You, unlike Scott Adams and the Seduction Community, are blaming "geeky" interests when the real issue is the encoded low social status of geeks and geeky interests in the larger community. I know plenty of well-adjusted, socially-adequate IT guys in DC and NOVA who are simply not the popular, well-connected, physically-attractive "Big Men" that the modern, average-looking (7+?) Sex-in-The-City middle-class Anglo-American woman is looking for. There are A LOT of people from my high school who watched Carson Daly (and his ilk who dominated the social scene there) step into high-paying high-status "be yourself as a pretty person" jobs, which is why the Seduction Community--unlike Adams--is so invested in the "every man a Rock Star" persona. Sure, the Silicon Valley geeks actually DID get married, but they are disproportionately MUSLIM WOMEN, who have a tendency to do that no matter what, or men who were at the top of the dominance hierarchies in the Valley. So I think all this furry cosplay pervy sex-is-easy-and-fun stuff needs to stop, or at least admit that geek interests are not the REAL issue when it comes to ease of acquiring partners, because it elides the fact that all of these perv/sex bloggers are invariably women, with magic vaginas that tend to automatically attract members of the opposite or appropriate sex.

The problem is--and this is why the Seduction Community is separate and distinct from the kink community--that intellectual abstraction is profoundly unsexy in American culture, and systemic, analytical thought likewise, and that Adams and the SC are NOT the kink community OR furries, freaks, pervs or cosplayers but rather men whose intellectual lives are analytical or abstract, and whose problem lies in the unsexiness of the masculinity they embody, hence the radical restructuring of masculinity/masculinities ("Every Man a Rock Star, if you want the Party Girls") that the SC tends to push on men. So while I'm glad that someone is addressing the issue, I think that The Pervocracy (Bruno excepted) is answering with a hearty sex-positive "Huzzah!" the concerns of a community that is not at all sexually or socially marginal, and that "[male] geeks who can't get laid" will continue to seek out the Seduction Community and its approaches to approaching.

[The point I took from Holly's post, the one that resonated most with my own various first, second, and third-hand experiences, is that the geek technology-worker guys who aren't "getting laid" tend to buy into definitions of attractiveness that *exclude them!* Which is why I brought in Cat Nastey's point -- if the Dilbert character Wally insists it's "not even sex" unless it's with a sex-in-the-city type then yeah, they're not just fucked they're *never* fucked! Another point: unless your scale is asymptotic (like, say, the Mohs or Richter scales) then all the women... and for that matter all the men... in Sex in the City were 10s, not 7s, in terms of either percent or percentile of conventional attractiveness and therefore not in the least bit average. Imagining them average makes one a target of Nastey's point. And finally? You explain what you meant about Moslem women further down, but I think it would have been more clear if you'd included the *very* large percentage of both current and (even larger) historical populations where arranged marriage is or was the norm. That would include traditional religious Moslems, Jews, Hindu, and Christians, and vast swaths of royalty, aristocracy, and oligarchy in all countries including western Europe and the U.S., and even isolated sub-300-population American non-migrant farm communities where incest-avoidance looms large. Otherwise, what Holly says: the set of preconditions people set for themselves, more than their absolute rejectability, has more to do with their enforced celibacy than they seem willing to acknowledge. --fl]

• reply

I have a great deal more cynicism about the SC's appearance-related issues than ANY SC blogger, which is why I even bother to post here in the first place, and I acknowledge that the SC itself is a cultural monolith speaking a sociolect of its own. I can't count the number of times I "auditioned" for the SMSC (please don't ask, what those people do to SM is, hum, atrocious) only to be rejected for my inability to instantly attract ("look deep into my eyes") and kinkify a stereotypical cheerleader. But freak/geek furries/cosplayers etc. are not the "geeks who can't get laid", and from the perspective of the SC, the "not getting laid" is the essence of chump-dom. Which is why the SC uses the term Average Frustrated Chump and why the conflation of geekdom with the SC in the Scott Adams post irks me a bit. It's not the obscure interests which are unsexy, it's having a masculinity informed by abstract or analytical intellectualism without rebellious hipsterism in this culture which is sexually disabling.

Perverts and geeks get laid, quite easily, in fact, even in high school. Therefore you have nothing to say to the IT boys who join the SC, and you should forget the idea that people who have to WORK against others' cultural conformity to become sexual and be seen by others as sexual (say disabled or autistic-spectrum female IT workers, which is a classic example) are part of your "freaks and geeks" constituency, just because of a shared interest in Animé. Which is why the SC's hypocrisy about mainstream, patriarchy-compliant female appearance is so, so juicy--nerd-boys want cheerleaders, deserve them, are entitled to them, and here's how they can generate a mainstream, patriarchy-compliant masculinity out of whole cloth (Gunwitch method) or competent metro-sexuality (Mystery Method, StyleLife) in order to get the cheerleaders and party girls.

I'm kinda unsurprised that you misread the Muslim thing, basically, women from non-Western traditional cultures can fall back on arranged marriages and pair-bonding rituals in ways that other "geeks" can't, and the over-representation of some non-Western traditional cultures in IT skews the marriage statistics greatly.

Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "presenting an incredible sexuality", i.e. not being a believable sexual being, or the classic radical feminist "unfuckable." The SC is about unfuckable masculinities, and conflating that with geekdom as fl does in the Scott Adams post is sleight-of-post.

• reply

It's totally intelligible to participants in a certain subculture with a certain vocabulary about sexuality/-ies. (Like every other subculture that constructs itself around a certain understanding about sexualities.) And since your LJ is mainly about what you can't/don't understand, I don't find that lack of comprehension surprising or a detriment to my arguments getting a hearing from the main detractors of the SC-subculture here.

• reply

You're quite hard to understand so I'm going to break this down best I can.

I can't count the number of times I "auditioned" for the SMSC... only to be rejected for my inability to instantly attract... and kinkify a stereotypical cheerleader.

Huh? Is this an actual organization? Googling "SMSC" gets diddly, but from context it seems like you're referring to a SM Seduction Community--which I never heard of, and I know my SM communities--and one that has, um, tryouts? Is there some SMSC coach you have to impress before they let you on the varsity team?

It's not the obscure interests which are unsexy, it's having a masculinity informed by abstract or analytical intellectualism without rebellious hipsterism in this culture which is sexually disabling.

No. You can love Star Wars and get laid, and you can be a dreamy intellectual and get laid. The only kind of geek that's really unsexy is the kind without social skills; the kind who either doesn't talk to girls or who scares them off.

Perverts and geeks get laid, quite easily, in fact, even in high school.

Agreed.

...you should forget the idea that people who have to WORK against others' cultural conformity to become sexual and be seen by others as sexual ... are part of your "freaks and geeks" constituency, just because of a shared interest in Animé.

I'm very confused by this statement. The closest I've got is: "People who aren't considered sexy shouldn't be included as geeks in the statement 'geeks are sexy'." I... can't even tell if I agree or disagree, honestly. All I can say is that the categories "disabled/unattractive people" and "geek" are independent; someone can be either or both or neither.

Which is why the SC's hypocrisy about mainstream, patriarchy-compliant female appearance is so, so juicy... here's how they can generate a mainstream, patriarchy-compliant masculinity out of whole cloth (Gunwitch method) or competent metro-sexuality (Mystery Method, StyleLife) in order to get the cheerleaders and party girls.

Which side are you on, Euro? It seems like half the time you're condemning the SC, and half the time you're suspiciously well-educated about it and justifying Seduction as necessary for unattractive men. Are you a Seduction Artiste or not? I can't tell!

I'm kinda unsurprised that you misread the Muslim thing... and the over-representation of some non-Western traditional cultures in IT skews the marriage statistics greatly.

I misread it because you said "Muslim women" rather than "Muslim couples," so now your point makes a little more sense, but it's kinda irrelevant. (And don't assume based on someone's religion or ethnicity that their marriage must've been arranged.)

Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "presenting an incredible sexuality", i.e. not being a believable sexual being, or the classic radical feminist "unfuckable." The SC is about unfuckable masculinities, and conflating that with geekdom as fl does in the Scott Adams post is sleight-of-post.

Okay, so (I had to read this a buncha times and squint really hard, you need to take an expository writing class or something) basically you're saying that "unsexy" and "geek" are not synonyms. Um... I agree! Never said any differently!

• reply

Eurosabra makes this observation:
...sexual privilege of the type exercised by virtually every sex blogger tends to inspire in me a rather bitter laugh.

To which Kochanie replies:

If you are referring to the privilege enjoyed by those whose bodies do not require specialized skills, medication or equipment to navigate in the world, you may be correct. However, the thicket known as figleaf's blogroll includes numerous blogs written by men and women who struggle with depression, chronic illness and the long-term effects of abuse.

The reason why people blog about sex is because so many of us have ended up in the Land of the Unfuckables and we are trying to figure out how the hell we got here or why such a place even exists. Perhaps we should consider fear of unfuckability as part of the human condition: not a trait that makes us different from everybody else but one that we have in common with everybody else.

If the Seduction Community provides a way for men to overcome their shyness, that's fine. But if it exists to exploit their loneliness and take their money, then a hex on it.

• reply