Nice write up. Your point at the beginning about ancestral man almost never coming across a single sexually available woman who was not already claimed by a man who would violently harm one, and desiring to see "don't worry the coast is clear" signals is a good one. Reminds me of all the times in high school that my boyfriend snuck in through my bedroom window when my parents were asleep, and snuck out again before morning, good times. 😊
Anyway it did also make me think that it's likely the reason that men seem to have historically and cross-culturally always had an intense fantasy about somehow finding themselves stumbling into some situation where men are simply not allowed period...an all girls school or ladies' changing room or slumber party or the cocnubines' quarters or whatever. More about the no man being around to kill them part than that any of the women in those situations would be sexually available, which they almost certainly would not be (and having been in many women's locker rooms, trust me they are not remotely sexy). Perhaps this is part of the reason AGP males/trans women demand so hard to get into those places too?
What I find very weird is how so many US women are now fully bought into and seem to actually believe that what a girl wears is totally irrelevant and that there is no such thing as sexy vs not or being sexually provocative. Why the hell do they think we have a word for "provocative" in the first place?? And do they really believe that a man will not perceive a teenage girl wearing shorts with her butt half hanging to be sexually provocative? I just don't understand how anyone could exist on earth and think that. I pretty much wore the shortest possible mini skirt that I could without showing my underwear every day when I was a teenager, and it was 100% because I knew I looked good and that it turned every man's head and that was the whole point. I don't understand this crazy thing these days where moms will scream at anyone who notices an outfit is provocative because WHY ARE YOU SUCH A PERVERT HOW DARE YOU SEXUALIZE A YOUNG GIRL YOU'RE THE ONE THINKING DISGUSTING THOUGHTS ABOUT MY DAUGHTER SHES JUST COMFORTABLE GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE GUTTER. Like do they actually believe that? It's hard to believe they do and yet this is the norm now and the moms will come at you hard and fast over it. IDK maybe it's just the daughters playing their parents but pretending to be naive. I probably would've pretended to be innocently ignorant regarding the effect of my miniskirts when I was 16, but my parents were too embarrassed to say anything to me about it.
Regarding teenage daughters, it seems like another problem of conflating apparent sexual availability with actual sexual availability that I haven't thought about. I guess it goes like this:
Someone: "Your daughter wears stuff that makes her seem (apparently) sexually available."
Mom: "HOW DARE YOU SAY MY DAUGHTER IS (ACTUALLY) SEXUALLY AVAILABLE?"
Very interesting! And accurate too. In my opinion, “high-restraint cultures” and “cultures who truly understand the nuances of sexiness and sexual availability” are not mutually exclusive terms. I think the two concepts go well together.
I guess I'm supposed to defend myself a little. I actually don't assume that men are wild emotional beasts - if nothing else, I live together with a man and he is a wonder of self control. I tend to consult him when making assumptions about the psychology of men. This time was no exception. The result:
A few men actually need to restrain themselves to avoid raping women. But most men don't. Their self-restraint is much milder. More or less, it is an act of resistance against women's tricks to catch male attention for their own purposes. I think that most men need to restrain themselves a little bit in order to avoid getting hooked on that pleasant feeling of perceiving sexual availability that you describe.
So more or less, I don't think that men actively restrain themselves from being sexual predators. I think they restrain themselves from being distracted and thereby less productive or faithful than they prefer to be.
This is basically what I came to the comments section to say.
"High-restraint" and "high-understanding" societies, in my opinion, have overlapping definitions. Both of them suggest that, in the simplest possible terms, a) adults are trusted to act like adults, and b) adults are socially and culturally held *accountable* to act like adults.
I'm using the term "adult" to mean "capable and willing to use self-control in service of goals." In this case, the goal is healthy sexual cooperation.
So if a society is high in self-control, that directly implies a healthy underlying understanding of sexual nuance and of the differences between the sexes.
I don't really see how you could have one without the other. If you did, you'd have either a bunch of really educated, nuanced people being terrible to each other, or a bunch of people being cordial and distant without understanding why. Neither of those really makes sense.
Muslim cultures strike me as odd, because they don't encourage self-control at all. They use culture and religion to impose control externally. They literally teach their young men that they can't control themselves. And therefore women must be covered up. What that means to me is that they're not even trying to understand sexual cooperation. They simply ban anything that might arouse men. In other words, to return to my definition above, they fundamentally don't trust adults to act like adults.
In the U.S., one of the big issues is that progressive thinking has gone past the station - it went from "we should continue to work on equality between men and women" to "men need to learn about women's needs, and serve them, but women don't need to learn anything about men." That's not helpful. It has created a low-understanding, high-restraint society. Which is not healthy. If you're going to give people freedom, you have to have both.
I think I get it. I was discussing self-restraint in "low stakes" (for the lack of better term) scenarios i.e. seeing a sexy woman walking down the street. Here, most Asian/Muslim men need to restrain themselves (and sometimes they don't), while most European/Christian don't really need to restrain (a small amount of them needs, and a tiny amount needs but don't). I was also under the impression that this is what you were referring too, but I guess was wrong.
There are also "high stakes" scenarios, where some kind of social relationship already exists: the social dance example from my other comment, talking to an attractive coworker you should not be flirting with because one or both of you are married, woman trying to get out of a speeding ticket by batting her eyelashes, or a date ending up at his/her place, but during foreplay she suddenly wants to stop and "take it slow". Here, European/Christian do need to restrain themselves, while for Asian/Muslim it would be borderline impossible to restrain, hence their culture prevents such scenarios from happening by creating gender segregated spaces and other means.
I read your "high-restraint" as "men highly restrain themselves in low stakes scenarios", but now I think it rather means "men only need to restrain in high stakes scenarios".
I'd be interested in an article elaborating on these two points.
>It also allows sexiness to be widespread and enjoyable for everyone without resentment and aggression, while also preventing a slippery slope into an unsustainable hedonistic hookup culture.
> For inspiration, we should look at the most sex-positive parts of the Western society - Southern Europe and Latin America.
If I were to list countries high in sexual openness, probably I would include some like Australia and NZ, and maybe Central Europe, but I guess those fall under "hedonistic hookup culture". There's also Thailand, the Philippines, and maybe Japan, but those presumably fall under your "Asian culture" umbrella. It seems you specially distinguish LATAM because women there have a higher baseline level of apparent sexual availability, which increases the plausible deniability available for social sexual availability, but I don't quite get why that's beneficial. Are you arguing that it would be better if women signaled more apparent sexual availability, because both parties generally enjoy that vibe, or something more like that would cause men to approach women more and most people will be happier as a result?
That seems sort of subjective, in the same way that other approaches also propose different sets of norms that benefit the status of some groups more than others. For example, the schoolmarms would probably respond to your proposal by decrying Latin machismo and claiming that women only dress more sexily to attract men because there are less economic opportunities available. On the other hand, hedonistic hookup culture is also sex-positive, but I imagine it's endgame would be a less nuanced process towards sexual interaction, so the distinction there would be to benefit people bad at social skills versus the LATAM approach which benefits those good at them.
> it would be better if women signaled more apparent sexual availability, because both parties generally enjoy that vibe
That was the point I was trying to make.
> that would cause men to approach women more and most people will be happier as a result
That would be a nice side effect too. Not only men would approach women more, but they would fully understand that even if a woman is apparently available, she is not actually available - at least not until she becomes socially available as well (a valid social relationship that permits sex is formed between the two).
I may follow up with a separate post about the Southern Europe/LATAM approach, but I believe the core of it is the strong cultural impact of the Catholic Church and the warm climate. A conservative catholic society exacerbates the importance of social sexual availability (forming a valid relationship - preferably marriage, but long term monogamous relationship work for normie catholics as well). This makes it less likely to conflate apparent sexual availability with actual sexual availability, as everyone understands that it's not possible to be actually available without social availability/relationship. And the warm climate makes it more convenient for women to undress, and for the society to adjust the social norms to allow that.
A great example of the LATAM approach is latin social dance. It allows women to both look and move sexy and dance with other men even if they are older and/or married. It's like the next level of sexiness, because you don't only look, you also touch. Again, some would say it requires more self-control, I say it requires a deeper understanding of apparent vs actual sexual availability.
As a matter of fact, a couple of years ago, me and my wife both got into the latin social dance scene. We enjoyed it, but some of our friends reacted with horror - they thought this stuff was for singles, and a married couple doing it was along the lines of swinging/polyamory. Social dance is a staple of the LATAM culture, but in other western countries (we live in Poland) the normies consider it a subculture with a weird alternative lifestyle.
I agree that "sex-positive" is maybe not the best term to describe this type of culture, as it was already claimed by the hedonistic hookup culture camp. I just failed to come up with anything else.
Lots of great insights here but I'm struggling with the basic framework.
What, in your terms, is the relationship between beauty and sexiness? In your essay they seem somewhat strangely divorced.
You can have two naked women in the same place at the same time, but presumably the more beautiful one will also be sexier. However, I'm not sure how the more beautiful one could in any meaningful sense be more sexually *available* than the other. Is the idea that more beautiful women are simply perceived as more sexually available? But then shouldn't beautiful women be perceived as *less* sexually available --and so less *sexy*--since the presumption is that they've already been snatched up?
First, let's differentiate beauty and attractiveness.
Beauty is an aesthetic category that can also be applied to animals and inanimate objects. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - one way to put it is that it's subjective, but it's also a social construct: whatever the society thinks is beautiful IS beautiful. Beauty is a matter of nurture.
Attractiveness is a measure of whether someone (or something, i.e. a sex doll or toy) looks like a fertile woman - young, healthy, thin, curvy figure, clear skin, symmetrical and neotenous face etc. Attractiveness is a matter of nature - it's evolutionary and therefore not subjective. There is a lot of research on what is the objective standard of female attractiveness.
You can fool nurture but not nature. This is why in some cultural eras we've seen mismatches between attractiveness and beauty, where unattractive women (i.e. very fat or skinny) were considered beautiful.
I consider attractiveness as a multiplier for sexual availability that contributes to sexiness:
Sexiness = apparent sexual availability * attractiveness.
An attractive woman is not sexy if she's not sexually available.
But also someone (or something) that is sexually available but not an attractive woman (e.g. old or fat woman, transwoman, cheap sex doll) is also not sexy.
I realize that this contradicts my description of Sexiness = apparent sexual availability, so maybe the model and the essay needs some updates, or we need to introduce some new terms.
Anyway, answering your question: I don't think that beauty directly contributes to sexiness, except for how it correlates with attractiveness which is a direct contributor.
Alright I suppose this cleans things up. I'm just concerned that your technical deployment of these terms (beautiful, attractive, sexy) doesn't track at all the way we use these terms in everyday speech
On the other hand, I think that there's something to your statement that an attractive woman who isn't sexually available isn't sexy. This is something we see a lot: Some women who aren't so good looking are considered sexy because they do/wear 'slutty' things while better-looking women who are more prudish are considered less sexy
> Even in liberal Western societies, women are expected to keep their legs crossed or squeezed together to avoid overt displays of sexual availability, especially in formal settings, such as police interrorgation:
Really? Women crossing their legs have always drawn my attention much more to ... their legs than when they simply sit with their legs side by side, like men usually do; without manspreading, of course, which I think female anatomy doesn’t favor as much anyway. Besides, if you’re not sitting opposite each other, legs can be crossed either towards you or away from you, signalling who is and who is not welcome to get any closer.
> When I see a sexy woman, I don’t get a sudden spike of testosterone level, and I don’t need to “restrain” or “self-control” to prevent myself from assaulting or raping her. What really happens is that I get a dopamine hit. It feels happy. It feels GOOD.
I have no idea about my testosterone levels, but needing to self-control to avoid raping women has always felt completely alien to me. I know it as the kind of reply people throw your way to put you in your place when you’re a pariah like me and show the slightest sign of sexual interest in women.
For a lot of years, I had very little idea what the deal with sexiness was. I knew conventional sexiness mattered to people very much, and I seemed to be expected to take it into account in some mysterious way or other. Showing interest too overtly seemed a bad idea, but refusing to show it—if this was possible at all; I think I’ve always been an open book to normal people—seemed to be considered hypocritical. I’m talking about conventional sexiness because whom I was or was not actually attracted to has never made a difference; I’ve never knowingly been in a situation remotely appropriate to try to satisfy my desires.
At any rate, as I see it, raping someone implies a fight, and I expect to lose it, so, to me, “I can’t help raping people” implies “I’m so powerful and high status I actually need an effort to stop myself from spontaneously doing what you could never do in a million years even if you wanted to; it doesn’t matter how many people I have to trample in the process, because I can take for granted my ability to crush them without as much as registering such events”.
I’m probably repeating myself, but you won’t feel cheated if you never expected anyone to be sexually available to you. For a long time, I didn’t even understand how attractive women could be self-conscious about showing their bodies: as far as I was concerned, they could go about their daily lives literally naked, and the only message I’d perceive is “See how absolutely superior they are to you. Let it sink in”. It turns out other people reäct very differently—and it feels incredibly entitled and high status to me, for sure—but it took me many years to begin to understand why.
Nice write up. Your point at the beginning about ancestral man almost never coming across a single sexually available woman who was not already claimed by a man who would violently harm one, and desiring to see "don't worry the coast is clear" signals is a good one. Reminds me of all the times in high school that my boyfriend snuck in through my bedroom window when my parents were asleep, and snuck out again before morning, good times. 😊
Anyway it did also make me think that it's likely the reason that men seem to have historically and cross-culturally always had an intense fantasy about somehow finding themselves stumbling into some situation where men are simply not allowed period...an all girls school or ladies' changing room or slumber party or the cocnubines' quarters or whatever. More about the no man being around to kill them part than that any of the women in those situations would be sexually available, which they almost certainly would not be (and having been in many women's locker rooms, trust me they are not remotely sexy). Perhaps this is part of the reason AGP males/trans women demand so hard to get into those places too?
What I find very weird is how so many US women are now fully bought into and seem to actually believe that what a girl wears is totally irrelevant and that there is no such thing as sexy vs not or being sexually provocative. Why the hell do they think we have a word for "provocative" in the first place?? And do they really believe that a man will not perceive a teenage girl wearing shorts with her butt half hanging to be sexually provocative? I just don't understand how anyone could exist on earth and think that. I pretty much wore the shortest possible mini skirt that I could without showing my underwear every day when I was a teenager, and it was 100% because I knew I looked good and that it turned every man's head and that was the whole point. I don't understand this crazy thing these days where moms will scream at anyone who notices an outfit is provocative because WHY ARE YOU SUCH A PERVERT HOW DARE YOU SEXUALIZE A YOUNG GIRL YOU'RE THE ONE THINKING DISGUSTING THOUGHTS ABOUT MY DAUGHTER SHES JUST COMFORTABLE GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE GUTTER. Like do they actually believe that? It's hard to believe they do and yet this is the norm now and the moms will come at you hard and fast over it. IDK maybe it's just the daughters playing their parents but pretending to be naive. I probably would've pretended to be innocently ignorant regarding the effect of my miniskirts when I was 16, but my parents were too embarrassed to say anything to me about it.
Regarding teenage daughters, it seems like another problem of conflating apparent sexual availability with actual sexual availability that I haven't thought about. I guess it goes like this:
Someone: "Your daughter wears stuff that makes her seem (apparently) sexually available."
Mom: "HOW DARE YOU SAY MY DAUGHTER IS (ACTUALLY) SEXUALLY AVAILABLE?"
Very interesting! And accurate too. In my opinion, “high-restraint cultures” and “cultures who truly understand the nuances of sexiness and sexual availability” are not mutually exclusive terms. I think the two concepts go well together.
I guess I'm supposed to defend myself a little. I actually don't assume that men are wild emotional beasts - if nothing else, I live together with a man and he is a wonder of self control. I tend to consult him when making assumptions about the psychology of men. This time was no exception. The result:
A few men actually need to restrain themselves to avoid raping women. But most men don't. Their self-restraint is much milder. More or less, it is an act of resistance against women's tricks to catch male attention for their own purposes. I think that most men need to restrain themselves a little bit in order to avoid getting hooked on that pleasant feeling of perceiving sexual availability that you describe.
So more or less, I don't think that men actively restrain themselves from being sexual predators. I think they restrain themselves from being distracted and thereby less productive or faithful than they prefer to be.
This is basically what I came to the comments section to say.
"High-restraint" and "high-understanding" societies, in my opinion, have overlapping definitions. Both of them suggest that, in the simplest possible terms, a) adults are trusted to act like adults, and b) adults are socially and culturally held *accountable* to act like adults.
I'm using the term "adult" to mean "capable and willing to use self-control in service of goals." In this case, the goal is healthy sexual cooperation.
So if a society is high in self-control, that directly implies a healthy underlying understanding of sexual nuance and of the differences between the sexes.
I don't really see how you could have one without the other. If you did, you'd have either a bunch of really educated, nuanced people being terrible to each other, or a bunch of people being cordial and distant without understanding why. Neither of those really makes sense.
Muslim cultures strike me as odd, because they don't encourage self-control at all. They use culture and religion to impose control externally. They literally teach their young men that they can't control themselves. And therefore women must be covered up. What that means to me is that they're not even trying to understand sexual cooperation. They simply ban anything that might arouse men. In other words, to return to my definition above, they fundamentally don't trust adults to act like adults.
In the U.S., one of the big issues is that progressive thinking has gone past the station - it went from "we should continue to work on equality between men and women" to "men need to learn about women's needs, and serve them, but women don't need to learn anything about men." That's not helpful. It has created a low-understanding, high-restraint society. Which is not healthy. If you're going to give people freedom, you have to have both.
I think I get it. I was discussing self-restraint in "low stakes" (for the lack of better term) scenarios i.e. seeing a sexy woman walking down the street. Here, most Asian/Muslim men need to restrain themselves (and sometimes they don't), while most European/Christian don't really need to restrain (a small amount of them needs, and a tiny amount needs but don't). I was also under the impression that this is what you were referring too, but I guess was wrong.
There are also "high stakes" scenarios, where some kind of social relationship already exists: the social dance example from my other comment, talking to an attractive coworker you should not be flirting with because one or both of you are married, woman trying to get out of a speeding ticket by batting her eyelashes, or a date ending up at his/her place, but during foreplay she suddenly wants to stop and "take it slow". Here, European/Christian do need to restrain themselves, while for Asian/Muslim it would be borderline impossible to restrain, hence their culture prevents such scenarios from happening by creating gender segregated spaces and other means.
I read your "high-restraint" as "men highly restrain themselves in low stakes scenarios", but now I think it rather means "men only need to restrain in high stakes scenarios".
I'd be interested in an article elaborating on these two points.
>It also allows sexiness to be widespread and enjoyable for everyone without resentment and aggression, while also preventing a slippery slope into an unsustainable hedonistic hookup culture.
> For inspiration, we should look at the most sex-positive parts of the Western society - Southern Europe and Latin America.
If I were to list countries high in sexual openness, probably I would include some like Australia and NZ, and maybe Central Europe, but I guess those fall under "hedonistic hookup culture". There's also Thailand, the Philippines, and maybe Japan, but those presumably fall under your "Asian culture" umbrella. It seems you specially distinguish LATAM because women there have a higher baseline level of apparent sexual availability, which increases the plausible deniability available for social sexual availability, but I don't quite get why that's beneficial. Are you arguing that it would be better if women signaled more apparent sexual availability, because both parties generally enjoy that vibe, or something more like that would cause men to approach women more and most people will be happier as a result?
That seems sort of subjective, in the same way that other approaches also propose different sets of norms that benefit the status of some groups more than others. For example, the schoolmarms would probably respond to your proposal by decrying Latin machismo and claiming that women only dress more sexily to attract men because there are less economic opportunities available. On the other hand, hedonistic hookup culture is also sex-positive, but I imagine it's endgame would be a less nuanced process towards sexual interaction, so the distinction there would be to benefit people bad at social skills versus the LATAM approach which benefits those good at them.
> it would be better if women signaled more apparent sexual availability, because both parties generally enjoy that vibe
That was the point I was trying to make.
> that would cause men to approach women more and most people will be happier as a result
That would be a nice side effect too. Not only men would approach women more, but they would fully understand that even if a woman is apparently available, she is not actually available - at least not until she becomes socially available as well (a valid social relationship that permits sex is formed between the two).
I may follow up with a separate post about the Southern Europe/LATAM approach, but I believe the core of it is the strong cultural impact of the Catholic Church and the warm climate. A conservative catholic society exacerbates the importance of social sexual availability (forming a valid relationship - preferably marriage, but long term monogamous relationship work for normie catholics as well). This makes it less likely to conflate apparent sexual availability with actual sexual availability, as everyone understands that it's not possible to be actually available without social availability/relationship. And the warm climate makes it more convenient for women to undress, and for the society to adjust the social norms to allow that.
A great example of the LATAM approach is latin social dance. It allows women to both look and move sexy and dance with other men even if they are older and/or married. It's like the next level of sexiness, because you don't only look, you also touch. Again, some would say it requires more self-control, I say it requires a deeper understanding of apparent vs actual sexual availability.
As a matter of fact, a couple of years ago, me and my wife both got into the latin social dance scene. We enjoyed it, but some of our friends reacted with horror - they thought this stuff was for singles, and a married couple doing it was along the lines of swinging/polyamory. Social dance is a staple of the LATAM culture, but in other western countries (we live in Poland) the normies consider it a subculture with a weird alternative lifestyle.
I agree that "sex-positive" is maybe not the best term to describe this type of culture, as it was already claimed by the hedonistic hookup culture camp. I just failed to come up with anything else.
Lots of great insights here but I'm struggling with the basic framework.
What, in your terms, is the relationship between beauty and sexiness? In your essay they seem somewhat strangely divorced.
You can have two naked women in the same place at the same time, but presumably the more beautiful one will also be sexier. However, I'm not sure how the more beautiful one could in any meaningful sense be more sexually *available* than the other. Is the idea that more beautiful women are simply perceived as more sexually available? But then shouldn't beautiful women be perceived as *less* sexually available --and so less *sexy*--since the presumption is that they've already been snatched up?
Maybe I missed something...
Excellent questions.
First, let's differentiate beauty and attractiveness.
Beauty is an aesthetic category that can also be applied to animals and inanimate objects. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - one way to put it is that it's subjective, but it's also a social construct: whatever the society thinks is beautiful IS beautiful. Beauty is a matter of nurture.
Attractiveness is a measure of whether someone (or something, i.e. a sex doll or toy) looks like a fertile woman - young, healthy, thin, curvy figure, clear skin, symmetrical and neotenous face etc. Attractiveness is a matter of nature - it's evolutionary and therefore not subjective. There is a lot of research on what is the objective standard of female attractiveness.
You can fool nurture but not nature. This is why in some cultural eras we've seen mismatches between attractiveness and beauty, where unattractive women (i.e. very fat or skinny) were considered beautiful.
I consider attractiveness as a multiplier for sexual availability that contributes to sexiness:
Sexiness = apparent sexual availability * attractiveness.
An attractive woman is not sexy if she's not sexually available.
But also someone (or something) that is sexually available but not an attractive woman (e.g. old or fat woman, transwoman, cheap sex doll) is also not sexy.
I realize that this contradicts my description of Sexiness = apparent sexual availability, so maybe the model and the essay needs some updates, or we need to introduce some new terms.
Anyway, answering your question: I don't think that beauty directly contributes to sexiness, except for how it correlates with attractiveness which is a direct contributor.
Alright I suppose this cleans things up. I'm just concerned that your technical deployment of these terms (beautiful, attractive, sexy) doesn't track at all the way we use these terms in everyday speech
On the other hand, I think that there's something to your statement that an attractive woman who isn't sexually available isn't sexy. This is something we see a lot: Some women who aren't so good looking are considered sexy because they do/wear 'slutty' things while better-looking women who are more prudish are considered less sexy
> Even in liberal Western societies, women are expected to keep their legs crossed or squeezed together to avoid overt displays of sexual availability, especially in formal settings, such as police interrorgation:
Really? Women crossing their legs have always drawn my attention much more to ... their legs than when they simply sit with their legs side by side, like men usually do; without manspreading, of course, which I think female anatomy doesn’t favor as much anyway. Besides, if you’re not sitting opposite each other, legs can be crossed either towards you or away from you, signalling who is and who is not welcome to get any closer.
> When I see a sexy woman, I don’t get a sudden spike of testosterone level, and I don’t need to “restrain” or “self-control” to prevent myself from assaulting or raping her. What really happens is that I get a dopamine hit. It feels happy. It feels GOOD.
I have no idea about my testosterone levels, but needing to self-control to avoid raping women has always felt completely alien to me. I know it as the kind of reply people throw your way to put you in your place when you’re a pariah like me and show the slightest sign of sexual interest in women.
For a lot of years, I had very little idea what the deal with sexiness was. I knew conventional sexiness mattered to people very much, and I seemed to be expected to take it into account in some mysterious way or other. Showing interest too overtly seemed a bad idea, but refusing to show it—if this was possible at all; I think I’ve always been an open book to normal people—seemed to be considered hypocritical. I’m talking about conventional sexiness because whom I was or was not actually attracted to has never made a difference; I’ve never knowingly been in a situation remotely appropriate to try to satisfy my desires.
At any rate, as I see it, raping someone implies a fight, and I expect to lose it, so, to me, “I can’t help raping people” implies “I’m so powerful and high status I actually need an effort to stop myself from spontaneously doing what you could never do in a million years even if you wanted to; it doesn’t matter how many people I have to trample in the process, because I can take for granted my ability to crush them without as much as registering such events”.
I’m probably repeating myself, but you won’t feel cheated if you never expected anyone to be sexually available to you. For a long time, I didn’t even understand how attractive women could be self-conscious about showing their bodies: as far as I was concerned, they could go about their daily lives literally naked, and the only message I’d perceive is “See how absolutely superior they are to you. Let it sink in”. It turns out other people reäct very differently—and it feels incredibly entitled and high status to me, for sure—but it took me many years to begin to understand why.