How comments are moderated at Man Boobz.
So I had to re-ban a couple of long-banned trolls today, who had returned with new names and slightly different IP addresses but who gave themselves away with their behavior. And that got me thinking about the people — well, the MRAs and PUAs and other such charming folks — who regularly denounce me as an evil censor of FREE SPEECH.
In fact, when I ban people, I do so for good reasons: one of the two trolls I banned today was a longtime MRAish commenter here who eventually creeped everyone out by boasting about having sex with underage prostitutes; the other was a man of many sockpuppets known for angry, abusive meltdowns full of slurs.
Anyway, so I thought I’d give you all a glimpse into my “trash” folder. Here’s a sampling of comments from would-be first time commenters at Man Boobz that I felt would not add anything to the discourse here. But in the interests of FREE SPEECH I thought I’d give these “ideas” an airing today.
TRIGGER WARNING for violent and offensive language. (Sorry about the quality of the last two; you can click on them to see larger versions.)
Not all of the comments I trash are quite this awful. Some are only mildly violent or abusive. I tend to be a bit picky with people’s first comments, assuming that if someone posts a shitty first comment it’s not likely to get any better after that. There are a few banned commenters who stop by and try to post anyway, including one fellow who leaves endless comments trying to prove, as far as I can tell, that teenage girls are objectively hotter than women in their twenties and older.
And, of course, there are comments targeting individual women, whether these are giant cut-and-pasted rants about Anita Sarkeesian, vaguely threatening remarks aimed at other well-known internet feminists, or bizarre sexual comments about female MRAs from fans of theirs.
Once in a while I will get a comment from a feminist that resorts to violent language; I don’t let those comments through either.
And then there are the pictures people try to post in the comments. Below, one of the ones I actually let through, depicting me in a dress with some extremely tall dude. A quick Google image search reveals that it was originally posted online by regular A Voice for Men contributor Janet Bloomfield, in a blog post of hers from last year on Disney princesses. Stay classy, Men’s “Human Rights” Movement!
I don’t actually own a dress like this.
Anyway, the pictures I don’t let through are worse.
No.
No, no, no, and no.
I disagree.
A person should be dismissive of the idea of a sex market, because while it has a seductive air of applicable analogous terms, it does not apply to economic theories as those are understood and used by actual economists, and using them, these theories, to explain a sex market is a misunderstanding and a misappropriate of a very specific kind of information and system, which ends up destroying and utterly rendering null any kind of value that analogy has, while also supporting a system of misunderstood, exacerbated ignorance in an attempt to make preferences and proscriptions seem scientific (But I’m right! I’m not a fool, I’m using economics).
Economics might be the dismal science (Well, it’s dismal, science is a bit off), but it need not be used by dismal people for dismal aims. I’m going to go through exactly why this doesn’t work, and why you should be very careful about using those terms.
Why?
Because I’m an economist.
And it bugs me when people do this.
It bugs me infinitely. It bugs me like the multiplier effect bugs my sense of math.
———–
No.
Demand is not individual demand.
Demand is a function of price – the lower the price, the higher the demand, generally. The axiom is that “Demand is a buyer’s willingness and ability to pay a price for a specific quantity of a good or service”.
Willingness AND ability. Ability is just as important as willingness. It’s a review of the available MARKET, not the individual preference of a product. The term is used to describe a market analysis on idea of, say, at price point XX, how many Consumers will eat our ice cream?
Using it to mean “Demand for love” means ignoring price, willingness, ability, elasticity, the availability of substitute products and market differences, while still somehow maintaining the “scientific notion” that demand is a function of a price – which allows one to make easy, off hand statements like: “Everyone is willing to go to different lengths for different products, but old women are still yucky, just look at the way the graph slopes downwards”
Preference is not and have not been an economic term that relates to demand, because preference is nominal, and we can’t work with personal preferences in a seemingly theoretical science.
At any given price point, any given amount of producers will put out as much product as the market can withstand and they can supply. It refers to the amount of a product that producers and firms are willing to sell at a given price all, other factors being held constant. Supply in economics NEVER HAS and NEVER WILL mean merely the “Amount We Have Lying Around In Stock”, it is a specific term with a very specific meaning. Pretending that it means “Supply of”, instead of “The supply the producers put out”, means you can make statements like “People with different demands will be more willing to compete for limited supply”, which seems like it then ties into economic theory, but it does not. It is not what supply means. If there was an very high demand for young, nubile women, the market, in a free market economy, would see this imbalance (This is a called a supply shortage), and would attempt to correct it, because there was money going to waste as demand ability and willingness was not met.
What broscience dudes miss is that, according to economics, if there was such a high male demand for beautiful nubile young women, those beautiful, nubile young women would be produced and supplied.
Congratulations, I have just explained the sex trade to you.
Personal preferences does not influence economic supply, the producers of a good influence economic supply.
If you truly think not doing something is not worth doing, a person should not do this thing they do not want to do.
This has nothing to do with economics, because demand is willingness and ability, and in this case, we’re looking at no willingness. If the market terms would have someone’s “price” as too high, other people would still want to buy that thing, because demand slopes downwards, and at very high prices, you can still find consumers of a product (their willingness and ability is still present). In market terms, that’s what that means, which is very, very different from someone claiming that the “price” on an interpersonal relationship is too high to bear because all women are bitchy. Nevermind how I can’t conceptualize of a graph that somehow explains emotional states as a function of price, but claiming otherwise allows one to make the neat non-economic trick of pretending that women’s behavior are somehow a market changer, despite the fact, that in the system presented, women are the product being supplied – it allows one to make grand, magical tales about how bitches ruined dating, despite also controlling dating, supplying dating and providing dating, but those bitches are still reliant on us manly men for paying their now overwrought prices, and when we don’t, they’ll get all lonely.
It’s Revenge By Misunderstanding Economics, when what would actually happen is: “Large segments of the consumers are unwilling to pay for the supply at this price, but others still are. Perhaps we should change our business model?” with a significant amount of companies answering: “No, I’m good” and others answering “Okay, sure”.
Becoming a free market and going through unfettered capitalism is about the single worst thing that could happen to a “dating market”.
No restrictions on under age dating? No controls for the treatment of the supplied product? No oversight by anyone on how dates are acquired or set up? What people who think “Free Market” means “Wondrous Wonders” misunderstand when dealing with a personal, emotional thing like dating is that dating (and women and women in dating) is a product in economic terms, and that “free market” just means “No regulations and no barriers to entry”.
If you think a free market approach and unfettered capitalism would be the single best thing that could happen to a “dating” market, then you are saying that you want sex slavery, children imported for sex dungeons and roving gangs of “Asset Acquisition” teams chloroforming women and men of the street and selling them.
It’s not what you want to say, it’s not what you intend to say, but it is, as a fact, what you are saying, because the barriers to entry for dating are very, very, very high and the regulations we as human beings place on dating are very, very, very strict, and most importantly of all, all those things are there for a very good fucking reason, because dating and sexual activity involves other people with sapience, sentience and lives, and not blocks of wood we can transport in a container through the ocean without food while throwing out whatever happens to rot on the way to keep prices down. In free market terms, no one entity has control over any other producing entities, and consumers are free to buy any and all products at any and all times. There are grand cases for free market economics in a lot of things and terms, but “De-regulated” is about the last fucking thing you want ANYTHING resembling a dating market to be, nevermind the fact that in a dating market, dating is the supplied product, and not sexual activity, which changes every single facet of the ongoing discussion.
What would constitute a market failure in a sexual market place?
What would the multiplier effect be like?
Does wages and work have an influence on a sexual market place?
Is it micro or macro economic?
Are you applying Keynesian, Neo-Classical or, god forbid, Austrian economic theories to the dating market?
What kind of market structure does the sexual market place have, pray tell?
“Sexual Marketplace” is the kind of Just-So analogy that has an impact, because you can, if you want to, visualize sexual interactions like a kind of market place where people go to sell and buy their preferences in genitalia, experiences and moments of joy.
The invention of economics as a science, however, totally ruins that analogy because people then start talking in “Demand and supply of pussy”, while not understanding what those terms mean in the theories they are attempting to mangle into being.
We should be dismissive of an idea for a sexual market place.
It’s about most inane misunderstanding of a science you’ll easily find, on par with claiming quantum mechanics means water has memory, or that geometry allows one to access the Eternal spirit of triangles and bring financial success through applying proper principles of squares.
If you want to be taken seriously and welcomed with a warm embrace, definitely open your first comment with “you people shouldn’t”. Best way ever to make friends and influence people, that.
Also, understands-the-basic-principles-of-economics fistbump to Finibachi. If reading stuff like that is annoying to me after only a couple of years of economics classes, I can only image how irritating it must be for you.
I thought that was an awesome comment by Fibinachi too. I only have one question (I’m not an economist, I’ve worked with them, and my total economics training is in the design and analysis of a couple of different types of choice experiments).
My reading of the dating/sex market, as outlined by people like Octo, is that it assumes all menz have the exact same utility* for the same womanz, and that preference trade-offs don’t occur.** The only overall utility change appears to be on the basis of age, where each womanz utility decreases by some (?constant ?ratio).
Did you have anything you wanted to add with respect to utility?
* I’m using this word in its technical economic sense only. It does not equate to “usefulness”. Fibinachi will know what I mean.
** The number of factors never change, and the factor weights are aggregated using some type of basic (probably linear) function, which ignores step functions.
Well, that was quite a hammering-down Fibinachi provided there to me. And, uh, I can’t very well argue against it. Given the points you mention, Fibinachi, yeah, 1) the analogy makes indeed not much sense… and 2) can be (mis)used to justify such things as sex trade or sex with minors, things I admit I did not think about.
What I meant was, well, something along the lines of “don’t like it, don’t do it”, instead of people trying to make generalized comments about what “men do” or “women do”, but yeah, as you said… it’s not quite what I wrote. And as you exhaustingly argued, the free market analogy for that doesn’t really work out in the end.
Kiwi: Do you have a reading comprehension problem with my posts? While Fibinachi proved exhaustingly that my analogy doesn’t work, I did write about individual preference (and mistook that as ‘demand’ in the market sense, which Fibinachi rightly corrected). My point was exactly that there is NOT an uniform utility.
Stop exhausting people, Fibinachi!
(Please note that this comment is SARCASM.)
Octo: are you capable of actually communicating clearly? You wrote:
That’s one example of a constant utility in your post, aka younger women have higher utility.
Here’s another one:
Aka modern women have lower utility.
Those aren’t fucking *individual* preferences, they’re *group* preferences.
Group preferences, but not uniform preferences across the male gender as you laid it out:
“My reading of the dating/sex market, as outlined by people like Octo, is that it assumes all menz have the exact same utility*”
(how is quoting done here anyway? BBC code?)
That is exactly NOT what I wrote. Iń both cases you quote I think I made it pretty clear that this is what those people think. And would you seriously disagree with that assessment?
Octo, seriously?
So there is no stereotype that females lose their attractiveness with age, or that their utility is based on that attractiveness? Even though popular culture shoves that down my throat? I must be imagining it that there are fewer older female anchors and actors compared to their male equivalents. I must also be imagining it that it’s hilarious to show an older female with a younger male companion, whereas the opposite situation is normalised.
Because clearly ageing has no effect on how society views the competence or attractiveness of women.
Otherwise, you know, my point earlier would hold.
Supply and demand, ugh … all I can say is, there’s no demand for MRAs and that pisses them off no end.
(Sorry, I’m too headachey at the moment to read all your post, Fibi.)
Hm, rereading your comment, maybe I mistook “as outlined by people like Octo”. Because what I first read is that you write I think that. I suppose it could also mean I merely outlined the dating market concept. You’ll understand that I was a bit put off by the first reading, I hope. That’s why I pointed out that I actually addressed non-uniform utility.
Sorry about the Word Count there, Octo ( and everyone), t’s just One Of Those Things which I really just can’t cope with, because it’s a seductive analogy that seems to fit some people, some times, justified using science that isn’t understood to end up at prescriptions that science doesn’t leverage. The analogy of a sexual market is one of those “easy, logical, coherent, reasonable and totally wrong” conclusions.
For instance, @Kiwi Girl: You’re totally right.There’s no trade of for utility and perspectives. But not just that – there’s no trade off for different markets, there’s no variation between producers at all, there’s no assumption of changes of supply or demand side situations, there’s no mention of substitutes, there’s no understanding of the impact of market structures, it’s a mix of micro and macro econonomics… the list goes on. “Demand and supply” doesn’t even Work, because in the basic idea of a Marketplace is that consumers want low Price but producers want high prices for their products, and the place where they meet is equilibrium. So… when women are both the product consumed (and apparently a non resuable, exclusive one at that), the producers producing the product and dependent on demand to not get lonely (So the product suddenly becomes a consumer consuming “Compansionhip”), it gets twisted out of control. In basic MRA terminology, when demand is low, that’s actually sometimes okay for all the women who are producers, because that Means they get a great price for their sold product.
It’s a cargo-cult of econonomics.
… but the thing is, it’s also the kind of… thought you can only really come up with if you already have a lot of ingrained, male bias / priviledge blinders and assumptions. Economics assume rational actors who buy high and sell low. Women being consumed as a consumer product Means they don’t have any preferences of their own, that once you pay a given value they’re yours, and more importantly, they remain yours and other people can’t get anything from them – they’ve been consumed.
The entire thing only works so long as you already think penises corrode value, and that being the first to get the notch Count is the key.
And demand = low is because Price = more than willing and able to pay. But a Price = high is = good for suppliers, who want a high Price for their product, so the entire thing is already entirely focused on the sad boners of the men who thought it up, because, oh no, they can’t acccess cheap, affordable pussy.
( also, consumers buy because of utility. The utility of a woman-product is not the sexual satisfaction (never considered, always want Young inexperienced people), it’s not the companionship (Hah, feelings) it’s not the relationship (as if), it’s not the pairbonding (nope)… so what’s left is the utility of being the first one there, getting some pua cred, and upping your notch Count. )
It’s always amazed me that not only do misogynists tend to see women as consumable products, they seem to expect us to see ourselves that way too. Can you imagine what it would do to a woman if she did see herself that way? It’s a good thing that most of us just kind of blink and go “um, what?”.
(Unless we’re feminists, in which case we go “fucking patriarchy”.)
I didn’t complain, I was just surprised!
And yes, if the market analogy only held women as “products” that would be very sexist in addition to, as you’ve demonstrated, wrong. I was more thinking along the lines of counting all “objects of desire”, be they men or women, be they desired by men or women… but thinking some more about that, yes, that would twist the analogy even more out of shape, wouldn’t it? Heh. Everybody would be consumer and product at the same time…
Welcome to the problem of Wages in economics.
“Oh no, all these people are paid by the Companies… but some of them use their Money in those Companies? And they’re being taxed by the government… but sometimes the government pays Money back… and how does the market Work if the people who Work in a Company always spend some of their Money on that company’s products… and… argh! I’m going to go become a zen gardener!”
(random capitalization curtesy of my phone)
Fibi, that was the most awesome takedown of terrible pseudo-Econ I’ve seen in a long time. That was stunning.
I’m sorry you had to be rubbed the wrong way and absolutely annoyed for it to come out, but I’m glad it did. Spectacular.
That said, Octo, I’m not going to yell at you too much more. Frankly, you didn’t say anything I haven’t heard before… and you said it a bit more kindly than most.
The stuff you said has been used in terrible examples in high school and introductory Econ for far too long. I’ve just never been able to word how badly the relationship analogy works.
Fibi, thanks SO much. I’d wager it was just as frustrating for you as terrible evolutionary biology analogies are for me.
Octo, better luck next time! Nice thing about this place: if you don’t understand Econ, or stats, or biology… Someone does.
Actually, it looks like you have had better luck! And more awesome explainy-ness!
*running to catch up on thread*
Yeah, I’ve learned a lot from everyone here. It’s neat. I know what crotchetting is these days! The Wonder!
Well, uh, I suppose… I’ll just wait for somebody to screw up on European history? :p
Yep. It has happened in the past! So, chances are we’ll be debating history again. Eventually.
In the meantime, we can share cute animal videos… like this one:
http://youtu.be/eF4rROGSjOU
Note: Sadly, not my dog and cat.
Doggie’s going to have one very clean ear. 🙂
Sorry, Bina. I’m a very, very homosexual twink. 🙁 (Well, the vessel is pretty twinkie. MY body looks like a deflated bear.) I can pretend to be hetero and single for a bit, if you like?
RE: Fibinachi
Because I’m an economist.
I didn’t know that about you! For some reason I thought you were an English major or something. Also, thanks for that explanation. I admit, a lot of it went over my head, because economics is one of those things that are really tough for me, plus it’s late and I’m groggy, but I still appreciate your efforts.
I’m going to add to the effusive praise for Fibinachi’s ‘Revenge By Misunderstanding Economics’. *much applause*
@Octo
MRAs abuse history and political science almost daily, so just sit tight. For instance, they misappropriate the concept of chivalry, tossing out it’s historical context wholesale. Your time will come grasshopper.
On a less interesting note, someone (Falconer?) asked what’s up with the Beast’s badge with “MOP Veritas” and a bean on stick (a flower?). After some mulling and googling, I’m going to give up and stop trying to make sense of it.
FYI, Here’s the Disney picture JB badly copied and/or traced.
I do like JB David’s Man Boobz belt, which I assume functions like Batman’s utility belt.
Oh, Disney. It’s true that humans are a sexually dimorphic species, but if an alien was to try to figure us out via Disney movies they’d conclude that the human male is, on average, approximately twice the size of the human female. And also that the average woman’s wrist is about the same width as her eye.
Jeez, I hope judgybozo didn’t trace the Disney pic. That’d take her drawing incompetence to new levels.
Even when I was a child with a very rudimentary understanding of sex, I found extreme physical differences between Fred and Wilma Flintstone disturbing. There are a clear logistical problems that had to be overcome to explain Pebbles’ existence, problems which my parents refused to discuss with me when I was seven years old.
Stewart the cat looks so proud of his living doggie pillow! Wish my dogs were so calm around my poor old kitty.
So they think the 1st amendment (or equivalent) elsewhere covers death threats… they’re idiotic as well as violent. Pathetic…