (no bishop Berkley shit!)

(Assumption3)

OK how does the investigation commence.
We send out observers and they come up with data on the empirical situation and lets, for the hell of it, assume that they find out that there is some slight bias towards the evil boys in our female population.

OK how do we explain it?

Surely it would be reasonable to assume that a component is biological and a component cultural and social.

(Assumption 4)

Also that of the biological part – our observed behaviour (phenotype) is accounted for by a combination of genes (genotype) + environment

(Assumption 5)

OK after allowing these assumptions (all well attackable) now what level of “scientific” explanation will we rest with?

Whats possible?

Whats useful?

What level do we move in on?

Gender Men (on mass) v women
Continental – American women v European
National – French women v Irish
Citys
Population groups
Family
Individual

Once we get to in duh vid ual and then down to their biology we can go

Whole person
Tissues
Celles
Biochemistry
Protein
Gene expression
Genotype (linkage etc)
Individual genes
Molecular structure of DNA
Quantum level
Lower?

So high “low” do we go or how “high” do we remain on this chain or can we usefully combine levels?

Bear in mind also that as noted above a quantum map of a person would be completely intractable – that is uncomputable – but also that a full map of how every single gene is being expressed (not the physical position map – obviously thats been done!) probably is too. And also that this is a series of states in time – so a continuous map needed.

Bear in mind also that if such a thing could be done – how useful would it be eg what would a map of every quantum particles spin/position (even if possible and its not under quantum physics and computable ACTUALLY YIELD as an explanation?) Would a map of the level of every protein with time and all their potential interactions yield much.
How many people in the population do we need a description of or can we represent them statistically?

If what Dawkins hierarchical reductionism stands for is that each thing can be investigated at its level – which, I think, is a reasonable claim though much less then his more loony “disciples” tend to make **.

In this case a useful level of explanation might be – human social/cultural/political standing right now combined with a general population level evolutionary approach…

Maybe?

I dunno

  • I don’t personally believe this. If this phenomenon does exist I’d say its very marginal…

** Well in so far as genes exert a phenotypic effect that can be selected for/against they must still be carried in organisms, expressed by them and selected at that level – which also must involve family and population level events.
Genes don’t compete DIRECTLY with each other at a molecular level (indirectly though its effects are absolutely felt at that level of course) - they can only be “seen” by competition at teh level of effect. Thats not just Gould and E O Wilson its also Darwin and, even Dawkins, you’ll find!
Selfish gene ain’t nothing but a catchy metaphor.