Things you wish the opposite sex knew about yours?

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Kicking this off because I had a thought that I've had before but I feel like it's the right time to actually say something about it.

My thought involves male sexuality, at least as I experience it and as I'd assume a lot of guys do as well (can't say 'all' because I wouldn't know), because I feel like if women knew this it would give them more room to work with and accomodate male sexuality without voiding their boundaries or feeling like that interaction is quite as prickly in cases where the guy is well-socialized.

It's this - that 'sex', the act, has the subjective experience, much more so than even pleasure, of God, the universe, etc. telling a guy that he's okay.

Back in the mid 2000's I remember Dennis Prager had a Christian dating coach named Allison Armstrong on his show, liked and respected her work, and she had an idea that I thought at the time was right on point - that while women do compete over beauty but end up feeling like it's mundane or like it's something most women have to some degree ergo it's common, her revelation is that men see God in beauty and in that sense see God in women's faces. My suggestion above - that a guy's been weighted in the balances but unlike Belshazzar you were found acceptable by the cosmos rather than wanting.

So it's much more the edification of a guy's existence. The pleasure is nice but it's not something a guy couldn't get from party favors. OTOH the edification component - that's the part that couldn't easily be replaced.

On that note - if women were able to brainstorm ways to keep the same arms-length distance between men and their pants (ie. fully exercise their sexual autonomy) while at the same time holding in their minds that they hold the power to actually edify the existence of men and found alternate ways to make men feel special and appreciated - that would go a really long way in terms of the current culture wars.

Obviously if a guy isn't well socialized and doesn't know boundaries it's a lot harder, trickier, you'd almost need professionals to handle a guy like that, guys who are relatively safe there's a lot you could do to help uplift them and send that dynamic circulating more.

I wish everyone knew that we really aren’t that different. We’re all human beings who are worthy of dignity and respect. Perhaps “opposite sex” is a misleading term.

It’s not like most women don’t want and enjoy sex when they have a suitable partner who cares about making them feel good. Why would one need to accommodate male sexuality? People are responsible for their own sexual behavior. Period.

I think people need to edify their own existence. Meaning comes from within. It’s not someone else’s responsibility to mold others’ behavior or sense of worth. That just sounds really unhealthy. With that being said, treating others with care and compassion is what we all should strive for, no matter their gender, unless their behavior makes that unwarranted. No brainstorming or special accommodations based on gender is required. It’s much simpler than that.

I agree with this.

I wish more men knew and trusted that most women already know this. ^
It's quite obvious about men.
That's the beauty of men.

The difficulty I have is when men think we don't know this, and it's a secret, and they need to hide it.
Intuitive women have known this all their lives.

I could easily say it's the same for women, but I think it's more true of men.
They're mesmerised by the qualities of femininity and they don't know how to express it in other ways.

What do I wish?

I wish the opposite sex knew I wasn't a magic fairy or a pixie sprite.
There isn't a mysterious cosmos between us.

That one will be harder to explain, so I won't.

I love TP's answer too.

A couple thoughts on the above:

1) I can only speak to the male half of the equation because I've only ever been male. I can see where the optics would look like I'm asking for specific 'male privilege', I'm not, I simply can't write the reciprocal 'what I wish men knew about women' much like you couldn't write 'what I wish women knew about men' - and I don't think MtF or FtM trans could either because their earliest experiences of life are as a given gender. It's really to clear the airwaves that sexuality is somehow base, shallow, etc.. I'm saying that it seems so aligned and overlapping with religious circuitry, or maybe religious circuitry (worst case scenario) is a second-order abstraction of sexual circuitry.

2) For everything that I've seen that testosterone and estrogen do to brains and bodies, and the relationship of sexual dimorphism to risks (both primary in terms of pregnancy or secondary in terms of both competition and criminality), we're largely socialized the same but the firmware has significantly different orders of concern. You have places like Sweden where more total equality yields more divergence toward STEM vs. HEAL. Highest aspirations may be quite similar, daily operations, trauma patterns, etc. only overlap where the type of trauma and optimal balance of priority isn't gender-skewed.

I wouldn't take claims that both sexes are largely the same as necessarily cynical but - if they are so similar as for the differences to be negligible (outside of incel and femcel) - why are marriages and birth rate falling off a cliff? I see urbanization as part of it (costs) but I also see where people's strongest desire - to be with someone - is getting turned away, such that you have growing minorities of both men and women staying single. I think the existence of that predicament breaks the idea that 'men are just women with different bits - get on with it' or 'women are just men with different bits - get on with it'. There's clearly something more happening.

I think a lot of the perceived differences in sexual behavior are due to social conditioning. I’m not saying that there are NO innate differences, but the differences tend to be overemphasized.

There are many reasons why birth rates and marriage rates are decreasing. Many people are choosing not to marry and are opting to cohabit instead. People are focusing more on education and careers than on having children. Fewer women are homemakers.

The biggest reason I see for declining birth rates between couples is probably urbanization and how that prioritizes what children need to succeed - ie. the use of many uneducated farm hands vs. one or two K-12 and bachelors, masters, etc.. young adults out the other end. What I think urbanization explains less is the drop in pair bonding. We can maybe say that marriage is a dead institution (that doesn't seem to show up well in statistics for children with both vs. one parent), the alternative seems to be a collective haze that - whether via Tinder, male spammers, etc. - it ends up with mutual gridlock (to which 'situationships' seem to just be singlehood with a story as to why it's not singlehood).

I think where I tend to fall more on the side of biological determinism is that I've seen so many people out in the world, whether male or female, where the ways in which they behave are myopically geared to such a degree that the consequences would kick them out of it if they could see the consequences or if they had any choice. The way I'd put that is it almost seems like genes supersede people, the most obvious way it shows up is 'the wages of difference is death' (if that wasn't about genes it would have no persuasive explanation for it's persistent sticking power in the face of ideas like liberal democracy, equality, etc.).

The weird thing about culture as well is it has to have a context to have any sticking power. The most persuasive forcing functions (for cultural change), outside of population genetics, seems to be changes to environmental attractors such as technology removing top reasons for why cultural institution a works b way.

The main thing I'd love to do is see if I can port the sense that civilization's a collaborative effort and that we do need to focus on mental health issues, including ways in which class, status, etc. negatively impact the population. No one has a right to sex but I do think we should live in a culture where everyone has available dignified means for finding meaning and purpose in life and where they don't need to knowingly lie to themselves to close that gap. For example we've increasingly scrapped religion in the west, which to some degree seems like it's been a requirement for the modern world, but we also lost monasteries and convents and accordingly we pile everyone into the rat race where it both doesn't seem like everyone belongs there and it seems like we have all kinds of needs for things to get done that don't have economically optimal answers. Richard Reeves brought up the issue of male children needing male role models with the suggestion that we might need more male K-6 teachers, there's a conundrum however with respect to income and incentives.

I still think the acknowledgement of people and that they're 'okay' as they exist is something we've really depleted in our Squid Games style of corporatism, and that in and of itself is the law of the jungle and power asserting itself for powers' sake. So much of the energy sap in the air is alienation combined with grueling obligation which seems to pulverize people and their instincts over time.

I'm not sure there's a specific thing. But I've noticed many women seriously overinterpret male behaviour, spinning all kind of subtle cues into an intensely urgent inner psychodrama when he's basically just distracted and thinking about bacon or something. Sometimes we're not being subtle, there's just not a lot going on in there and prodding in search of the deeper meaning of our blank looks just causes confusion and distress.

Sometimes I like to follow these types of threads out of curiosity. It's like looking into a different world. Ultimately I can't really answer the question. I don't have anything that I wish the opposite sex knew. Granted, I'm gay.

Paranoia seems like it's a trade off in exchange for more rigid social rules and customs and it often seems like whoever feels like they pulled beyond their weight in terms of a partner will tend to be the more paranoid of the two.


Any familiarity with kidology? She's had some interesting discussions on trying to date as bi and I find that she does a pretty good job of impartiality on the topics she hits.

I thought about this a fair amount yesterday, I just wasn't quite sure how to respond.

Probably the best way to zip or compress my thinking on it - if it's true that that's universal knowledge even among NT's it doesn't show. It would be profound if true but just not in a good way.

OK maybe I’m just a little more intuitive than other women lol. I thought it was common sense given all the chivalry, poetry, and artwork for women throughout history.

I hope women don’t exploit that knowledge if they do know.

My only concern is that some men get carried away with the fascination to the point of harming women if the feeling isn’t reciprocal or if we can live without men. I’m not saying that’s all men but admittedly it’s some.

I don't think it's about women though, it's just one example where it goes that way.

I think the biggest thing I keep learning, forgetting, and relearning just because it's something - genuinely - not talked about is that if you're not thinking the same way other people do (irrelevant as to whether you're ahead, behind, or orthogonal in some way) you'll be wrong - sometimes without even being literally wrong - because what matters more is where the weighted average of humanity is and what they know, don't know, care about, don't care about, etc.. If you look for something in the social world that actually does make sense but no one has conceived of it it won't exist in the social world or it'll be bouncing around the minds of a few outliers.

That last point is funny because I think of how ChatGPT confabulates / lies sometimes. Where I caught it lying is where it seems like there 'should' be knowledge and articles written but there aren't. For example I asked ChatGPT if there were any really good papers and articles related to solving the Slate Star Codex 'Moloch' problem and ChatGPT gave me back five papers with fascinating titles, genuinely real authors in that space (like Vankatesh Rao) but the articles themselves didn't exist and the links were bad. ChatGPT might be a 'fast talker' in the psychopath sense but it would probably also get an autism dx.

I also think of a particularly humorous but rather pathetic time when I walked into the Home Depot, a guy in his 60's greeted me at the door, asked what I was looking for, to the extent I went into any details I got a 'Woah! Woah! Woah!' and I could tell he was getting ready to yell at me so I pulled it all back in and barked out a two word response and he told me which isle.

I remember you reciting your experience where you were temporarily in a wheelchair and you felt like you were something people could conceive of and then when you no longer needed it you went right back to effortlessly odd-angling the heck out of people the same way I do.

The world's that much of a mess. One would think available ideas would be processed by people but great philosophic works aren't processed by bears, racoons, or squirrels either, it's just confusing when it's indefinitely not processed by the bulk of a species that knows how to read.

For the issue of men harming women - the problem is these guys aren't understanding the human condition and in turn they're resorting to reprehensible behavior. It's not only f'd in the way humans treat each other, it's f'd at the level of what biological life does to biological life almost by design.

Life seems to be a dance between mind and matter where mind is typically getting pummeled and traumatized by matter and the way matter wins is by being deaf to reason. Finding ourselves primarily existing as minds we inherently want to believe in 'The Secret', mind over matter, etc. but it doesn't work and anytime we even accidentally apply some version of that fallacy to our lens on the world, outwardly applying 'shoulds' as if they're true is a good example, it tends to pay back in trauma. What I'd love to know, main reason I bring these topics up, is how much of this we actually could be doing better armed with the right information vs. how much of it's genuinely unchangeable for reasons that supersede logic or reason of any kind (ie. to what degree are we genuinely slaves to genes and unconscious forces?). I see this kind of questioning going on with things like body positivity among other things but those experiments seem to be revealing people's worst fears - ie. that even if we're the blankest slates nature has it's still true that cultural and social engineering doesn't work at the selection level unless, like Tinder and other apps, it's changing the fitness landscape maps via forcing functions (like in the case of apps - grabbing a monopoly on the network effects much like Facebook, Twitter, etc. have grabbed public square).

• Breasts: If you do not want them looked at, then do not let them be seen.

• Deep down inside, a man is still a little boy who wants to be held close and reassured that he is still loved and that everything is going to be alright.

• If you think that the outfit you are wearing makes you look fat, do not ask us.  Instead, get your fat ass down to the gym and work some of it off.

• In the long-term, your looks are not all-important to us; your attitude and personality matter just as much (if not more), especially after we have come to know you better.

• Interrupting us during an important task just so that we can reassure you that you still have the highest priority in our lives serves only to frustrate our urge to complete the task we were working on.

• Once we are married, we no longer care about weddings, so do not expect us to enjoy anyone's wedding but our own.

• Please let us know what you do and do not like in bed, and do not assume that if we could know, we should know -- we cannot read your minds.

• We give only our best friends uncomplimentary nick names (i.e., "Doofus", "Mutton Head", "Stinky" et cetera), because they are our best friends.

• Sex is not the only thing on the male mind, but sexual desire in men is easily provoked from the time their testicles drop until they can no longer sexually function.

• Shaving is an annoying (and sometimes painful) chore for us too.

• Sometimes, despite your best efforts to look sexy, we are just not interested . . . right away . . .

• Sometimes, we are not thinking of you.  This is natural and usually harmless.  Our jobs are important, too.

• Sometimes, we need to adjust our "boys down under" like you sometimes need to adjust your "girls up top".  Get used to it.

• Sometimes, when you think you look your worst (i.e., just woke up, no makeup, tired, sweaty, et cetera), you come across as very sexy.

• The toilet seat goes both ways.  Learn to tell the difference in the dark, or switch on the light and have a look.

• We do not like to multi-task unless all tasks -- other than the one we are currently focused on -- are automatic.

• We need to feel appreciated, and not taken for granted; but do not just tell us, show us, too!

• We are hard-wired notice other potential mates, and we would have to be blind not to.

• When we ask "How many were at the party?", we are not asking for a role-call; we are asking for a number.

• Yes, high-heeled shoes help you look "sexy"; but most of the time, it is not your shoes that draw our attention.

• You do not need more than three pairs of shoes, and basic black goes with everything.

• You heard one noise.  We heard twenty.  Please describe the noise that you heard, and do not just say, "That one".

Last edited by Fnord on 15 May 2023, 11:21 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Wow. You have a good memory. It wasn't a wheelchair but a rollator walker (the kind with wheels), and I had to use a private wheelchair bus which came to my house for pickups. I felt extremely self-conscious and awkward but you're right, I was treated better by people when they could see I had a problem. It was even more pointed when I broke my foot and had an airwalker cast on my leg at the same time as pushing my walker around and wearing coke-bottle lens glasses for double vision. Such a sight to behold, I was. I graduated to a cane and got a few odd looks but it didn't have the same effect. Now that I seldom use a cane people don't have a clue what my problem is, even though I'm nearly ten years older and it stands to reason I might just be going senile, which I'm not.



I love this. ^

As a woman I agree with everything on Fnord's list.
It goes both ways and applies to what I think men should know, too.
Yes that applies to male breasts.
Yes I hate weddings.
Yes I call my friends Doofus and Mutton Head (actually Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum).
Shaving hurts.
I adjust my boobs.
My exbf looked pretty good in stilettos.
I want the number of people and the name of the sound too.