By David Futrelle
Beware of women bearing potato chips, because they’re out to kill your sexy, sexy body and make you, like, a fatty. Especially beware when the woman in question is your longterm girlfriend, because this is all a devious plot to kill her feelings of attraction towards you because secretly all women want boyfriends they don’t think are attractive, or something.
Sorry, I’m having a little trouble understanding this latest theory from the Red Pill subreddit. So let’s go through it in detail and see if it makes more sense the second time around.
“Food is a trap. Don’t fall for it,” the Red Piller known as NorthEasternNomad declared in a recent post.
[A longterm] partner will almost always try and “fatten you up.” But that makes me less attractive, you say. Why would she want that?
Simple: It reduces your SMV [Sexual Market Value].
Ok, it’s still not making sense yet, but let’s hear this dingus out.
Validation is sex for women. Its their primary need, in terms of what they get from men. Sex itself is secondary; its the validation they are after.
Huh. This sounds just a teensy bit like the sort of thing guys tell themselves when they’re not very good at sex.
Meanwhile, SMV for men is determine by a LARGE margin, by physique. Thats not the ONLY factor, but is a BIG factor.
Yeah, if you get off of the Red Pill subreddit and into the real world for a few minutes you’ll notice rather quickly that women tend to be flexible on this point.
By “fattening you up” she is essentially taking you off the sexual market. Making it so that other women, are not even interested.
But, again, even if we accept the premise that fat or even slightly pudgy dudes are inherently unsexy to all women, which isn’t true, this makes no sense because it means the girlfriend in question doesn’t find you sexy either.
This gives her the power. It places your existence, within her frame.
Oh noes!
Think about if: If you are off the sexual market, Dread Game is impossible.
“Dread Game,” by the way, means manipulating a woman so she’s constantly worrying that you’ll leave her. It’s a favorite strategy of the Red Pillers, because at heart they’re a bunch of manipulative abusers (or manipulative abuser wannabes).
If no one wants your fat ass, she never needs to worry. The power dynamic shifts to favor her to an immense degree. But this also means you can never, ever make her tingle; if there’s no risk inherent in the relationship, no dread, her hamster has basically rolled over and gone to sleep…until someone ELSE wakes it up.
So her strategy is to make you fat and unattractive … then to move on to a new, non-fat guy? Why? Why go through all this trouble when she could simply have you in your original form?
Do not let her junk food fixation, become your way of life. She will try. SUbtly, at first. Desert night once per week. Then next thing you know, she’s buying potato chips and ice cream on every shopping run.
POTATO CHIPS ARE THE DEVIL!
Maybe she knows why she does it; more probably she doesn’t even understand her compulsion to fatten up her husband or long time partner. But the fact remains: The result is your removal from the sexual marketplace completely, the utter inability to use dread game, and her complete stranglehold on your sex life and the relationship as a whole.
This leads to staleness and boredom. A complete lack of emotional tingles. And we ALL know where the next step is from there.
In case anyone didn’t get what NorthEasternNomad was implying here, one of the commenters made a little diagram.
Get tingles > fuck > marry > lower partners smv > no more tingles > divorce > get tingles
Huh. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just do
Get tingles > fuck > marry > fuck more
In addition to everything else wrong with it, the Red Pill just seems needlessly complicated.
H/T — r/TheBluePill
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Imagine having to translate Pratchett!
Yeah, that particular pun was left out in Finnish translation, like some others.* In Finnish, dessert in literally “after-food” so there’s still some comedic effect in Rincewind finding “food and after-food”.
Surprisingly many Pratchettian puns can be translated, if the target language shares a good amount of loan vocabulary and pop culture with English. Sometimes you can substitute a different pun or pop culture reference. For example, “Dwarf Campaign For Equal Heights” in translation refers to the Finnish expression “same-level heads”, which is a common metaphor for dull conformity.
*At least in one case, the Finnish translator made a special footnote to acknowledge an utterly untranslatable pun, because was a running gag in Soul Music: “He looks Elvish”
The late Anthea Bell was one of the all-time great translators. Exhibit A: she did the English translations of the Asterix albums.
@Moon_Custafer:
And given how pun-heavy those are, that was quite a feat. Granted, there’s enough French/English common root vocabulary that a surprising number of puns do translate directly. (English being the weird Danish/Latin/Norse/French hybrid that it is.)
Though I’ve heard from people better read in both versions than I am that the English ones often tended to be more pun-heavy, to make up for some other humour that didn’t translate quite as well.
If you want to highlight heroic translators, how about Michael Kandel, who translated a lot of Polish science fiction to English, including Stanislaw Lem’s work. Lem’s language could be poetic to start with, and he loved his wordplay: one of the stories in The Cyberiad was based on a machine that (in the English version anyway) could create anything that started with the letter ‘N’, which ran into problems when it was asked to create ‘Nothing’. Needless to say, a number of the intervening requests had to be tweaked as keeping to theme was more important than a perfectly accurate translation. Especially since some of the requests didn’t work because they were in the wrong language (trying to use the Latin ‘Natrium’ to get it to create Sodium, for example).
Thanks everyone for all the info on translation!
@Jenora Feuer:
Do you remember the poem in The Cyberiad? Klapaucius challenges Trurl’s electropoet:
The machine responds with this:
I remember being in awe that Kandel could do this. I learned later that he adapted the challenge a bit: in the original Polish, the poem still had six lines, but every word began with the letter ‘c’, and the subject was entirely different. Kandel stuck 100% to the spirit of the challenge, but created something completely new (and, I would say, better than the original). Great work.
(Incidentally, Lem’s humorous work has given me some of my biggest laughs. The Seventh Voyage in Star Diaries had me almost helpless with laughter at some points)
The other example of heroic translation which comes to mind is Gilbert Adair’s translation of Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a French novel written without using the letter ‘e’. Adair translated this to English, with the same constraint. I must admit I didn’t find this very readable, but I don’t know whether to blame Adair or Perec for that.
Re: translations
This sometimes crops up in court proceedings, and the interpreter can make all the difference.
I had a drugs case where my client was asked “And what was your reaction when the drugs were found in your car?”
He answered in his native tongue. The interpreter seemed to collect his thoughts and replied “shocked”.
He told us afterwards though, that whilst that was a valid interpretation, the actual word spoken had a connotation of ‘caught out’ that luckily English didn’t have an exact synonym for.
Still convicted though; it is hard to explain 20kgs of charlie in your spare wheel.