No brother of mine will play the flute
homosabiens.substack.com
homosabiens.substack.com
* The reference to / advertisement of obscure online communities (Agor? Darkworld?)
* The quoted tweet about bloodlines. There are no lines worth speaking of in biology, there are webs. You are not the last one in a very long line, you're a twig on a very big tree. People who talk about their bloodline are often a bit iffy.
So why do I make an issue of it, when I agree with everything they say anyway? Because I actually agree with a lot of what lots of weird sects say - in public. The advertising pitch is often very reasonable even for groups like Mormons or Scientologists, which are 50-250 years out of touch with the trends of the times. This post is very sensible, but it feels like a pitch for something which isn't quite as easy a sell. Maybe this Agor thing.
Your children will exist. They will have no children. But these two facts will have little to no intersection with each other, other than your comment above (which doesn't appear to have any purpose other than to attempt to make someone else feel bad about their choices.)
The expansion gets even more extreme if you start your expansion further up the tree, as the average number of children per household goes up dramatically as you go further back in time.
https://populationeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/a...
Genetically, you're just about as close to your great-great-grandfather as his second daughter's son's third daughter's nephew is.
Unless you've been in some sort of clan war for generations or your family has been the target of small-scale genocide, you're unlikely to be the 'last of a bloodline'.
At a complete guess, that may be inaccurate because I don't know you? What you possibly have is a biological imperative to reproduce, perhaps some social expectation or personal desire to have a family, which combine to create the anxiety. Then the anxiety manifest as magical thinking about "being the last" in a way to drive attention to the underlying issues. Is it 'being the last' or 'being alone' that's the real driver?
A fun thought exposing the silliness: every woman without a daughter is the end of a chain of mothers going back millions of years.
On the other hand though, people who don't are often as an aggregate group destroying a lot of twigs to the detriment of the tree, all the while pretending their love the tree in general that's why they don't care for their twig.
They usually want you to not care about your own.
> I feel you’re on stronger ground, Duncan, when you say that the status quo is unfairly blocking some people from activities they spontaneously want to do and (you argue) safely could in a different society.
> I feel less comfortable when you dig for reasons that other people’s aversions to touch or sexual activity or whatever might be “unhealthy” (against some standard I’m not sure you’ve made a case for the universal healthiness of).
It's easy to work backwards from harmful, biased, or just plain wrong conclusions to a strong and reasonable core principle (and vise versa, for that matter). Without knowing the details of what led the friend to say that, it feels a bit, I don't know, manipulative? for the author to present only their strong core principle as a defense of a position they only allude to, when from that quote it sounds somewhat tangentially related and perhaps a little less universally reasonable.
(The pun in the blog name might also have been a hint)
As usual, some good practical advice (try to understand the societal context your navigating in; don't attempt to fix a problem before you have understood it in depth) which leads to some questionable conclusions (don't try to fix bad situations at all and just learn to accept the injustice because alternatives could be worse?) and then shifts into weird otherworldly stuff where I'm not sure if I'm dealing with scifi literature or things people are actually believing. (darkworld, Agor).
The whole thing has an unpleasant vibe to it that reminds me of the way "pickup artists" used to talk a decade ago.
I found it quite odd and a bit unsettling as well.
He says
>“Something like 9 out of 10 people that I’ve met who had strong touch aversions were also visibly maladjusted in the same way that you would expect from the stereotype of an animal that was cringing away from normal touch (e.g. from other members of its own species).”
In an article where he clearly has a touch aversion. Another post of his describes physical intimacy as "slimy pushups" and clearly has an issue with sex. It just feels like a call for help or nod to issues he's dealing with when he says that people with touch aversion usually have other issues while he rights a lot about touch aversion.
In terms of the pickup artist vibes he talks about orgasms (not sex) as incentivizing him to "Try to convince some other cool and interesting person to drop all of their cool and interesting activities to do some slimy pushups with me"
This whole thing is much weirder yet: https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/on-puberty-identity-and-s...
I sympathize. It just gives the writing a feeling of beating around some bush that we cant see.
There could have been a dozen other examples. Perhaps dancing, or cheerleading, or computer nerding, or whatever else. All of which have had various social stigmas in various groups at various times.
But perceptions are certainly different.
Several studies [0][1][2] have found significant differences in gendered participation in various instruments, and the perception by others of people playing instruments typically played by other genders.
Further, at least one study [4], has found that this variance vanishes or flips in queer ensembles.
Anyway, I wanted to check because Paradise Lost was a long time ago. Men were the first to wear high heels, after all. I figured there'd likely be a drift from times where flutists were male because ensemblists were male to now where anyone can be seen as gay for just about any reason.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264200609_Musicians...
[1] https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/vrme/vol5/iss1/3/
[2] https://theath.ca/arts-culture/instrument-gender-bias/ (mentions a different study)
Traditionally, Manly Men are not supposed to put phallus-stuff into their mouths.
The most noble, selfless reason I could think of is "so that they try again". I say, the "most noble" because people have plenty of more selfish reasons: "they'll make me feel better", "to make me a better person", "to keep up with the expectations of my friends and family", "they'll give me comfort when I'm old and frail", "they will care for me". And then no-reasons such as "it's the way things are", and "everybody does it", and "god wants it".
But I prefer mine: "so that they try again". Try what? To right the wrongs, to succeed where we failed. But that is a mirror: if my kids inherit the world of my failures, can I look back into my soul and say that I tried hard enough? When the day they lose something precious comes, and they understand this world is mostly darkness, will I be able to look them in the eyes and say that I tried hard enough to beget the light they crave?
Historically, there has been a lot of pressure to reproduce, but in the modern era this doesn't always make as much sense. I wish there was more research to clarify this phenomena.
We'd potentially be avoiding a lot of grief and angst during young adulthood for those who choose not to be parents if they more clearly understood why it doesn't "feel right". That grief and angst from choosing "wrong" potentially translates to cases of mental illnesses in the children at best and domestic abuse at worst. Even when couples choose not to have children, they can still be very unhappy. It's as much a matter of social justice as it is health.
Imagine, if you will a large endless expanse. Clear skies above, but as you look to the floor you realize it's made of people. Compacted like tetris pieces, as far as the eye can see. You're standing there, presumably atop some people right then and there. What do you do? Do you walk forward? You'll step on the bodies; the people. Do you stand still? Won't that invalidate your life? Aren't you allowed to live?
Making that decision is trying hard enough. We all had to do it, and luckily, we did it at an age we can no longer remember; right when we were born. We decided to venture forth and try. You tried hard enough because you tried, period. That is enough.
These are the reasons, which don't start from an egocentric perspective, but try to reason about it from an absolute point. Why wouldn't they be reasons?
Was this episode in childhood and now he is a young adult? Did he attend public school?
1. it's unfair that boys who chose to play flute got bullied for it
2. it's not good that his brother essentially took his choice from playing flute by reinforcing #1
3. #2 is actually simultaneously the way to minimize the negative effects of the authors choice of instruments
So in spite of those first two things individually being pretty shitty, they actually give you an optimal outcome (socially) in school. Ideally we get to a place where #1 stops happening, but you won't solve it by going against the grain, you'll just be a martyr for nothing.
The author got grief for playing the clarinet too, and from poking around at their other articles I think they'd have had a lousy time regardless of what instruments they might have chosen, if he hadn't got bullied about the flute he'd have gotten bullied about something else.
OP could have gotten to play the flute, despite the bullying.
It’s not being a martyr for nothing, it’s being a martyr for your own sake.
The association isn't new, see the related slur for gay people.
This feels like a leap. Is it impossible to support your sibling's self-expression and teach them emotional resilience? And even if not, the long term psychological impact on the younger sibling of feeling alienated and controlled in their own family must be taken into account.
> Are you suggesting boys are less empathetic than girls?
Let me leave this for you:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33846514/
Girls exhibit greater empathy than boys following a minor accident Joyce F Benenson et al. Sci Rep. 2021.
ABSTRACT
Hundreds of studies find that girls and women report feeling greater empathy than boys and men in response to adverse events befalling others.
[...]
These behavioral results suggest that an adverse event produces different subjective experiences in females than males that motivate objectively different behaviors, consistent with findings from self-report measures of empathy.
Plenty of reasons for this other than feelings of empathy. Amusingly, history shows that queens are statistically more likely to start wars than men (not that I think this is particularly relevant to the question): https://qz.com/967895/throughout-history-women-rulers-were-m...
> Let me leave this for you
That's mostly behind a paywall; from the abstract I can't see how it distinguishes between experiencing empathy vs reacting to social norms or expectations of behaviour.
I think this is a piece by rationalists for rationalists that escaped the niche it was supposed to remain in.
There was a very interesting video? Article? About how the reason Twitter is so hostile is because it blends people who do not have shared contexts, so ideas are taken out or context and land poorly. This feels like that.
Intimacy is great, but you’re fooling yourself if you think that doing
slimy pushups against each other is the optimal way to produce it. It
may (sadly) be one of the best ways in practice, given what nature has
left us with, but that’s very different from saying “yes, this is
definitely how a good designer would have designed this system from
the ground up.”
A literal actual majority of the people I’ve talked to about this
genuinely claim to believe that yep, this is the right way for
intimacy and pleasure to be created, it’s ideal, no actually better
system could exist, any major changes would be worse.
And they are deeply confused. You are deeply confused, insofar as you
are (probably) a part of that majority.
I’m quite fond of orgasms, as it happens. I wouldn’t write them out of
the universe. I just wish they incentivized me to do something that I
straightforwardly want to do, rather than incentivizing me to:
- Sit alone tediously massaging a body part, instead of doing anything
actually interesting
- Try to convince some other cool and interesting person to drop all
of their cool and interesting activities to do some slimy pushups
with me
https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/on-puberty-identity-and-sex-6...
hell the Way Bill plays the flute is pretty manly imho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxNrC27xcaA
People want to have kids, more often than not. We want to socialize, we want to find partners, we want to find happiness, we want to indulge in hobbies. We are a social species, even when individuals might be deeply antisocial.
Yet we built a society that robs us of agency to try things in private, because we must be advertised to constantly. We built systems that prioritize labor over the health - physical, emotional, mental, social, and otherwise - of the organism. We built media platforms that demand attention, reward controversy, and punish learning.
Like the author’s sibling, we rob our younger cohorts of the agency to decide for themselves the life they want to live by forcing them into holes we deem appropriate and reasonable. Only certain jobs are acceptable, only certain employers have prestige, only certain careers are valid, only certain schools are worthy. Everything you do, everywhere you go, everyone you meet, everything you touch, everything you buy, everything you watch or read or listen to or consume, tracked and logged somewhere for profit-motives. Not safety, not security, not enrichment, not health, and not growth.
Just profit.
And then when those good souls try to build something else - federated social media to break algorithms, private economies to bypass advertisers and payment processors, social circles hiding within encryption to duck government surveillance and identity verification - the cult of convenience and base of power punches down. When a cohort raised on the borderless lands of the internet finds someone they wish to spend their life with, they’re beaten down by arbitrary national barriers and the various -isms and -obias that keep people separate. Thus isolation is reinforced, and withdrawal amplifies.
It’s easier to not search for that thing that interests you but you’re embarrassed about, because then you avoid ads for it. It’s easier to not look for love, because you might find it’s two continents away in a country that hates you or your country hates them, or just hates immigration in general and slaps huge fees on the process. It’s easier to keep your head down working for a Big Tech company because it’s a recognized name even if it hurts your soul to see what it does to humans, and who knows, you might retire from it someday.
It’s easier to choose known misery over the risk of joy. That is the core problem.